Mountaintop-removal mining and the hard knot of activism against it in Appalachia are this era's great pitched coal-field battle -- much deadlier than the Battles of Blair Mountain and Matewan.

Michael Shnayerson is the latest author bringing to light the environmental atrocities of King Coal's money and its labor-saving shortcut for extracting the fuel.

In it, he tells a fine story of good and evil:

People trying to save their ancient land, its habitats and their homes vs. a greedy, ruthless power-tripper serving America's energy demands.

It would be a quixotic fight were it not for courts that occasionally interpret the law to protect the land.

The highlight of "Coal River" is the series of legal challenges that have made this decade the most irksome for Don Blankenship, Massey Energy Co.'s CEO.

And if Blankenship is the villain of this story, attorney Joe Lovett is the hero.

The co-founder and executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment, Lovett has worked for years for nonprofit groups that love the land as ardently as Blankenship loves money.

His clients are some of the people who have been written about in magazine and newspaper articles, including the Post-Gazette. Apparently, only a few dozen stalwarts have the nerve to fight Blankenship in his own back yard.

Lovett and a group of like-minded lawyers began challenging West Virginia's so-called Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the coal industry in 2004. They won some cases and forced some restrictions in part because so many of the violations were overt, having gone unchallenged for so long.

Shnayerson's research shows the Army Corps as a rubber-stamp for the coal industry, barely bothering to look into the merits of individual permit applications and perpetrating the fantasy that a buried stream might be "re-created" elsewhere.

If anyone else is best suited to be called King Coal than Don Blankenship, he hasn't been born yet. Shnayerson vilifies him by chronicling his history of behavior. Among many things:

Denying breaks to injured miners, breaking promises of bonuses, running other companies out of business, using his fortune to buy a rubber-stamp judge, pursuing vendettas against employees he can't cow, fighting claims for benefits and, one year, taking home more in bonuses than his company made in profits.

Aside from Massey's fat rap sheet of safety violations -- many thousands more than any coal company in Appalachia -- and that men have died as a result, Massey's most damning legacy has been its prolific destruction of mountains.

If the Appalachian Mountains were the youngest range in the world, the practice would be no less appalling, but it is the oldest, with the greatest diversity of flora and fauna that depend on hundreds of miles of primary and intermittent streams for habitat.

For more than 20 years, Massey has buried streams by throwing millions of years of mountain and old-growth forest -- called "overburden" in the lingo -- down into valleys.

Residents of Appalachia's coal "fields" have been inured to some collateral damage from the industry, but the years and the ailments and the accidents have piled up like so much overburden:

Chemical pollutants in streams and residential wells, an epidemic of asthma and other respiratory illnesses and the occasional spill of hundreds of millions of gallons of coal sludge.

At this point, all Appalachian people, even those whose families depend on a miner's paycheck, know the chilling disregard in which the coal industry holds them.

Massey is not alone. There are other coal companies whose bottom line is never the well being of the natural order or of people. And then there's the Bush administration, which, as Shnayerson points out, has bent over backward for the coal lobby since 2001, dismissing the intent of four decades of environmental protection standards, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts among them, and dismissing people who stand up for those standards.

In a world of hard-to-swallow motivations is the United Mine Workers' hostility to the activists and lawyers. The UMWA has argued that environmentalists are costing miners their jobs, but the coal companies are the culprits. They have cut thousands upon thousands of jobs over decades of strip, longwall and mountaintop removal mining which need handfuls of workers instead of hundreds per site.

Plus, if the coal companies did not commit the violations in the first place, there would be no court challenges to stop work.

It's time for America to care about this magnificent and cloistered region.

Books, articles and photographs revealing the horrific sin of mountaintop removal should by now have tapped the American conscience deeply enough to prompt a ban on the practice. If that jeopardizes our electricity supply, there will be a lot of work for people developing clean options. Out-of-work miners would probably apply.