The longtime West Virginia environmentalist Julia “Judy” Bonds has died at the age of 58 from cancer. Born into a family of coal miners, Bonds became a leading voice in the resistance to stop mountaintop coal mining. She appeared on Democracy Now! in 2009.

Judy Bonds: “Coal mining has greatly affected West Virginia. Right now, there’s almost 400,000 acres of mountains that have been lowered, the tops blasted off. They’re using three-and-a-half million pounds of explosives a day just in West Virginia to blow the tops off our mountains, and it’s blasting our homes, it’s poisoning our air, and it’s poisoning our water. So, basically, the people who live where I do, in coal extraction areas, literally are living in terror and are being poisoned by the coal extraction process here.”