coal mining

From the ground, peering up at their vertigo-inducing heights, the green and wooded mountains of southern West Virginia look ancient and undefiled. But from the air, the stark reality of an ecosystem under siege becomes clear. The mountains around Charleston retain their diverse hardwood cover and contours shaped by time immemorial, but things change abruptly 35 miles to the southeast. Replacing the green mountains are flat, bare and terraced plateaus that evoke the mesas of the Southwest, though with added black stripes from the coal seams.