THE SMALL COMMUNITY OF BLAIR, West Virginia, has a violent history as the site of a famous battle in the Mine Wars of the 1920s, when U.S. armed forces fought unionizing coal miners. More recently, Blair was again the site of a mine war, this time over the environmentally destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). In 1998, residents filed a lawsuit against the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) for failing to enforce regulations that call for a buffer zone to protect streams from mining. In a MTR mine, the forest is cut down and explosives are used to loosen the rocks and soil above the coal seam. Giant machines, such as dragline ...