“I got to looking around, when all this mountaintop removal and strip mining and tearing up of our beautiful mountains was going on, and I started praying about it,” he said.

To Mr. Shoupe, the retrofitting is a small step on the daunting path toward what environmentalists call a “just transition” — economic growth that does not harm people’s health or the land. To Joshua Bates, 21, who spent the afternoon blowing insulation into Mrs. Cope’s basement, it means a job in the region he calls home.

“A lot of people have left,” Mr. Bates said sadly. “Eighty percent of my friends are gone.”

Tomatoes and Hemp

The road to Hippo, Ky., snakes through a hollow in Floyd County that runs across Brush Creek, not far from where Todd Howard’s ancestors settled after the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Howard, 36, a seventh-generation Kentuckian, grew up here, dodging coal trucks on his bike and watching miners tromp off to work toting their lunch buckets. When he was 19, he joined his father’s business, helping mining companies navigate the cumbersome permit bureaucracy.

But by 2009, with fewer permits being handed out, the company closed. “That sort of catapulted me into this farming thing,” he said.