Mountaintop removal activists Dustin Steele delivered a pep talk to his comrades before they marched up to the Hobet open-pit coal mine in Lincoln County, West Virginia on Saturday. Steele, whose grandfather was a union coal miner for twenty-seven years, said, “Hopefully the reaction of the folks in the coal fields won’t be extreme. But even if it is extreme, realize that they’re feeling that same fear of the future as what we are. They are oppressed by the same mechanisms and they feel it in the exact same way.”

The response that the approximately fifty activists who blocked mining operations and dropped banners reading “Restore Our Mountains, Reemploy Our Miners” and “Coal Leaves, Cancer Stays” from bulldozers received might be characterized as a bit extreme. The cops didn’t exactly help either. The video below documents.