Rating: ★★★★☆

Imagine living in one of the greenest valleys on earth, sheltered by a looming panorama of Appalachian mountains, amidst the oaks and sugar maples, white-tailed deer, black bears, foxes, raccoons, woodpeckers, and neighbors you’ve known since childhood, in a house built by your family generations before.

Now imagine that section of Appalachia is in West Virginia, rich in coal and the year is 2000. The coal industry, allied with the railroads and utility companies pour money into George W. Bush’s campaign. He is given the election and they are rewarded with key environmental posts, and serve a one-word alteration to the Clean Water Act, changing the interpretation of that statute to legalize mountaintop removal mining for the first time.

Suddenly, the harmony of your homeland is embattled, resembling a war zone, assaulted by an industry that detonates explosives equivalent in power to a Hiroshima-sized bomb every week. Explosions rock the ambience, multiple times daily. Boulders land near your garden. Coal and silica dust, a cancer causing poison, infects your lungs through the once rich mountain air. Fresh water streams become dumping grounds and dry up or run laden with heavy metals and arsenic, delivering an outlandishly high rate of brain tumors, among other ailments, to the small communities that share the well water. And the powerful, stately, life-giving mountains themselves are reduced to rubble (then reconstructed with permanent, substantive destruction), allowing for severe flooding every time it rains. Imagine what the families of Coal River Valley are experiencing, what has already shuddered at least 25 neighboring communities, and you’d be more than a little pissed off.

The Last Mountain is predominantly a tale of small town citizens in a David vs. Goliath fight to save Coal River Mountain against Massey Energy, the fourth largest coal company in the U.S. and by far the biggest practitioner of mountaintop removal. The title is literal, for this great mountain is the last of Coal River Valley that hasn’t been destroyed. It may also be a rallying cry signifying the buck stops here, as the people have taken it upon themselves to assert their right to be considered, given corporate control of the political process. Thus, the film is also a tale of democracy subverted and activism necessitated, of people trampled upon, lacking funds but motivated in spirit, reliant on numbers, and out in the streets.

One Coal River resident, Bo Webb, claims the need for external assistance on account of the coal industry providing what jobs the state has to offer. What this means is that despite Massey’s decimation of the UMWA union in 1984, resulting in longer hours, decreased benefits and low wages, despite the 67,000 environmental and safety violations the company racked up over a six-year period, causing innumerable atrocities including the deaths of 29 miners in 2010, despite the 24 coal sludge impoundment spills in the last decade, releasing over 300 million gallons of toxic waste (twice the volume of the BP Gulf oil disaster) contaminating land, rivers and streams, and despite the fact that the company has blown up a portion of the state the size of Delaware (1.5 million acres), the old line of doing what the coal man says or you’re out of a job still carries weight. Consequently, the residents of West Virginia often find themselves on opposite sides of the picket line.

One outsider who has answered the call for help is environmental advocate and lawyer, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He is the film’s white knight and a lifelong, committed activist. In lending his presence and voice, he speaks of the coal industry permanently impoverishing the communities of West Virginia, enriching a few and leaving behind a wasteland from which there is no way to regenerate an economy. As an alternative to this prognosis, Coal River Mountain Watch, a community organization, commissioned a report on the possibility of a wind farm atop Coal River Mountain. The result was the realization of category five winds, enough to power 70,000 homes, engender sustainable forestry, significant job growth and $1.74 million dollars in tax revenue to the county, permanently. By contrast, blowing up the mountain would generate $36,000 for a handful of years and create virtually no jobs locally. Of course, turning the mountain into rubble would also nix any possibility of a wind farm, leaving less height and no solid ground in which to stand the turbines.

There is a difference in the cost of wind-generated power at 7.9 cents per kilowatt-hour vs. 6.1 cents from burning coal. However, that doesn’t factor in the subsidies and breaks the coal industry receives, on top of associated healthcare costs. According to the EPA, between 20,000 and 60,000 Americans die every year and a million asthma attacks occur as a direct result of the ozone and particulates emitted by coal-fired utilities. A Harvard Medical School report estimated coal electricity would cost and additional 17 cents per kilowatt-hour if it included such costs borne by the public as air pollution illnesses, mercury poisoning, health damages from carcinogens, and the impact on climate change. As for the employment issue touted by Massey, in the last 30 years, the coal industry in West Virginia has increased production by 140% while eliminating more than 40,000 jobs. In the meantime, the U.S. wind industry has developed to employ 85,000 people, as many as work in the coal industry with tremendous room for growth.

Of the comparison, Bill Haney, the film’s director, references the frighteningly dirty coal plants in operation since before the Clean Air Act, which were granted an exemption to those critical standards and thus, “have been kept going for 50 years as a result. And so, enormous pieces of the arsenic that’s dumped into American families, the lead emissions that we pick up, the mercury that’s contaminating rivers across the country, the carbon dioxide emissions, sulfur, nitrous oxide, ground-level ozone, is coming out of this small number of coal-fired power plants, which are spending enormous sums of money to prevent themselves from being regulated in a way that would force them to be on a level playing field with solar plants or wind power plants or geothermal plants, and therefore lose.”

In many ways the fight to save Coal River Mountain is a frontline of the most significant battle in human history. 41% of electricity worldwide comes from coal, and the resultant emissions make it the largest contributor to global warming. Bill Raney, President of the West Virginia Coal Association opens the film with this statement, “I don’t think most people understand where electricity comes from. I think most people feel like it’s an entitlement. It’s contained in the Bill of Rights somewhere and everybody’s entitled to it. And we don’t need to worry about where it comes from because every time I flip the switch it comes on.”

These simple yet strong words highlight our certain complicity and perhaps willful ignorance to the crimes against the earth and ourselves, committed in the name of powering comfort and electronics. Our conveniences and industries are important, but there are energy alternatives that we are not demanding (not to mention our propensity for waste) as we pay for sources that in turn pay politicians in order to pollute. And as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reminds us, “Our children are going to pay for our joy ride.”

The message of The Last Mountain is immediate and impacting, and the more people who see it, the more presumably will its objective be achieved. Like An Inconvenient Truth, Sicko, and Supersize Me, its purpose is the illumination of mass consciousness. But without the ultimate doomsday of Al Gore, the humor of Michael Moore, or the self-punishment of Morgan Spurlock, one wonders if the film is entertaining enough to succeed. There has been a boon in documentary filmmaking since the advent of digital video, but the genre must still compete with James Cameron and Jerry Bruckheimer.

Furthermore, it is prey to the difficulty of molding reality into an arresting, narrative structure. The Last Mountain is guilty, perhaps unavoidably, of laying out a series of expository scenes without the advancement of a plot, leading towards a conclusion. In fact, the very nature of a documentary that hopes to affect the outcome of its subject implies an inherent impossibility of achieving a satisfying resolution. In other words, you can’t blow up the death star. Perhaps, like Gasland, The Last Mountain will win only a minority audience, but its details of pernicious, environmental assault will be significant enough to move the issue into the public radar. It’s a meaningful and enlightening film, worthy of one’s time and discussion. For if we think electricity is in our Bill of Rights, and we don’t have to worry about it because every time we flip the switch it comes on, then we owe it to the people of Coal River Valley and to every living thing on this planet to see where it comes from and what that means.

The Last Mountain is on release in the U.S. tomorrow.

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