castanyes blaves

The first sight of the impact of US hunger for coal takes the breath away, here at Kayford in West Virginia, there's a yawning chasm where a mountain used to stand.
Open cast sites in Virginia
The coal is accessed by blasting the open cast site

And stretching a dozen barren miles to the horizon there's a series of hills with unnaturally flat tops - their peaks have been blasted off in a type of mining known as "mountaintop removal"

On a flight organised by the conservation charity SouthWings, pilot Susan Lapis tells me she's "horrified" to see how the quest for coal has devastated great tracts of landscape, some estimates suggest that more than 400 tops have been demolished so far.