Burning the Future: Coal in America

Screens on the Sundance Channel and is released on DVD on 13 May.

Mountain Top Removal

At the Fine Arts Theater, Asheville, North Carolina, on 15 May; on DVD in December.

Coal provides half of the United States' electricity. Increasing demand and eased regulation are fuelling coal-mining operations such as mountain-top removal, in which miners access coal seams, without digging below the surface, by dynamiting the summits of mountains and dumping the blasted rock in adjoining valleys.

Two new documentaries — Burning the Future: Coal in America by director David Novack and Mountain Top Removal from producer and director Michael O'Connell — investigate how mines affect health and the environment. They focus on the Appalachian mountains just inland of the eastern US seaboard, an area known for its traditional music, rural poverty and religious fervour.

Mining companies move mountains to get to coal. Credit: A. CASKEY, WWW.ANTRIM-NEW.COM

The sight of demolished mountain tops is dramatic and well suited to the screen. Both films feature aerial shots of the mines, which look as if someone has skinned the top halves of mountains down to the rock, then snapped off the peaks. Residents such as Ed Wiley of Coal River, West Virginia, are understandably upset: “Once these mountains are gone, there is no more Appalachia; there is no more West Virginia. It don't grow back.”

In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 6.8% of forested land in Appalachia will be affected by mountain-top mining by 2012. According to Mountain Top Removal, 207,000 hectares of mountains have been destroyed and 1,900 kilometres of mountain streams have been buried. Mining companies are required to do some remediation of mined-out surface sites, although this is often waived, and in any case does not return the area to its former state.

Both films describe the mines as causing increased flooding in the valleys below, and polluting local water with toxins, including arsenic and lead. Chilling but anecdotal evidence charts the effects on the health of local people and on the school children of Marsh Fork elementary school in West Virginia. This school and many local individuals appear in both films.

Choosing to focus on the wound-like alteration to the landscape, the film-makers barely mention climate change, probably the most dire and far-reaching effect of the US coal habit. Nor do they discuss arguably worse mining methods elsewhere, like hard-rock mining for minerals such as gold and copper, which is undertaken on a much larger scale.

Both films stir up a sense of loss and outrage. But neither offers solutions — political or technical — beyond suggesting that coal companies resume underground mining, which they are unlikely to do voluntarily as it is less efficient. Coal companies would rather keep opening up a mountain like taking the top off an egg.