Coal miners and wives guard the entrance to a Massey Energy mountaintop mine, shouting at protesters who had marched there to demand a stop to mountaintop removal mining. Nearly 2,000 miles of streams have been contaminated or buried and more than a million acres of forest have been destroyed across Appalachia due to mountaintop coal mining. Each week, four million pounds of explosives are used in the region for mountaintop removal, the equivalent of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Coal proponents argue that America needs mountaintop mining to keep the lights on, and West Virginia needs it for the jobs.