The Last Mountain
| The Last Mountain | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Bill Haney |
| Produced by | Clara Bingham Eric Grunebaum Bill Haney |
| Written by | Bill Haney Peter Rhodes |
| Starring |
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Maria Gunnoe Bo Webb Ed Wiley Jennifer Hall-Massey |
| Narrated by | William Sadler |
| Music by | Claudio Ragazzi |
| Cinematography | Tim Hotchner Stephen McCarthy Jerry Risius |
| Edited by | Peter Rhodes |
| Distributed by | Dada Films Uncommon Productions |
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Release date
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Running time
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95 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Last Mountain is a feature-length documentary film directed by Bill Haney and produced by Haney, Clara Bingham and Eric Grunebaum. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and went into general release on June 3, 2011. The film explores the consequences of mining and burning coal, with a particular focus on the use of a method for coal strip-mining in Appalachia commonly known as mountaintop removal mining.
Based in part on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s 2005 book, Crimes Against Nature and featuring Kennedy and a cast of activists and experts, the film considers the health consequences of mining and burning coal and looks at the context and history of environmental laws in the United States. Exploring a proposal to build a wind farm on a mountain in the heart of "coal country," rather than deforesting and demolishing the mountain for the coal seams within, the film suggests that wind resources are plentiful in the U.S., would provide many domestic jobs and that wind is a more benign source of power than coal and has the potential to eliminate the destructive aspects of coal.
The Last Mountain tells the story of the fight for Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, where community members and environmental activists are pitted against a coal company in the struggle to save one of the last large mountain ranges in the area from mountaintop removal.
Massey Energy (purchased by Alpha Natural Resources in 2011) has many of the necessary permits and plans to blow up the mountain and fill the nearby valleys and streams with the resulting rubble, but the activists would like to build a wind farm on the mountain’s ridges instead. They have even commissioned a study demonstrating that Coal River Mountain has a high wind potential – high enough to produce 328 megawatts of electricity, which can power 70,000 homes.
Both approaches – a wind farm or a coal strip mine – would produce needed electricity, however the results are very different. Massey and the coal industry maintain that they are creating jobs and would reclaim the mountain, while the activists present a very different picture and claim that with mountaintop removal mining the land cannot be properly reclaimed, that the practice destroys their air and water, produces fewer jobs than traditional underground mining. While the locals work these jobs and worry constantly if they will have a job the following day.
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