Photography by Chad A. Stevens

Photography by Chad A. Stevens

Photography by Chad A. Stevens

FILM SYNOPSIS

In a forgotten part of our country, coal feeds families when not much else does. There's no easy way to take sides when the coal company that takes your land, destroys your streams, and balances tons of sludge over the heads of your children also pays your electric bills and puts food on the table. That's why speaking out for the first time was the hardest thing Lorelei Scarbro had ever done.

Lorelei just wanted to make scented candles, paint her ceramic angels and spoil her grandchildren. She just wanted to live out her days in the place she always considered home, the rolling mountains of West Virginia.

Then the bulldozers came, followed by the blasting crews. Massey Energy was gearing up for one of the largest mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia on Coal River Mountain, the mountain Lorelei called home. So on August 2, 2007, Lorelei spoke out at a hearing permit at Marsh Fork Elementary School: "This isn’t coal mining," she yelled. "This is the rape of Appalachia!" And so began her transformative journey to stop a corporate giant, putting at risk the very thing she holds most dear: her family.

Kevin Meadows, covered in coal dust after another 12-hour shift in the mine, stumbles through the door and kisses his wife on the cheek. She's nine months pregnant, due any day. Kevin, eyes as black as coal, arms like timber, works 60 hours a week in a Massey mine to put food on the table. It's the only job in the area that can support his growing family.

On April 22, 2010, his family grew by 6 lbs. and 10 ounces. Levi Meadows was his first-born son and Lorelei's second grandchild. When the nurse carried Levi out to meet the family, Lorelei was the first to hold him, then Kevin. Family means everything here. And that’s why Lorelei's decision to fight Massey Energy, in a place where to be against coal is to be against your family and their way of life, changed everything.

Coal River Mountain, an ancient Appalachian cradle of rolling ridges, nestled hollows and an untapped $4.3 billion of coal, is in the crosshairs of the national energy debate. On one side, an international coal corporation is set to destroy the mountain through a process known as mountaintop removal coal mining. On the other side, a tenacious grandmother has found her own energy solution: a 220-turbine wind farm along the ridges of the mountain.

A Thousand Little Cuts isn't a story about mountaintop removal. That story has been done. This is the story of a grandmother, her back pushed against the wall by Big Coal, and her transformation into a green energy activist fighting to build one of the first wind farms in Appalachia, then a twice-arrested mountaintop removal coal mining protester, and finally, after a dramatic turn of events, a community development organizer trying to save her home. It's a story of change: of a culture, of a community, of a family, and of a person.

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