Kimberly Vargas, 20, recently got the words “Food Justice” tattooed across her back. “I wanted something I’d never regret,” she says, “and know that food justice is something I’m going to be working on forever.” Kimberly wasn’t always so passiona...

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In 1970, not long after the very first Earth Day, a 15-year-old named Andy Lipkis escaped the lung-burning, mountain-obscuring L.A. smog to attend summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains. There, he met a naturalist who pointed to the dirty air and the dying trees and said, "If we don't do something, they'll all be gone in 30 years." Lipkis rose to the challenge. Together with 23 other campers, he decided to revive a small patch of forest. Over the course of three weeks, they cleared a tar-covered parking lot and transformed it into a fertilized grove of saplings. By the end of the summer, animals had returned, life was coming back, and Andy Lipkis had found his calling.

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“This is my home. I’m not going to let them run me out of my home. Maine is pretty, but it doesn’t have mountains like we’ve got — like those that hug from God. Us hillbillies like our hills. You can feel the ancient energy here. We are the most homesick people in our life.”

Julia “Judy” Bonds, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in a wooded corner of West Virginia’s Coal River Valley called Marfork Hollow, where six generations of her “great-greats” worked, lived, and were buried. Bonds is the co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch, which organizes against the coal companies’ destructive practice of mountaintop removal.
 

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