Born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Judy Bonds is a coal miner's daughter and the director of Coal River Mountain Watch.

Over the past 10 years, Bonds has emerged as a formidable community leader against a highly destructive coal-mining practice called mountain-top removal that is steadily ravaging the Appalachian mountain range and forcing people in neighboring communities, some of whom have lived in the region for generations, to abandon their homes. She was the 2003 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize (the Nobel of the environmental world).

See her and her film, "Mountain Top Removal," on Saturday night at 8:45 in the Oddfellows Hall, Nevada City.

Janet Cohen: Mountain Top Removal sounds like it has very similar effects to the hydraulic mining that went on around here over a century ago. How bad is it?

Judy Bonds: It's very bad. Here in Appalachia, the people are the mountains. We've relied on the mountains for generations, and mountain-top removal is changing the whole landscape. When it rains, there are floods. When they blast, it causes homes to be damaged and destroyed. It feels like we're living in a war zone. We can taste the explosives, and we have to breathe rock dust, coal dust and silica. It's really as if they're mining coal right in our homes.

JC: What were you being told about the environmental effects of mountain top removal?

JB: We're still being told that what they're doing is within legal limits, even though they're destroying our homes and our environment. We're challenging this in the courts right now, but at the same time, the coal industry is trying to raise the legal limit on selenium discharge and give the coal industry an even longer time to clean up their mess. It's a vicious circle - the coal industry makes big campaign contributions to politicians, who then give them tax breaks, and then the industry gives money straight back to the politicians. It's one big lump of money that keeps poisoning people. If a foreign country was over here blowing up our mountains and poisoning our streams, it would be called terrorism.

JC: What heath effects are people experiencing as a result of mountain-top removal?

JB: People suffer post-traumatic stress from the blasting. And there are a whole range of behavior and neurological problems from mercury and selenium poisoning. Our air is poisoned from rock dust silica, and so there are a lot of cases of asthma and black lung from breathing coal dust. We've also had to battle for safety measures on our mountain roads because of issues with dangerous coal trucks and problems they've caused to the road surfaces, as well. And there are increasing incidents of safety issues with wild animals like bears and snakes that are being driven into our backyards when their habitat is blown up.

JC: Was there one particular moment that made you decide to become an activist?

JB: When I saw the gooey black water running downstream and all the dead fish I couldn't not do something about it.

JC: Hydraulic mining in our area was stopped by farmers taking action downstream of the mining. What successes have you had?

JB: We've had several successes. We recently stopped a permit to blow up more mountains, and just today we had another victory in Kentucky where the Army Corps of Engineers rescinded a permit. Unfortunately, we expect the coal industry to appeal both of these decisions.

JC: Are you hopeful for change?

JB: I'm looking for change in 2008. I'm a coal miner's daughter, but coal is an enemy to all of us in terms of global warming and what it's doing to our drinking water. The Appalachian range is the birthplace of all the water on the East Coast. They've already blown up 400,000 acres of our forests, which is the equivalent of a quarter mile-wide trail all the way form New York City to San Francisco. We need these forests to absorb carbon to combat climate change. Hopefully, there will be action on this very soon.

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Janet Cohen is the Wild & Scenic Film Festival Coordinator and a passionate environmentalist herself. She says Bonds was "absolutely wonderful to talk with."



(Editor's note: To read a bio of Judy (Julia) Bonds, go online at http://goldmanprize.org/node/84.)