The Last Mountain is a documentary about a handful of people who stand up to save a mountain but more importantly it is about fighting back against the subversion of democracy, the assault on the public process at the local level that occurs everyday, all in the pursuit of profit for the very few.

Resource rich areas exploited by resource extraction industries historically have higher levels of poverty than the national average. This is true in Coos County and like West Virginia a local grassroots effort recognizes what is happening and is fighting to protect the commons for the entire county.

Robert Kennedy Jr: – …one of the things that—one of the reasons that I’m interested in what’s happened in West Virginia and that Bill really got interested in doing the film here is that it’s not just about the destruction of the environment. It’s about the subversion of democracy. And wherever you see widespread environmental injury, you’re also going to see the subversion of democracy. And West Virginia is really the template for that dynamic. You’ll see the destruction of the public process at the local level, where people no longer have a say in the allocation of the public trust, the resources of the commons. You’ll see the destruction of transparency in government. You’ll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become—in West Virginia, the West Virginia DEP has become the sock puppet for the industry that it’s supposed to regulate. You’ll see the widespread corruption of public officials, which you’ve also seen. Virtually every relevant public official in the state of West Virginia is now an indentured servant for the coal industry. And you’ll also see the destruction of the press and the role of the fourth estate. And again, in West Virginia you see the press largely blind, holding a blind eye to this wholesale destruction of the landscapes and to the people whose lives are being destroyed in this process that’s making a few people rich by systematically impoverishing virtually everybody else in the state.

This is why it is so critical to insist on proper public process and this is why having a real press is so important to a healthy democracy.