Julia Bonds is Appalachian through and through. The daughter of a coal miner, she was born and raised in the mountains of West Virginia. Specifically, Bonds was raised in Marfork Hollow, where six generations of her family had lived. But Bonds doesn't live in Marfork Hollow any more.
Nobody does.
Over the past two decades, the Appalachian coal country has been transformed, ravaged by the practice known as mountaintop removal mining. The process relies on reaching narrow coal seams by literally blasting the tops off mountains. The coal is then collected through the use of drag-lines, massive buckets attached to cables which collect huge amounts of dirt and small amounts of coal.