Do you ever wonder where the juice to charge your iPod was produced? Like over half the electricity in the United States, it probably came from a coal-fired power plant run on coal from the mountains of West Virginia. This reliance on coal raises a score of questions about people, land, and a region's future. In the first of a three-part series of excerpts from "Burning the Future: Coal in America", we meet some of the West Virginians affected by our country's coal policy and see some of the health and ecological costs wrought by it.
