In West Virginia, three environmental activists have shut down a mountaintop removal site run by the mining giant Massey Coal. The three activists are perched atop platforms on trees at the Bee Tree Strip Mine on Coal River Mountain. On Thursday, Democracy Now! reached protester Eric Blevins.

Eric Blevins: “Right now I am sitting on a platform that is hanging in a tree, attached to the tree, probably about sixty or seventy feet in the air. I’m not sure exactly. Fifty yards away or so, there’s a bunch of holes where Massey Energy has been drilling to put explosives so they can blow up Coal River Mountain, the last mountain in the Coal River Valley area of West Virginia that has not been destroyed by mountaintop removal. And they actually just started blasting on the mountain within the past year.”