This view is only there as long as we let it be. (Photo: Jim Clark)

Editor’s note: This event has already taken place.

I know what you’re thinking: why should ocean dwellers like us care about mining practices in the mountains? Who cares?

Well, you should care. We should ALL care. We have reached a critical time here in Virginia: polluted waterways, proposals for a new coal burning plant in Surry County (53 miles from Norfolk!), and cancer rates on the rise.

Check out the links. It’s scary stuff.

Isn’t it time we take a critical look at the environmental diseases that are leading to these symptoms? Because you can best believe they’re coming from somewhere.

Coal Country, dubbed “the best movie on mountaintop removal to date” by the Charleston Gazette, is playing 7pm tonight at The Naro. The film starts to answer some of these questions that are, to me, burning.

According to official website: “A war is being waged in central Appalachia and it’s destroying communities and desecrating nature in the name of corporate profits and dirty coal used to fuel coal-fire electrical generating plants like the proposed Virginia plants in Wise County and in neighboring Surry County.”

The film will be presented by Virginia Sierra Club and will be preceded with live music by Andrew McKnight. Andrew McKnight uses his musical talent to call attention to important social justice issues. His album, Still Moving Mountains, was produced “to raise public awareness of the heavy impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) on the people and environment of rural south-central Appalachia.”

At the beginning of this blog I questioned who cares about what’s happening to the mountains in ours and our neighboring states. Well I, for one, do. They are beautiful and we need to protect them. Come out tonight and learn what’s happening.