On the surface, The Last Mountain is a documentary about the dirty business of coal, the highly destructive and toxic practice of mountaintop removal mining, and one community's fight to preserve their homes, their livelihoods, their health, and the last great mountain in the region. However, the story of Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is allegorical of much that is wrong with America, which is why during our roundtable conversation with the film's champion, renowned environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he barely mentions the four-letter word that is coal. Instead, Kennedy focuses on the underlying history and climate that has allowed corporations to rape and pillage our environment, and poison and kill our citizenry with impunity.In The Last Mountain, Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy (he retired at the end of December 2010), is typecast in the role of modern day robber baron. As the largest coal producer in Central Appalachia, his company is only able to function on the scale it does by subjugating democracy. Mountaintop removal mining is cheaper and less labor intensive than traditional underground coal extraction methods, but it causes such an affront to the landscape, water and air, that it can only be done when the authorities charged with protecting the public interest are willing and able to look the other way.Between 2000 and 2006 Massey chalked up a staggering 60,000 EPA infractions, but has suffered little in consequences beyond much belated and pitifully low fines that serve the government's need to be seen to be doing something while maintaining the status quo. Of course, Massey is not the only corporation and coal is far from the only industry that is using and abusing our severely compromised shell of a democracy. In light of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate campaign donations (and a subsequent one that makes direct-to-candidate payments permissible), our government couldn't be for more up for sale if it were posted on eBay.Though there will inevitably be dark days ahead for our democracy, it's not all doom and gloom thanks to a groundswell of grassroots activism as witnessed in Coal River Valley and documented in The Last Mountain. As for the environment, Kennedy points out towards the end of this interview that there's an (LED) light at the end of the tunnel, and ironically it's capitalism in its cleanest and purest form that may end up saving the day.What is it that touched you as a child that set you on an environmental path?Well, I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid...I was raised in the country, and my mother says that I was the interested in it from when I was born. When I was 8-years old, I wrote my uncle, who was down at the White House. There was pollution along K Street in Washington, D.C. because there were a number of cement factories there. To me, the pollution seemed like a kind of a theft, that somebody could steal the air from their neighbors and pollute it and make people sick. It seemed like a theft to me. So I wrote my uncle a letter saying that I wanted to meet with him about pollution, and that I was going to write a book about it. He wrote me back and asked me to the Oval Office, so I had a meeting with him in the Oval Office about that. I went in my shorty shorts and I brought him a salamander that I had caught the night before in a vase. I think I killed the salamander with chlorine from the tap water. It was a big spotted salamander. So a lot of the meeting was his observations that the salamander didn't look well. We went and released it in the Rose Garden fountain. There was a striking inanimation.I didn't really get around to writing the book until I was 29-years old. But...he set up interviews with Stewart Udall, who was Secretary of the Interior, and a number of the other environmental ministers. At that time, he was involved in a battle to vindicate [trailblazing conservationist] Rachel Carson against his own USDA, and the medical community, and everybody else who was trying to dismiss her as a quack. She was very quiet and wouldn't defend herself because she was dying of cancer. But I'm very proud that he went to bat for her and stood up for her.Then I started kayaking and training hawks when I was very young. I started training pigeons when I was seven, and raising them, and then training hawks when I was nine, and I still do that today. I wrote the exam that people use to become falconers in this country...I run a wildlife rehabilitation center at my house and I have a kayaking company, a whitewater company that I've had for 15 years. So it's been part of my private life. But also, more importantly, you know, I've always seen pollution as an act of theft, as stealing of the commons, or the public trust assets. That the constitution of every state, including the State of California, says that the commons belong to the people. That the fish, the waterways, those things, those assets that are not susceptible to private property ownership by their nature are the property of the entire community.The air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the wandering animals, the beaches, the shore lands, the wetlands; that these things belong to the people, whether rich or poor, humble or noble, black or white, young or old. You have an absolute right to go down to the waterway and take out the fish. You have a right to go surfing without coming out with an ear infection. And those rights are being stolen from the people of the state. They're being stolen by powerful political entities within the state who break the law, violate the law, in order to privatize public trusted assets. I have three children with asthma, they get sick on bad air days when there's ozone and particulates in the atmosphere, and somebody, literally, is making money by privatizing the air in their lungs.And this is ancient law by the way, it goes back to Roman times and the Code of Justinian. It's in the Magna Carta. One of the first acts of tyranny always includes activities by powerful entities within a society to privatize the public trust resources...I'll just give you a little history lesson. In 375 AD, the Code of Justinian had these enumerated protections of the public trust resources, so that if you were a citizen of Rome, no matter what color you were, or whether you were African or European, you had an absolute right to take a walk across the beach, throw a net into the water, and take out your share of the fish. The emperor himself couldn't stop you. That was the public trust doctrine. And in 375 AD, Christian fundamentalists, who were anti-enlightenment, they wanted the one source of knowledge to be their source of knowledge -- the Bible. They burned all of classical literature and all of classical learning in the Library of Alexandria, and that event was the beginning of the Dark Ages and it plunged Europe into 800 years of feudal Oligarchy.At that time, when the Roman law disappeared, all the local lords and feudal kings began reasserting control over public trust resources. For example, in England, King John said that the deer no longer belonged to the poor. The deer were an important food source. And game animals no longer belonged to the poor also. You couldn't hunt them. That's what got him in trouble with Robin Hood, because for them that was a critical right of their democracy. He also erected navigational tolls in the Thames and the other rivers of England so that what was once free to all the people, now wealthy people controlled the access to the rivers. They sold monopolies to the fisheries, so the last thing that a very poor person could eat, you could always go out and catch a fish, now you had to pay a wealthy person for the right to do that.That attack on the commons caused the public to revolt. They rose up and confronted him at the Battle of Runnymede and they forced them to sign the Magna Carta, which was the first act of constitutional democracy in the history of mankind. And, if you read the Magna Carta, it has rights that we no longer have, like habeas corpus, in this country. But it also has enumerated rights about the commons. It says it protects the air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands on behalf of the public. In fact, in the 1600s in England, there was a clean air act where it was illegal to burn coal in stoves in London, and people who did it were actually executed for the offense.So on Earth Day 1970, 20 million people came out on the street, inspired by Rachel Carson's book. 10 percent of the population of our country. The largest public demonstration in American history demanding our political leaders return to the American people the ancient environmental rights that have been stolen from our citizens over the previous 80 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Over the next 10 years, a frightened political establishment of Republicans and Democrats created EPA, Nixon made EPA, signed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and 28 other environmental laws. But really it was just a resurrection of these ancient laws. It's a restoration of the public trust doctrine, and the doctrine of the commons that had always existed. So it wasn't just a bunch of hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts making up a new set of laws. They were just reenacting old laws that had always been there. And those are the laws that we operate with today. They're ancient laws, they're part of Western history, they're the central values of government in democracy, that the core responsibility of a government is to protect the commons on behalf of all the people...The issues that come up with coal are all the issues that you'll see...when you see large scale environmental injury, you'll also see the destruction of democracy. You'll see the disappearance of public participation at the local level. So the public can no longer participate in decisions about how their public trust resources are allocated, how the air, or water, or wildlife, or fisheries, or public lands are allocated. You'll see the disappearance of transparency. Things are done in secret...And that's a key foundation stone of government. You'll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become sock puppets for the industries that they're supposed to regulate.If you see this movie, there's a scene in the movie where a small group of local activists tries to do a demonstration in front of the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection]. Well, if you look very carefully, they are put off in a distant corner of the parking lot and they are surrounded by all kinds of barriers that are erected by the police to stop them from actually getting anywhere near to the offices that they're boycotting. Then you have a line of police around them to make sure that nobody crosses that barrier. And then behind the police, you have several thousand private miners who have been invited in by Massey Coal to give that final concentric ring of protection around the agency. And it says a lot about the agency because it's saying, you know, the real protectors, the real alliance with the agency is the coal industry, and that the enemy are the environmentalists who want to clean up the coal industry, and that government is on their side. That's the classic destruction of the environment...the coalition between government and corporate power.It's the classic combination that every visionary leader in America's history has warned us against. Franklin Roosevelt, who was a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but he warned that our beloved political democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would get their hooks into government officials and then erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, in his most famous speech ever, another Republican, warned Americans against the domination of the military industrial complex and the loss of our values. That would come with the ascendancy of the military industrial complex, and we're living in that era right now. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in history said at the height of the Civil War, in 1863, he said, 'I have the South in front of me, and I have the bankers behind me, and for my [country] I fear the bankers more.'And Franklin Roosevelt during World War II said that the domination of government by corporate power is 'the essence of fascism.' He was looking at the history of Europe where in 1932 the Nazi party in Europe had a 1.1 approval rating, and then all of the sudden, the big industrialists like Krupp and Messerschmitt and the chemical industry come in and say, 'Hey, we'll make a pact with you. You provide us the foot soldiers...for the cause of corporate profit taking.' When Hitler got in, he got rid of all of Hindenburg's cabinet and he replaced them with industrialists and let the industrialists run the country. He cut taxes to the rich, he banned unions, and that was called European style fascism. The same thing happened with Franco's France and Mussolini's Italy. You hand the power over to the industrialists and it becomes a kind of industrial feudalism, a corporate kleptocracy. And Mussolini, who had insider's view of that process, complained that fascism should not be called fascism, it should be called corporatism, because it was a merger of state and corporate power.What we have to understand in our country is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism, which makes a nation more efficient, more prosperous, and more democratic, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which has been embraced in the state houses and in Washington, D.C. today, which is antithetical to efficiency, prosperity, and democracy in America...It's capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich and for corporations...We really need to understand that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk a narrow lane in between, which is free market capitalism and democracy, and keep big business at bay with our right hand and excessive corporate power at bay with our left. In order to do that we need an independent and courageous press that is willing to stand up and speak truth to power, and that doesn't get distracted by you know, entertainment news, you know, Britney Spears' slow emotional decline...and talks about the issues that we need to understand to make rational decisions in our democracy. And you need a public that is informed. You need an informed public that is willing, that is [capable] of recognizing all of the milestones of tyranny.Wouldn't it also take campaign finance reform and a public understanding of the need for it?Right...And we lost democracy at one point in our country. We lost democracy during the 1880s, when the big trusts were running our country and they were running it for their business. The steel trusts, the railroad trusts, they're all overlapping boards. It was the Carnegies, then the Mellons, the Fricks, the Osbornes, and a number of other large companies, just like South America, and they owned everything. They owned everything in our country...and they owned the legislatures. It was said at that time that John D. Rockefeller had done everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it. And at that time legislatures appointed the senators, so there was no direct election of senators. So they could literally appoint every senator in the United States Senate just by controlling these legislatures, and that's what they did, these big corporations did that.A couple of things happened during the early 1900s. You had a couple of reformers come along. One of those reformers was obviously Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who had incredible charisma and who was willing to stand up to the big corporations. Then you had a whole slew of really, really courageous journalists who turned our country around, Ida Tarbell and Sinclair Lewis, and cartoonists, who really turned the country around and made Americans see for the first time that democracy was falling apart in and around them.They woke Americans up, and they passed the Sherman Antitrust Act...which said we're going to get rid of monopolies. They passed graduated income tax so that the rich had to pay their share. They passed laws that allowed unions to organize so we could begin developing a middle class in our country. And, above all, they passed in 1907 a law [The Tillman Act] that said corporations cannot make direct contributions to federal political campaigns, and that law lasted for 100 years. And then, [with] the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court -- which is not conservative, the Supreme Court is corporatist...If you look at classic conservatism, it has nothing to do with this court. This court is always on the side of the corporation...I wrote the introduction to Barry Goldwater's book,, which is the bible of the conservative movement, and he says the same thing. He says corporations are a really important thing, they encourage people to assemble money and to risk it, and they drive prosperity, and that's what you want to do. But they should not be running our country. Because corporations want a different thing than Americans want. Corporations don't want democracy. They don't want free markets. They want profits. And the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, to get their hooks into a public official and use that public official to give them monopoly control, a competitive edge in the marketplaces to skew it towards them, and then to allow them to privatize the commons.That's what they do, and that's what you see in West Virginia, where the corporations really have fixed the whole deal. It's not democracy anymore, it's a corporate kleptocracy, it's a plutocracy. And the biggest thing they did was campaign finance reform. This Supreme Court, if you look at the history of the Supreme Court...My partner, he was a clerk to the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, so he's very interested in court matters, he did a diagram of all of their decisions. Of Scalia and Alito and Thomas and Roberts, you look at all their decisions and there's a formula, which isn't conservatism. If an individual goes up against a corporation, the individual loses. If an individual goes up against government, the individual loses. If corporation goes against government, the corporation wins. So, in all cases, the corporation wins. It's a blueprint for the domination of our country.So now they've passed this law, Citizens United, which gets rid of 100 years of environmental law...One of the things that H.L. Mencken said was that ['Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.'] And, you know, we saw Citizens United passed, and for the next year we've been reading about Charlie Sheen...They appeal to the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. Right? We're, today, the best entertained and probably the least informed people on the face of the earth...So what do we do? The unions have been attacked, and the places for journalists to print serious journalism and get paid for it have collapsed, so how do we proceed?I don't have an answer for you, okay. I'm trying to do my part. I think we all got to do our part and then die with our boots on if we have to. I have a radio show, and it talks about these issues. What we found was when we did Air America is that Air America failed because we couldn't get advertising, because we were blackballed...We had tiny little signals, we were going head to head against Rush Limbaugh on Clear Channel, and we were beating him everywhere we went, even in conservative districts. We were the number one most popular radio station in San Diego. In a Republican district. And all over the country, even where we were allowed in the Midwest, we were beating people, head to head. But, our biggest advertisements were for penis enlargement, and erectile dysfunction, and weird crap that you're embarrassed about. And we got a memo -- I have a copy of it still -- with several hundred corporations, it was being circulated by ABC, saying all of these corporations do not want to appear on Air America. So naturally we're not going to get pharmaceutical dollars. Pharmaceuticals are the number one supporter of the nightly news, and we're not going to get any on TV. We're not going to get any pharmaceutical dollars, because we're attacking the pharmaceutical industry all the time. We're not going to get oil dollars, we're not going to get coal, we're not going to get automobile, which is the biggest, $15.5 billion. But it was also people like recreational equipment, REI, which you would think would be on our side. But they were on the list. And these were all companies that were boycotting progressive radio...You say that it would take an active press to battle this. But the problem I guess with the way the press is structured in America is that the press is owned by corporations who choose to pay people to write about particular things...that cornerstone [of democracy] has basically been removed and has been substituted by something that shores up the agenda of the right and the Republicans. So how do you get around that? And how do people get motivated, or even know what they need to be motivated about? I mean, like you say, a lot of this goes back to the Supreme Court. It's really frightening what's going to happen in two years time...there's going to be money pouring into those elections, and we'll have no idea where the money is even coming from because it doesn't need to be reported. God help us in two years time.Yeah. I'm worried about it. I think everybody's worried about it. And the people on Capital Hill who are watching the money accumulate against them are terrified of it. I'm terrified in our democracy. But I think what we have to do is create the same kind of infrastructure that the right wing created in this country over the past 30 years. They were very patient. They built Fox News as their own network. We now have MSNBC that to some extent counterbalances Fox News. I think the big tragedy was losing CNN. You know, when Ted Turner walked away from CNN. He got distracted. CNN could've provided us a counter balance and changed really the history of our country. You know, to counterbalance what's going on with Fox News. But, I don't know, I think we have to use all the little tools of communication to build structures, scaffolds, platforms for progressive advocacy to fight that the powers of ignorance and greed are threatening to drag us into Armageddon.In making this documentary...what was the biggest surprise for you?[pauses for thought] I guess just the disconnect between what's happening down there and how inconsistent it is with American values. You know, it really is a colonial economy...They're sickening and killing people...I spent a lot of my time growing up in Latin America and watching United Fruit and IT&T and Anaconda [Copper] destroy the lives of people and poison them and stuff. But that was happening there...Now it's our companies doing it to us here. And they're tearing down an entire mountain range. Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and bluegrass music and NASCAR racing comes from there, and so much of American culture is rooted in there.The Appalachian Mountains are the richest ecosystem north of the equator. The reason for that is because during the Pleistocene Ice Age which began 20,000 years ago, my home in Mount Kisco, New York had 2 1/2 miles of ice over the top of it, and virtually all of North America became a tundra, so there were no trees left. The only place the forests survived were in a tiny, what they call refusion in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. There's a tiny place there which, because of peculiar barriers of these mountains which were quite a bit higher back then, they protected these little valleys and the forests were able to thrive and they didn't get pushed down by the glaciers.After the glaciers withdrew 12,000 years ago, all of North America was reseeded from the seed stock in the Appalachians, so they're the mother forest of all North America. And the typical North American forest, like where I live, there's three dominant tree species. That's pretty common all across America. In Appalachia there's 80 dominant tree species -- in any forest you walk into. There's more abundance, biodiversity per cubic meter [there] than any other place north of the equator. So this is the richest ecosystem north of the equator. And now Massey Coal is doing to it what the glaciers couldn't do, which is plowing it under and poisoning the people and destroying the communities. It just shouldn't be happening in our country.[break]The problem with green energy is that it's perceived as being expensive...I was watching the debate that you did with the CEO of Massey [Don Blankenship] and you talked about the solar energy plant that you're building out in California.Yeah, BrightSource ...It cost a little over $3 billion a gigawatt.So you're building it at the same cost as a coal powered station, but then moving forward all of the energy is free.Right.That will change things massively because once you have this up and running, and contributing to the grid it will be hard for anyone to say 'it's too expensive' or 'it's unproven technology'.Exactly. And that's why, the more you see electric cars out there...the more people see how they function, and how cheap they are maintain...An electric car costs six cents a mile over the life of the car to drive. If you include the purchase of the car, the repairs, the gasoline, the power, the fuel, it costs sic cents a mile to drive. It costs 60 cents a mile to drive an internal combustion engine. So the market forces are so compelling, they're going to...drive out internal combustion very quickly.We're now at this tipping point and you're going to watch this cascade come very quickly...If you went to the Detroit Auto Show this year -- two years when we were negotiating the TARP plan with Detroit, they were laughing at us. Literally. The CEOs of General Motors and of Ford. We made Billy Ford drive a Tesla , which is one of our cars, and he went and he said, 'I want all the engineers in my office on Monday.' And now, this year, at the Detroit Auto Show, every automobile manufacturer has an electric car. That's how fast it went. You're going to see this cascade as the costs start going down, as the batteries become more efficient, as the infrastructure for delivering the batteries becomes more efficient. You're going to see a real sun drop...We are going to watch the end of internal combustion engines.Now, these bulbs here [indicating ceiling light fittings]...these bulbs are traditional Edison bulbs. That technology is 130-years old. That technology is now illegal in Europe. The 100-watt bulbs are illegal here...People don't even know that. So there are now a thousand companies making LED solid state light bulbs. Our company, we think, is the leading company. It's called Switch. And we're in a bidding war now between General Electric, Philips and Siemens over who's going to get this bulb, our bulb. GE has a bulb that costs $40 for a 40-watt bulb. We produce a 60-watt bulb for $15, and it's completely dimmable...It lasts for 25 years and it uses 12% of the energy...And, even at a $15 price point, they pay themselves back in 18 months. Well, we will have dropped that $15 price point down to $5 within two years, so there's not going to be any of these [Edison] bulbs left.So ultimately it will be capitalism that will [prevail].I say this, that for the last 27 years of my life I've been doing Martin Luther King's prescription, which is all the tools of advocacy: agitation, legislation, litigation, and education. And I would add that the most important tool that I've dealt with has been innovation. That's what I'm doing now. I'm spending more and more of my time doing that. I still am doing the litigation. I'm still doing the agitation...They're prosecuting me for criminal offenses in Poland and wanted to see me do a two-year jail sentence there. So I'm doing that stuff. I'm going to go do a civil disobedience next week in coal country in West Virginia. I'm continuing to do that stuff, but most of my work today is based upon innovation, it's based upon [the fact] that we have these technical solutions that by themselves are going to drive into the marketplace and they're going to be embraced by people -- not because they want to be green -- but because they want to have better lives and save money. And we can do that for them.You touched on civil disobedience; obviously it's a big decision as a career lawyer to take that step.Right.To say that the system is so broken that there are no other options...That's what you have to do. That's the analysis you have to do. Before an attorney does a civil disobedience you have to say the system is broken, the legal system does not provide redress to this deserving client. You have to make that decision. You have to do an economic analysis before an attorney can go anywhere near a civil disobedience.Also as an attorney that puts your ability to practice in jeopardy.Right. Because we're an officer of the court, so we have a special responsibility. We're not allowed to speak ill of judges publicly -- that's against the law for us.