Hobet 21, which has claimed at least 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of land, was once the site of several adjacent peaks. To get at the coal beneath those peaks, miners began by clear-cutting the forest above. Next, they drilled holes deep into the side of the mountain (some holes up to 120 meters [400 feet] deep), set dynamite in those holes, and blasted as much as 300 meters (1,000 feet) of mountain into a mass of rubble known as overburden. The miners repeated this process several times, until the layers of coal were exposed. Then, using buckets big enough to hold 20 midsized cars, they scooped that rubble into staircase-shaped mounds that filled in entire neighboring valleys from the ground up—all told some 72 million metric tons (80 million U.S. tons) of overburden each year. The process obliterated the forest habitat, buried countless streams, and permanently reordered the land’s natural contours. INFOGRAPHIC 18.4

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This mountaintop removal mining is just one form of surface mining. The other type, known as strip mining, employs a similar process: Workers use heavy equipment to remove and set aside overburden so that they can harvest the coal beneath. When they finish mining one strip of land, they return the overburden to the open pit and move on to a new strip. Strip mines are used in areas like Wyoming, where the coal is close to the surface and the ground above is fairly level.

With their reliance on explosives and heavy equipment, surface mines are a far cry from the underground mines, also called subsurface mines, that sustained the Nelson family for so many generations. “When our daddies were mining, back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the seams were as tall as full-grown men,” says Nelson, who since retiring has become a spokesperson for the anti-mining Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. “So you could get at ‘em the old-fashioned way, with pickaxes and sledgehammers.” Those days of plenty are gone, he says. Many of the coal seams that remain are too thin to be culled by human hands.

To be sure, subsurface mines (which still make up about 60% of all coal mines worldwide, and about 50% of those in the United States) come with their own challenges. Water seeps easily into tunnels, and as it does, toxins leach from the surrounding rocks into the gathering pools. Sulfate in particular produces acid mine drainage, which goes on to contaminate soil and streams and has become a major problem with both active and closed mines. In 2011, Duke University ecologist Emily Bernhardt and her colleagues reported that not only is acidic water directly toxic to many aquatic plants and animals, it also alters the nutrient cycle of streams in ways that reverberate all the way up the food chain. Subsurface mines also account for 10% of all methane release in the United States; methane is a potent greenhouse gas. INFOGRAPHIC 18.5

But subsurface mines also come with some advantages. Unlike surface mines, they don’t disrupt or permanently alter large surface areas. And because much of the work is still done with workers rather than by machines, they employ more people. In Appalachia, 100,000 mining jobs were lost between 1980 and 1993 as underground mining gave way to mountaintop removal. In Kentucky alone, mining jobs are down 60% in recent years, even though coal production is on an upswing. The loss of traditional mining jobs has bred yet another controversy in the region. Coal industry reps say that the riskier deep-mining jobs are being replaced with higher-paying, safer work—like demolition and heavy equipment operation. But that has not alleviated tension as more jobs are lost than replaced. “It’s a double insult,” says Tim Landry, a fourth-generation deep miner in West Virginia. “They’re not only destroying the land that we love, but they’re taking our jobs away, too.”

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But a loss of jobs is not the community’s only—or even its most serious—concern.