One Sunday morning, just after deer-hunting season ended, Veronica Coptis, a community organizer in rural Greene County, Pennsylvania, climbed onto her father’s four-wheeler. She set off for a ridge a quarter of a mile from her parents’ small farmhouse, where she was brought up with her brother and two sisters. “Those are coyote tracks,” she called over the engine noise, pointing down at a set of fresh paw prints.

At the crest of the ridge, she stopped along a dirt track and scanned in both directions for security guards. Around her stretched a three-mile wasteland of valleys. Once an untouched landscape of white oak and shagbark hickory, it now belonged to Consol Energy and served as the refuse area for the Bailey Mine Complex, the largest underground coal mine in the United States.

Five hundred feet below the ridgeline lay a slate-colored expanse of sludge: sixty acres of coal waste, which filled the valley floor to a depth of more than a hundred feet. Coptis stared; it was twice as deep as it had been when she’d visited a year before. “How can it be that after two hundred years no one has come up with a better way of getting rid of coal waste?” she asked. A flock of geese cut a V through water puddled atop the sludge. Recently, activists in West Virginia had paddled an inflatable boat onto a similar pond to bring attention to the hazards of coal waste. Maybe the same tactic could work here, Coptis said. It was dangerous, though; the slurry was too thick to swim through, and at least one worker had fallen in and drowned.

Coptis directs the Center for Coalfield Justice, a regional organization that advocates for people living with the effects of resource extraction. Industrial mining, she believes, leaves places like Greene County environmentally ravaged and reliant on a single, dwindling resource. At thirty, Coptis is an unlikely activist. She grew up among miners, and her father, a surveyor, sometimes works for the oil industry. She heard the word “environmentalist” for the first time in college, at West Virginia University. (Local hunters and fishermen, whom Coptis sees as some of her best potential allies, prefer to identify themselves as “conservationists.”) After graduating, she moved back to Greene County and married Donald Fike, a former marine who worked in the mines. When Coptis brings in outside activists, she often warns them not to expect issues to break down along tidy ideological lines. “The assumption is that rural America is this monolithic community, and it’s not,” she told me. She also warns them to be prepared for shotguns leaning against kitchen walls. Like many locals, Coptis learned to shoot when she was a child. “I find firing handguns relaxing,” she said. “Maybe because I’m so powerless over so much of my life.”

Around Greene County, Coptis carries a Russian Makarov pistol, partly to reassure her father. Her fight against coal mining often puts her in opposition not only to energy companies but also to miners concerned about their jobs, and he fears that someone will run her Nissan Versa off a rural road one night. “The coal mines are multimillion-dollar projects,” he told me. “Stopping them can be a nasty thing.” Coal has dominated the area for more than a century, and mining companies own about fifteen per cent of the county’s land. Above ground, their dominion is marked by yellow gates that block roads into valleys designated for waste; when Coptis was younger, a coal company that was expanding its waste area bought a neighboring village and razed it, leaving only a single mailbox. Below ground, the practice of “long-wall” mining, which removes an entire coal seam, can crack buildings’ foundations and damage springs and wells, destroying water supplies.

In 2005, this process led to an environmental catastrophe in Ryerson Station State Park, a twelve-hundred-acre preserve that contains some of the county’s only pristine land. The center of the park was Duke Lake: a reservoir, created by damming a fork of Wheeling Creek, where people had gathered for decades to swim, paddle canoes, and fish. While Consol was mining nearby, the dam ruptured, and the water had to be drained away. The lake has not been restored; a survey commissioned by the state found that the ground was too unstable. But more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of coal remains under the park, and now Consol wants to return and mine it. Coptis’s organization, along with the Sierra Club, has filed suit to block the mine from acquiring the necessary permits, arguing that the mining would destroy three endangered streams. According to Consol’s own survey, the mining is predicted to crack the streambeds, draining the water and spoiling the last fishing in the park. “This is property owned by every resident in Pennsylvania,” Coptis said. “They don’t get to keep plowing through our communities as if we didn’t matter.”

Since the mid-eighteenth century, Appalachia has supplied coal to the rest of the country, in an arrangement that has brought employment but also pollution and disease. Coptis’s opponents argue that the benefits outweigh the costs. Recently, on Twitter, an industry organization called Energy Jobs Matter taunted Coptis: “How much is the Sierra Club paying you to put these families on unemployment?” One of her neighbors warned that if she won her suit the Bailey mine would go bankrupt, devastating the local economy. There are two thousand jobs underground in Greene County, and, according to state estimates, each one supports 3.7 others at the surface. Shutting the mine could eliminate more than seven thousand jobs, in a county of thirty-seven thousand people. “Greene County will become a ghost town,” the neighbor wrote.

Coptis argues that the county is already dying. In the past eight years, as coal has ceased to be the dominant fuel used in power plants, production in the United States has dropped by thirty-eight per cent. Until recently, the Bailey mine had three competitors in Greene County; one has closed and another has gone through bankruptcy. Some six hundred jobs have disappeared. In Coptis’s old school district, enrollment has declined twenty-four per cent. For Coptis, the changes are urgently personal—her husband was among the miners who lost jobs when the mines closed. “As a community, we need to start to talk about what happens when coal mining stops,” she said. “In my lifetime, it’s going to happen.”

When Coptis goes out to canvass her neighbors, she has the advantage of familiarity. She is brown-eyed and sturdy, with deep dimples that make her look gentle and friendly, even when she is pressing a point, and she is skilled at breaking down the arcana of lawsuits and rights-of-way. “I come from the working class and struggled hard in college,” she said. “I had to read aloud to understand things.”

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But some of her tendencies make her seem strikingly out of place; one local official referred to her, fondly, as a “radical.” When Coptis drives to appointments, she often blasts the cast recording of “Hamilton.” She teases her husband that she’s going to put a sign in their yard bearing their nicknames, Roni and Donnie, so that passersby will think that their brick bungalow belongs to a same-sex couple. She has already planted one controversial sign, near their chicken coop. In black and red letters, it announces, “COAL ASH IS TOXIC.”