Junior Walk of Coal River Mountain Watch in Naoma, West Virginia, prepares his drone to fly near a reclaimed surface mine in Edwight. Roger May/The Guardian

Mother Jones shares a story we missed in its original publication:

One Man’s Aerial Crusade Against West Virginia’s Coal Industry

Citizen vigilante uses his drone to expose polluters—”I don’t have a lot of friends around here.”

Coal has stalked Junior Walk his entire life.

He remembers his elementary school in the mountainous southern reaches of West Virginia being caked in coal dust, and the representatives from the nearby mine showing up to hand them out mollifying squeezable toys in the shape of lumps of coal.

That school was subsequently shuttered and is now wreathed in weeds, a replacement established a few miles away to escape the shadow of the mine. Walk’s childhood home sits a few hundred yards from another mine, Black Eagle, that spectacularly disgorges coal via a conveyer belt into a huge heap by the main road, like a sort of Stygian waterfall.

Walk followed the path of many of his peers, as well as his father and grandfather, by working for the coal industry in its Appalachian heartland, doing jobs in security and maintenance. But as he saw the black rocks being clawed from the guts of the mountains and thought of the local people being sickened by this work, Walk began to see coal as an implacable foe.

“People are getting exploited, people are getting poisoned, people are losing their lives to the activities of this coal industry,” said Walk. “I’ve seen friends and neighbors getting sick and dying of cancer and heart disease and having babies with birth defects.”

Since he was 19 years old, Walk, who is now 33, has risked the wrath of his community by actively campaigning against coal, firstly through direct protest action and, more recently, in more novel ways. Standing as a lonely opponent of an industry that still holds the region in a tight grip, Walk is now fixated upon the destruction of his nemesis. “My ultimate hope is to shut down the coal industry,” he said. “In order to get anything else new here, you’ve got to burn it down first.”…

Read the whole article here.