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... more

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.

Question: What is it that touched you as a child that set you on an environmental path?

Bobby Kennedy: 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.

Q: Wouldn't it also take campaign finance reform and a public understanding of the need for it?

BK: 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, The Conscience of a Conservative, 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...

Q: 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?

BK: 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...

Q: 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.

BK: 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.

Q: In making this documentary...what was the biggest surprise for you?

BK: [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]

Q: 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.

BK: Yeah, BrightSource...It cost a little over $3 billion a gigawatt.

Q: So you're building it at the same cost as a coal powered station, but then moving forward all of the energy is free.

BK: Right.

Q: 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'.

BK: 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.

Q: So ultimately it will be capitalism that will [prevail].

BK: 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.

Q: You touched on civil disobedience; obviously it's a big decision as a career lawyer to take that step.

BK: Right.

Q: To say that the system is so broken that there are no other options...

BK: 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.

Q: Also as an attorney that puts your ability to practice in jeopardy.

BK: 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.


The Last Mountain opens in New York and Washington D.C. on June 3, and goes nationwide thereafter.

Visit TheLastMountainMovie.com/ for information on screenings in your area.

For more on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his fight to protect the environment, visit RobertFKennedyJr.com/.

Forgive me if there is already a thread like this - I searched but I didn't find one...(unless my search failed :blackeyed Basically - who do you want to see together in a multi set? I want to see Wildy and Lee

Rob Zombie has followed up his horror hit House of 1000 Corpses with a much more brutal, ugly and sadistic film, The Devil's Rejects. Rejects keeps some of the characters such as Captain Spaulding [Sid Haig], Otis [Bill Moseley] and Baby [Sheri Moon] but now instead of them being hunters they are... more

Rob Zombie has followed up his horror hit House of 1000 Corpses with a much more brutal, ugly and sadistic film, The Devil's Rejects. Rejects keeps some of the characters such as Captain Spaulding [Sid Haig], Otis [Bill Moseley] and Baby [Sheri Moon] but now instead of them being hunters they are being stalked by Sheriff Wydell [William Forsythe] whose brother they had killed.

Check out the official website for The Devil's Rejects

Daniel Robert Epstein: Were you such a fan of the Police Academy movies and Three’s Company that you had to cast Priscilla Barnes and Leslie Easterbrook?

Rob Zombie: Truthfully I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Police Academy movie. I think I saw the first one, but I have watched Police Academy 6 since shooting this movie, unfortunately. With Three’s Company, what kid didn’t watch that show? But really it was funny because Priscilla Barnes and Leslie Easterbrook were two people I didn’t actively pursue, they came in and read for the part. If someone had said their names, I would’ve been like, “Oh yeah, she’s cool on Three’s Company.” But I never saw her do anything like this. There were people on set who I had worked with on other films and they were like, “Holy shit. I never knew she had this in her.” So those were just lucky auditions. They came in and they were amazing. Most of the other parts were filled with people I wanted for them or I wrote it for them.

DRE: Had you always planned on doing a sequel to House of 1000 Corpses?

RZ: Well yes and no. When I finished the first film, I wrote a one-line treatment for a sequel only because I was contracted for one. They were going to make a sequel with or without me. I didn’t want it to be without me, so I kind of had a little half-assed idea.

DRE: What did you learn from the experience of doing the first movie that you’ve brought into this one?

RZ: Everything. I mean the first movie is this calamity because you think you know what’s going to happen and you think you know how movies are made, but it’s complete insanity from day one. The biggest thing was learning that preproduction is god because once you get on set, the time moves so fast that it seems like when you walk on set the first day you’re already behind schedule. Then suddenly it’s lunch and everyone is lazy because they just ate lunch and then the sun goes down and you’re like, “Terrific. We accomplished nothing.” But on this film, preproduction was very intense. The other thing was making sure your key crew members are great. On the first film, I had one cinematographer who came in and I fired him after the first week because he was just not doing his job and we were falling behind schedule every day. Then the next guy came in, who was fine, but there was no vibe whatsoever. Then he couldn’t return for the reshoot, so we brought in another guy and we didn’t get along at all. We spent most of the time like fighting on set and that’s retarded. Literally the crew was in mutiny and walking around set like “I can’t work with this guy.” For this movie, I met with a lot of cinematographers and then came back to Phil Parmet, who I just could tell from his personality that he would do whatever I wanted.

DRE: What was it like directing your wife?

RZ: It’s really easy but you have to treat every single actor like they’re the most important person because that’s the way they probably think. The whole thing about directing is you have to find a special way to manipulate each actor to do exactly what you want; yet make them think they thought of it and that you didn’t do anything.

DRE: What makes you want to create such dark films?

RZ: I’ve always been a fan of darker films, whether it is A Clockwork Orange or Taxi Driver where the lines of who’s the good guy and the bad guy are always very blurry. You love Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange even though there’s no redeeming characteristic to him whatsoever, but he’s so charismatic. The same like De Niro in Taxi Driver, at the end of the movie you’re like, “Whoa have I been rooting for an avenging hero or a complete nutcase that’s going to open fire in the Post Office tomorrow?”

DRE: Do you feel like we are supposed to be rooting for these sick people?

RZ: No, I feel like you’re not supposed to know what you’re doing. I’ll talk to different people and they’ll go “I was crying when they died.” Then other people will be like, “I hated them. I was rooting for the sheriff the whole way.” Everyone’s got a totally different opinion, which is what I like.

DRE: How about you?

RZ: For me it goes both ways because I knew those characters were ending and I did like the characters and the actors. I’ve always been a big fan as a kid of reading about the Old West and the concept of vigilante justice and that was where the Sheriff Wydell character came from. I was never rooting for anybody.

DRE: Did you have alternative endings in mind?

RZ: No, that was always the ending and every actor had a complaint about that. I wanted to do it because it seems like nobody makes a movie anymore without a sequel set up. Lions Gate was like “The franchise. It’s gone.” But you know, that’s the problem. I feel like there’s never a definitive ending anymore. Every movie ends with the possibility of another one and it drives me crazy. I feel like, “Why did I just invest two hours? It didn’t even end.”

DRE: Did you have any problems licensing those southern rock tracks?

RZ: Yeah there were always problems, but what I did this time that’s very different and what people never ever do, is that I licensed all the songs in advance. I knew I was going to do that whole Freebird thing but I couldn’t possibly risk shooting it, being in editing and then Lynyrd Skynyrd goes “I don’t think so.” I cleared up all those problem in advance so I wouldn’t run into that.

DRE: Did you have various directorial homages in mind?

RZ: Yeah but there was no specific moments. There was certain key things like a lot of the extreme close-ups and things are very like Once Upon a Time in the West and the ending is like Bonnie & Clyde and the general vibe to the violence is very Peckinpah.

DRE: I read about a lot of cameos like Natasha Lyonne and Rosario Dawson and Mary Woronov that I didn’t notice in the actual film.

RZ: Well Natasha Lyonne never came to set and that became like a whole other thing. So she was replaced by E.G. Daily on the day of shooting and Rosario’s scene got cut unfortunately. Mary’s just in the credit sequence.

DRE: How did you come to cast Ginger Lynn?

RZ: I needed an older actress who was going to be very free with nudity. I never wanted to get young girls that are all like plastic surgery damaged because that would be horrendous. So someone was like, “Well, why don’t we try casting old porn stars?” We went through a bunch of different ones and Ginger was just the best actress even though unbeknownst to me, until two seconds before she got to the set, she was on crutches and couldn’t walk.

DRE: I saw you on Henry Rollins’ show the other night on IFC.

RZ: Henry is one of those people who goes, “I rooted for the sheriff the whole way.’

DRE: You mentioned something that was very interesting about how you feel a lot of the horror movies are watered down to PG-13.

RZ: That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to make a G-rated movie for kids that’s totally super nice. But if this was PG-13 and then what we would be watching would be totally ridiculous. None of those decisions are made based on what’s best for the movie. It’s just what’s best for the marketing.

DRE: Did Lions Gate let you do whatever you wanted?

RZ: Lions Gate is great. They have to be the most artist friendly people I’ve ever met in my life. I gave them the script. They read it and were like, “Okay. Fine. Let’s do it. We have no changes.” They would come down to the set every once in awhile and go, “Okay we saw the dailies. We’re happy.” Then they’d disappear for a month. We did a preview screening in front of an audience. That went great and they were so happy afterwards.

DRE: Did you have any trouble getting the R rating?

RZ: Yeah, that was tough. The strange thing was that the R rating was mostly based on tone. It took about eight tries and it all came down to the motel scene with Bill Moseley and Priscilla Barnes. We cut about two minutes out of that. Still I was like, “Well there’s no real nudity. There’s no violence. There’s no language.” But they were like “Yeah, but it’s too dark.” Basically it was like telling me, “Your comedy is too funny.” It’ll be back on the DVD.

DRE: Do you see Devil’s Rejects as a grindhouse movie?

RZ: It’s kept the spirit of that. The funny thing is I was talking to someone else and they were like, “Are you a big fan of bad movies?” I went, “No, I’m a fan of good movies.” In that world there are a lot of great films. Russ Meyer’s films are better than 99 percent of the great films we have to celebrate every year. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is an incredible movie.

DRE: Do you think you can learn more from watching a bad movie than a good one?

RZ: No you really can only learn how to make a good movie from watching good movies. You can learn what not to do maybe.

DRE: Has doing this movie work affected your music at all?

RZ: Nothing really affects my music but what I took away from this is that great actors make great things happen. William Forsythe is a good example. If I had cast the wrong guy it wouldn’t work on any level. That’s where you make or break the movie.

DRE: What are you doing musically now?

RZ: I have a record more or less finished before I started shooting Rejects and I’m actually on tour right now. I played last night and Ozzfest starts on Friday so I’ll be doing that all summer and then I’ll come back to finish the record and then start another movie.

DRE: Will the next film be a horror film?

RZ: I’ve got two movies I’m working on simultaneously and neither are horror movies.

DRE: Isn’t one an animated movie?

RZ: Well, there’s an animated movie that I’ve been working on for about a year. That’s called The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and I’m doing that with Film Roman. It’s an adult animated comedy and it’s basically if Austin Powers was actually an over the hill alcoholic Mexican wrestler living in a world populated by people like the Munsters.

DRE: Is it going to look like your animated sequence in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America?

RZ: No, it’s very stylized. The look was to make it look like it’s a cocktail napkin from 1968. That style of illustration.

DRE: There was an article on CNN.com that pointed to House of 1000 Corpses as the film that started this new wave of horror. When I spoke to [Fangoria editor] Tony Timpone, he said, “Maybe not all horror, but at least Lions Gate horror.”

RZ: I think it’s really hard to judge the effects of something, but it is funny that the movie was dropped by Universal and now Universal is like the house of horror once again. It definitely kickstarted horror for Lions Gate because I know the movie they followed mine with was Cabin Fever and I talked to [Eli Roth] the director and he was like, “Oh man I thought my movie was dead in the water and then your movie came out and was like this huge hit so suddenly mine jumped up to be this priority project.” So it did do something. I don’t know what but you can never judge.

DRE: Gary Panter remembers you from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

RZ: That’s funny because when Paul Reubens first showed up, he had really long hair and a beard and he stepped off the elevator with Gary Panter and I think half the people thought Gary Panter was Pee-Wee because they’d go “Well, he’s certainly not the other guy.”

DRE: What do you think of all the horror remakes?

RZ: I’m not really a fan of them because I liked the movies the first time. No matter how good it is, it’s never as good as the original and I would like to see something new. It’s kind of boring to sit there and watch a movie where you know how it’s going to end. It’s kind of a bummer and with some of the original movies there was just something about the time they were made and the way they were made that works.

DRE: But you liked the Dawn of the Dead remake enough to hire [music composer] Tyler Bates.

RZ: I thought his music was great. It’s not that they’re bad movies. Maybe they’re better for a new wave of kids who haven’t seen the original. But I’d already seen the original Dawn of the Dead like a hundred times.

DRE: What if you got offered a horror remake with carte blanche?

RZ: I’ve gotten offers to do things and I always say no. Maybe if there was a certain movie where I felt like the original idea was great but the movie was bad, but I don’t understand remaking great films.

DRE: Do you ever think about stopping doing music and just working on movies instead?

RZ: Yeah because I definitely can’t do both. Doing both is impossible and I don’t want to have years between films.

DRE: What should fans expect from the tour this time?

RZ: Well the tour this time is very stripped down because Ozzfest is outside in a summer festival and there are like a million bands so there is no production. You can only take production so far where the best thing you can do is scale it all back to nothing and then that becomes interesting. Whenever I’ve seen huge acts, whether it be Alice Cooper or KISS, in a situation with nothing, it’s ten times more interesting.

DRE: Are there any comic books or books you’re reading lately?

RZ: No, I’m sort of burnt out on comic books right now. Steve Niles and I did Bigfoot together. We were starting another one called Giant Monster that was going to be like a twelve part series but I just said, “Steve, I don’t have time.”

DRE: Are you involved with that deal that Steve and Thomas Jane have with Lions Gate?

RZ: No, they asked me to be involved. We met a couple times to talk about it but since I’m so busy I knew I would be of no use to it whatsoever.

DRE: Do you mourn the state of rock and roll today?

RZ: I felt the music industry making this horrible shift maybe like five or six years ago when it started becoming like the movie industry in the sense that it became about the opening week with a record. All the best records took a year or two years before anyone would go “Oh? What’s this band? Guns N’ Roses? I wonder who they are.” But now if it doesn’t hit the first week, they’re like, “Oh. I told you that wouldn’t work.” That’s not the way music functions. That’s not really the way movies should function either. With Halloween, it was months before it caught on and every week it would grow and grow and grow until suddenly it was this phenomenon called Halloween. Also the labels have no artist development. The Ramones would never have a record deal. They’d get dropped after their first record, as would Cheap Trick and AC/DC and everybody. The Ramones stayed on a major label for 22 years and they never sold more than 150,000 records. Now a million records, a platinum record is considered a failure. Labels have nothing but mega artists and total failures and no artist development. They have a bunch of stuff we won’t be talking about in six months.

DRE: What are you listening to now?

RZ: I’ve been listening to a lot of Terry Reid during making of this movie and those have to be the great lost records of all time.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

There's nothing pretty about coal mining at the best of times, but mountaintop removal mining is downright obscene. The process is ugly in every sense of the word, but is less labor intensive, and therefore cheaper and more desirable for the big energy corps who do it. However the hidden expense... more

There's nothing pretty about coal mining at the best of times, but mountaintop removal mining is downright obscene. The process is ugly in every sense of the word, but is less labor intensive, and therefore cheaper and more desirable for the big energy corps who do it. However the hidden expense in terms of the environment, public health, employment, and subsidies mean that it's something that the American public is paying a dearly for. The cost of mountaintop removal mining is something that is literally and metaphorically killing us.

The sordid details involve deforestation to prepare the site. The 'overburden' - in this case a euphemism for the top 250 to 500 feet of a mountain - is then removed using dynamite to reveal the underlying coal seam. The rubble created as the mountaintop is blown away is generally pushed down the mountainside, covering flora and fauna, rivers and streams, and anything else in its wake. Once the coal has been removed, the mining companies are supposed to restore the site, but this requirement is at best broadly interpreted, and at worse blatantly flouted with few repercussions.

Fifty percent of the electricity produced in the US comes from coal-powered plants, and thirty percent of the coal used comes from Appalachia. As a result, 500 majestic Appalachian mountains have been destroyed. The biggest perpetrator of this destruction is Massey Energy, who proudly proclaim on their website that their "vision" is 'to be the premier supplier of quality coal from Central Appalachia to worldwide markets."

The physical removal of coal however, is only the first stage in a highly toxic chain of events. The coal then has to be prepared, a procedure that uses vast amounts of water to wash off the soil and rock. The byproduct of this is a filthy sludge, which contains all manner of heavy metals and other such carcinogens that is stored in vast impoundments. These sludge ponds are generally lazily constructed using dirt that is blasted off the mountaintop to damn a valley below. For the most part, there's no concrete or steel reinforcement as would befit dams built on such a scale. Because of this, many of these impoundments are leaking, and, furthermore, because these structures are not lined, the pollutants even in the sound dams leak into the surrounding water table.

The environmental impact of such mining practices is supposed to be mitigated by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, which in turn are supposed to be enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), and, to some extent, the Army Corps of Engineers. However, a Bush-era single word change to the Clean Water Act arrested its ability to control pollution, much to the delight of the polluters. Known as the Fill Rule, the definition of allowable fill material that could be dumped into lakes, rivers and streams, was essentially broadened to include all manner of waste. As a result the Clean Water Act now serves as a license for big business to pollute.

Because of the intrinsically dirty nature of coal mining, and the cozy relationship the industrialists have with those in power (George Bush famously called his election to office 'a coal-fired victory' because of the extent of the industry's contributions to his cause), pollution is an inevitable part of the process, and polluters are rarely brought to task. For example, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's own records, Massey Energy committed over 60,000 environmental violations between 2000 and 2006, but has paid a pittance in fines, which when compared to the company's profits barely even register as a tickle on the wrist, never mind the slap they're supposed to be.

In the lieu of the government acting in the interests of the people it's supposed to represent, the battle for clean air and water, and sustainable energy and jobs is being fought, in large, by those Big Coal directly adversely effects. The struggle of one such community in West Virginia's Coal River Valley, whose homes, land, health and employment prospects have been blighted by Massey's mountaintop removal mining operations, is documented in a new film, The Last Mountain.

A collaboration between filmmaker, Bill Haney (whose previous credits include the Academy Award- shortlisted Price of Sugar), and renowned environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Last Mountain should be mandatory viewing for anyone who's ever switched on a light. The film not only tells the inspiring story of the grassroots fight against the Goliath that is Massey, but also underlines our implicit culpability, which can be summed up by one simple yet staggering statistic: sixteen pounds of coal is burned each day for every man woman and child in the US.

SuicideGirls participated in roundtables with Haney and Kennedy earlier this month. The following is excerpted from the interview with Haney (check back later in the week for our conversation with Kennedy).

Question: One of the great things about the documentary, you did this in The Price of Sugar, and you've done it again here, you humanize the story. You throw a lot of statistics and facts out, but at the same time you make individuals the centerpiece. How did you go about designing this particular documentary, and selecting the people that you would have involved?

Bill Haney: ...I try to make movies that would move an audience the same that they would move me. So I find stories of ordinary people who...circumstances press into finding things in their character that are extraordinary. I find those kind of people really compelling and really inspiring...The fight for Coal River Mountain itself is both an important story for me, and a metaphor for the fight for our energy future and the struggle to use democracy really, citizen democracy...

Then of course, there is connecting us more than 'this is a tale happening to these people far, far away'. What about our role in this? Because, you know, we're making decisions and our decisions are affecting this. Every time we click on our iPod or click on a light in America, 50% of it comes from coal. And to be disconnected from those consequences -- not I think willfully, just because we're all busy and most of us have our own jobs and our own families, it's hard to keep up with this stuff -- but to not understand the linkage, makes us in a curious way complicit in something that probably none of us would accept. In some way I'm trying to find a way to tell all of that. And do it in a way that it cuts through the chaff that the fossil fuel industry just pours through the television at people, telling you that there's green clean coal. Just to say it -- picture the coal, how clean is it? But, in a way, if they just say it long enough, you start to kind of lose touch with it...

Q: How did you pick your subject?

BH: ...Filmmaking is part of my work life. I also run high tech companies and I run a charity. In the filmmaking part of my work life I've made 14 movies, or something like that. Half narrative basically, and half documentaries...I have this view that there are a lot of movies I enjoy watching for three hours; For something to be worth working on for three years, I have to feel like it means something to me. To some extent, I look back and it feels like issues of inspiration and justice seem to be the things that matter to me, so I keep doing those.

Q: Why this one?

BH: Well, the roots of this one are more complex than sometimes they are. I began my work life as a freshman at college in 1980 designing air pollution control systems for power plants. I invented a system for reducing what's called NOx [nitrogen oxide] emissions for power plants -- which are a precursor of acid rain and ground level ozone, or what you guys see as smog here -- in 1980. I spent the years 18 to 24 putting that up all over the world in power plants...and it gave me exposure to the extraordinary environmental footprint of fossil fuel plants in general, and coal in particular.

In the years that have followed I have taught environmental policy at Harvard, I've done this stuff at the EPA and lots of environmental things. I've long been wondering about what is the single most pernicious attack on the global environment and public health, and I just constantly come back to coal. So let's say that was a recurring theme. Then Bobby Kennedy wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature, and he really showed in that book, in a very powerful way, how an attack on the environment has effectively been an attack on our democracy. That in order to get away with the things that are the most egregiously profitable and destructive, you really have to subordinate the public's will.

So, for example in West Virginia...which is at the heart, heart, heart of coal country, long generations of coal country, intergenerational family commitment, deep patriotic linkages...two thirds of the people at public poles are against mountaintop mining. So how come every politician is for it? I mean, we're a democracy after all right? So Bobby, chapter and verse, hammer and tong, asked these questions, and I began to awaken a perspective in me that I was thinking about. That, in a sense, the same way that the banks privatize the gain and publicize the losses to all of our challenge, so also are the coal industry giants doing...

Then, my friend Clara Bingham, one of our producers, she's a pretty famous investigative journalist, she began doing a set of stories on the corruption of the safety standards and other kinds of mine behavior questions. You know, where are they allowed to pump stuff in the ground or where are they allowed to actually shut off the methane emission standards, and what are they doing when they're caught violating. And so the more immediate personal familial health consequences, safety consequences, that became apparent.

I started looking for a story that would crystallize these themes, and the people in Coal River Mountain were that. They were unusually courageous and unusually effective. And probably frankly for me, most important of all, because I'm not a big fan of films that demonstrate another problem. I think you really have to go both ways. You have to find a problem and propose a solution. It doesn't have to be the perfect solution, other people can debate the solution, but it just is not as useful or interesting to me. This community had seen that as well, and they decided that they needed to know not just what they were against, but what they were for, and then they had to take action. Of course, to take action if you're a waitress or a former marine or an ex-coal miner in West Virginia, takes an awful lot of courage.

...Your values aren't things that you talk about. Your values are things you're willing to make sacrifices for. What will you give something up for? These folks were giving something up. They were giving it up every day. And those kind of characters are what draw me an awful lot I think. I admire them, I respect them, you know, I think they're inspiring to me. My guess is even if there's some other issue that an audience is thinking about that's more powerful to them than coal mining in West Virginia, they might take sustenance from the example of these extraordinary people...

Q: We're in a banana republic period now where we've had everything hijacked by the Bush administrations. All the regulatory bodies hijacked, and people just bold-face lie. They don't even act as if they know that they are lying. It's all manufactured. Everything you could pretty much say is no longer investigated, and anything you hear publicly is the opposite of what it's supposed to be -- anything about anything, from any company, from any politician, anyone in public office...The truth doesn't matter. It's completely malleable...

BH: I would say, that for me, the most egregious sin of the Bush administration was the attack on the Renaissance. They basically attacked the Renaissance idea that first you gather the facts, then you reflect on them, then you form an opinion. They started with opinion, scoured the universe for a few facts to stitch into it, and told us that that was the same thing...However, I think the public is much smarter than that...

I know there is a trend in documentary filmmaking that's basically polemical. You know, I start with a conclusion and I go look for facts to fit. It can be highly entertaining facts. I can feel very strongly about the facts. I can be a really good filmmaker about those facts. But that doesn't have the same relationship with the truth that I personally am interested in. So finding a balance between being deeply moved enough to be committed to something, and being respectful enough of the audience to try to just share the information, kind of take whatever journey you take, and let the audience take the journey with you, and let them decide what they think. Often the conclusions will be more progressive than the present case policy would suggest because the conclusions an audience will reach will not be subverted by a misuse of facts...

One of the things that I like to do is I believe in test screenings. Because I believe the role of the director is to actually find a bridge between the material being covered and the audience, not to kind of shout their truth. I did a screening that was mostly Republicans, and I asked people, 'Do you find the film partisan?' And actually, to my utter delight and astonishment in a way, they felt the film was totally fair-minded. I had one person -- out of 80 -- who thought it was clearly the work of a passionate Democrat, which of course I am...

Because the roots of conservatism, the genuine roots, are in conserving. We don't see a whole lot of that anymore, but the old debate of small government, protect nature, troops at home, budgets are small, the government is out of your life, that's a reasonable debate, in my mind anyway, between bigger government, higher taxes, more public services. That's somehow gotten manipulated. There's nothing conservative about destroying the Appalachian Mountains for 8 years of coal. I think a lot of people whose political views come across slightly different than mine would agree with that.

Q: Was there anything that you learned while you were filming this that you couldn't believe?

BH: Yeah, I think the scale. Even though, as I said, I've been...thinking about issues around this for a long time, I don't think I grasped the scale of it. It's almost unimaginable. Like, for example, 50% of the rail traffic. 50%! I mean, we're the largest grain producer in the world. We're the largest timber producer in the world. We're the second largest steel producer in the world. Think of all the cars that are transported around America. All the goods, most of which were transported through the heartbeat of America by train, all of them combined are half the rail and the other half is coal...If you'd said to me, 'do the coal guys get money?' I would have said, yes, and who I was just kind of thinking of was the miners. But that the rail guys are four times as big, and that the utility guys are four times as big as that -- that surprised me.

The quantities of materials that go through a coal plant contribute to the vile consequences. For example, the average coal fire power plant is 100 times more radioactive if you're standing 100 feet away from it than the average nuclear power plant. Because although there's only traces of radioactivity in the coal, there's so much of it going through. Or the settling ponds...133 are leaking.

Here's an interesting story; The EPA was forbidden by the Bush administration to actually even ask how many of these ponds there were, and where they were. So, until December [2008], there was no information of any kind [about] where these things -- which now we know contain 150 billion gallons of toxic metal sludge -- where they were. Then one broke. In Tennessee in December one broke. A 56-foot high tidal wave of toxic metal stuff poured through three giant rivers. They already spent north of a billion dollars trying to clean it up...And the House of Representatives, which at the time was Democrat, began an investigation and they demanded that the EPA at least find out where these things were.

They discovered that there's 600 of them. That they contain 150 billion gallons of the stuff. That they're all on big drinking water supplies, because they're basically where you moved coal to a power plant, down the river, to the power plant where it used the water for cooling. So they're next to water supplies. And, at this stage, they found out that they were so dangerous that the Department of Homeland Security put a court order on the EPA to say that they couldn't tell us where 57 of them were because they were terrorist threats. So, 12 months before they were so uninteresting we didn't need to know where they were. Now, they're so toxic and dangerous that they're terrorist threats and they have to be hidden from us...

Q: You also talked about the EPA, in language and word. One of the things the film talks about is how the Bush Administration changed the language in a way that was seemingly innocuous...On first read, it didn't seem to be all that important, it was a grammatical thing...What kind of impact has that had and where is that now? Why hasn't the Obama administration gone in and changed that? Because it sounds like that's just administrative, and it doesn't require Congressional approval.

BH: Well, there you go. It was one of the gifts that Cheney gave America. He'd been in government for so long, that he knew that you don't have to have a big public debate about a new law. It's too hard. You don't have to run a new Senator who stands up and says, 'I'm going to do this and not that', because then the public pays attention. Just a little word change. By the way, I'm documenting one place, in one part, of one element of EPA. It's happening all over everything. This is where our civil rights got eroded. This is where wire tapping and domestic wire tapping became legal. It's where the banks decided to change the standards on all the home loans...Word by word, just a couple words here, a couple words there, all buried from public sight...

There is an endless sea of this stuff. In the particular case of the Fill Law, its consequences were extraordinary in terms of mountaintop mining, which is what we're talking about, but also all across the country. This notion wasn't just for coal. When you look and you read about people who are doing gold mining and using arsenic to poison the waters in Alaska, or the stuff that's happening in Yellowstone National Park in the copper mines, every place -- now you basically can dump anything you want in the water as long as there's the consequence of creating a dry spot. Well, everything has a consequence of creating dry spots...In one part of my life, I built the world's largest recycling plants. I don't know the statistics today but I used to know them well. But at the time there were 13 billion tons a year of waste created in the United States. 12 billion of it was created by the mining industry. All of that is now allowed to be dumped in water, and it wasn't before the Fill Law.

In terms of the Obama administration changing it back, I think that a couple of things have happened. The first is that the Obama administration has a Republican house right now...The Obama administration wasn't focused on environmental stuff very hard at the beginning, and it has 12 coal state senators who were focused pretty hard on it. So when they were trying to pass healthcare reform, which was the signature domestic policy...[there] are coal state senators, Democrats, that the Obama administration needs on healthcare reform...The administration would've had to prioritize things like the Fill Rule at the national level and, frankly, would've had to start acting in the slightly sneaky way that the Bush administration was so comfortable with. They were kind of thinking ideologically, 'Well, just because they were lying and cheating, does that mean that we're supposed to lie and cheat back?' Because the way that these Fill Laws were changed wasn't really appropriate...

So they've left the EPA to some extent on it's own to fight out it. Lisa Jackson is an unbelievably heroic figure, taking it on the chin all day, every day, and with the public support. She has stopped mountaintop mining in 90 sites. She has turned back permits that already existed. She has shut down mines that were contaminating fresh water supplies. She, by herself, has done more to clean up the mining industry in this country than the whole country had done in the previous 50 years. I mean she's unbelievable, but she has not gotten the benefit of a change of Fill Law, and she does not have tremendous [support]. She's under attack in Congress, and her support in the administration is passionate but limited...

Q: So she's not allowed then to change it on her own.

BH: She's not in a position to change that on her own, correct...Sadly. Or maybe not sadly. There's supposed to be a process before these changes happen. That process was broken in the Bush administration. The Obama administration is trying to actually respect it...The Fill Law change is complicated, but it in part now it involves the Department of the Interior and therefore the Army Corps of Engineers. So now you've got a bunch of people who have to be involved.

Q: How significant do you think it was that the West Virginia Legislature announced that they are now going to audit and investigate the DEP within West Virginia. Do you think this is a lame duck move or will this prove beneficial in some respect?

BH: I don't know yet. I think we'll discover. It's all about the intention, and about what genuine consequences take place as a result. It's better than leaving them alone. I mean, I think that the tide against mountaintop mining's free ride is turning...We'll do a set of screenings down there around the Blair Mountain March. I think that...had Senator Byrd not died, he had written letters in the last six months of his life, as the son of a coal miner, really changing his position and attacking the mountaintop removal process. Now this is a place where my personal views, and the views of some of the activists in West Virginia diverge a little bit, because I don't think the answer is only to stop mountaintop mining. And I don't think the only place we should build a wind farm is on top of Cold River Mountain. So people's views on the issues can change.

I think that the United States should get out of all of this stuff completely. I think it can do it. I think in some way that it's peculiar America's optimistic can-do attitude has been eroded by a pile of fear mongering Republicans who want to divide us from ourselves. We've been able to do all kinds of extraordinary things, there's no reason we can't be off all coal and off all fossil fuels in a relatively short period of time. And not only do I think that, but Scientific American, as a moderately conservative science-based publication, says by 2020 we could be out of all fossil fuels in this country. So a much more effective use, for me, of spending America's capital is to build a new power grid and put up renewable energy rather than spend 4 or 5 times that money shooting at kids and having kids shoot at our kids in the Middle East to get stuff that we know is polluting us -- and, by the way, destroying our economy. We read about our trade imbalance, we hear China, China, China. Well, we've got a 60 billion dollar trade imbalance with China; we have 120 billion dollar trade imbalance in oil...

I personally think that the Obama administration made a terrible mistake focusing on climate change with the Cap & Trade rules, as opposed to building a green economy. The environmental consequences would've been the same, but the inspirational nature would've been wildly different. If somebody said, 'We're going to rebuild the American economy. It's 3 million new jobs. We're going to do it by spending less than we spend on imported oil every year, and when we're done doing it over the next 10 years we won't need any oil from the Middle East and we won't need any coal, and that will save 25 million asthma attacks between oil and coal, and all kinds of other health consequences, and put us at the low cost manufacturing for any electricity based materials in the world. I think the public would've signed up a lot more than would've to an international regime where we let the United Nations set prices and trade carbon. It just doesn't have any inspirational quality. I think we're ultimately going to need a president who says I've got a five point plan for rebuilding the American economy, and it says something interesting in it. And much as I'm a Democrat, I don't think Barack Obama has yet done that.

Q: Cap & trade is such a fudge that maintains the status quo anyway, because it just means corporations can pay to pollute.

BH: Well, as you know, the notion of it, which was kind of explored most effectively in the CFC protocols in Montreal, can work by slowly adjusting price, so it gets more and more expensive to pollute. And you reduce the amount of pollution credits available, so you take some out and you increase the price, and people get more and more incentives to reduce pollution. But you have to actually have the political will to stick with it. That's a difficult thing in America because our political system is up for purchase.

Q: Also, as the film illustrates with the tens of thousands of violations that Massey managed to get away with, it seems that in this country, instead of making corporations accommodate the law, we make the law accommodate the corporations.

BH: Yeah. I think that's right...It's going to get worse because of the Supreme Court...the Citizens United case it's going to get worse...It's about leadership to some extent too. You know, in a way, somebody's got to be willing to take their lumps. I mean, DEP can enforce laws, they just have to go in and take their lumps. And, Barack Obama could come out and say, 'You know what? These guys are trying to steal our country, and I want to take it back'. And he's going to get an onslaught of negative criticism. He might even lose his next presidential campaign. So what? He's still going to get breakfast. His kids are going to go to school. He could accept that. So there will have to be, to some extent, people who are really willing to stand up for this stuff if we want to change it...

Q: You have the EPA, you've got the Army Corps of Engineers, essentially checks and balances. You can't get your permit for your mountaintop removal without getting your permit for your ponds and your dumping. But somewhere along the line we've lost the checks and balances.

BH: The Army Corps of Engineers was utterly unsuited by psychology, by structure, by intention, by human resource design, to have responsibility for this. I mean, they were configured to...you're going to build a dock and put a submarine on it and you're basically putting a fill in so as to do something industrial and constructive and important to the nation. Or you're going to build a levy, so you can put something into the Mississippi River because it's designed to protect the community down river. The Army Corps of Engineers is going to oversee it from a national environmental, engineering standard point of view. This wasn't about any of that. The intention in none of these cases was to do something constructively industrial. It was to dump a pile of crap. And the Army Corps of Engineers had five or six people nationwide to support this stuff, and they're guys out of the army. They weren't in a position of balancing the public will, environmental science, public safety, and economic development. That's the last thing. These guys got in here so they could build stuff so we could fight people who were against us, or we thought were against us...

Q: At the end of the film, you talk about how when the system becomes so broken, civil disobedience becomes a viable option, when the law and democracy no longer is. Do you think that it will take that in order for someone like Obama to make the right choice?

BH: I don't know. I think that it's a curious thing, because I think that Obama, as any leading politician of either party, wants people on whatever flank he's on, in this case wants people on the left, challenging him so that he can look like a moderate by doing what many would consider to be a progressive thing. Presidents rarely are genuinely in the lead anymore...It just doesn't happen anymore. They're poll testing and triangulating and all this kind of crap.

So civil disobedience, or at least civil action, is required in some sense, and that's OK, because it's our country. You know, we got all the Federal EPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, because people demonstrated on Earth Day -- and it was 10% of the population in the country. 10% of the population in the country. I can guarantee you that if 31 million Americans decide that they want to stand up and say that they want a different energy future in the country right now, we'll get it. But if we all kind of muse quietly in our rooms thinking, 'Boy oh boy wouldn't it be great if it got better, what's on ESPN', then we won't.

Q: On Earth Day we're just encouraged to turn our lights out, which is absolutely useless...No politician is worried about people sitting in the dark in their living rooms.

BH: That's what made me like this community in Coal River Mountain so much...The kids who come from there, we didn't show all this in the film, but there's 80-year olds who are doing hunger strikes in the capital building in West Virginia...There's a 91 year old grandmother getting arrested...In some ways, this fight for Coal River Mountain is like the Selma of our generation and it's just beginning. And you know, there weren't initially all that many people fighting for civil rights either, but it did slowly begin to grow, and that's happening at this point...

Q: You look at coal mining in other parts of the country, the Powder River Basin, there isn't a population there that is going to rise up and demand that the Powder River Basin be shut down...How do you get civic action, civic involvement, where there either isn't a population or that the population seems to be somewhat distant from the problem?

BH: I think that what we see in American history is that it has to get tied to big questions. Let's take slavery. A lot of the revolutionists were powerfully committed and they didn't have slaves and they didn't live in slave holding states. A lot of the revolutionists came from New England and upstate New York. They felt on religious grounds, and on grounds of personal principle, that this was deeply wrong. One of the things that makes the American Revolution so extraordinary is that it's fairly common for revolutions to be led by the hopeless, but the American Revolution was led by the rich and powerful. Thomas Jefferson was the richest guy in his state. George Washington was the biggest landowner in the country, and he didn't have any kids. He's a 50-year old guy, at a stage when the average life expectancy is 50, he's the biggest landowner in the country, he has no children, so he decides he's going to take on the world's superpower by horseback. In winter. Why? Because he thought it was the right thing to do. He understood, he thought about it in consequence, and he thought it was the right thing to do. And the people who supported him, thought he was the right person to follow...

And the question in part, I think, is how do we want our economy to work? You can see this stuff, you can see it in big factory farms. We've wiped out the family farm in America by giving huge subsidies to giant factory farms because they don't have to meet safety standards or environmental standards or any other standards. As a result there's 3 million Americans who worked on farms who don't. The quality of the food has gone down. The pollution has gone up. We enriched a small number of executives who take enormous bonuses and then try to manipulate the capital gains tax so that they don't pay that much. So, slowly -- and this is where Obama or where a good leader comes in, [to say] 'this is my five part plan to rebuild the economy, and to do it in a principled way, and I need your help'. I'd think he'd find a lot of Americans - or she'd find - maybe it's time for a she...

Q: Do you have a choice for who it might be?

BH: I'm going to leave that to you guys.


The Last Mountain opens in New York and Washington D.C. on June 3, and goes nationwide thereafter.

Visit TheLastMountainMovie.com/ for information on screenings in your area.

Who else needs a new set? Hasn't had one up in a while? [show us pictures to prove it] First off, I think I need to see Leola quite soon (image) (image) And, I'm sorry, but this picture of her butt is just hot! (image) [Edited on Mar 15, 2006 by Fatality] more

Who else needs a new set? Hasn't had one up in a while? [show us pictures to prove it]

First off, I think I need to see Leola quite soon





And, I'm sorry, but this picture of her butt is just hot!




[Edited on Mar 15, 2006 by Fatality]