Topless mountains-can we still call them mountains?

I saw my first flattened mountain a couple of years ago while driving to Kentucky. Soaking up the abundant, verdant beauty around me, I was unprepared for the specter looming in front of me: the mountain was gone. In its place was a gaping hole in the sky.  Dust, grit, carved tracks and deep ruts, despair and sickness filled in the gap, while someone--possibly you or me, made off like bandits with the energy robbed from that place.

The shock of that day is still with me and hard to think about, but recently I was again confronted with it, this time through a movie--The Last Mountain. In it, I saw more than just that one mountain stripped and flattened--there are thousands of acres of land decimated all the time, most of it in Appalachia.   The wealth from mining goes not to its few workers who run mammoth machines, but to robber barons who stand on the backs of our people, strip the earth of its resources and then send it someplace else.

Will we ever learn that the earth is more than a resource and that much of what is here is finite?  Can we restructure corporations so that blind acquisition no longer drives them to rob our world to line the nests of the few?

 The thing about most energy sources is that once we use them, they are gone. Whack the mountaintop off, rob it of the coal and other minerals collected through the eons, and there is no more. Gone; used up.