When the wind blows hard from the wrong direction, coal ash from the Reid Gardner Generating Station blows directly onto the Moapa reservation, home to about 150 tribal members.

Sisters Aaliya, Ayona, and Zayda Hernandez near their home on the Moapa Band of Paiutes Reservation, about an hour north of Las Vegas. Since 1965, coal ash from the nearby Reid Gardner Generating station has been dumped into uncovered ''ponds'' less than a half mile from their neighborhood.

Surita Hernandez at home; she and four of her five children have asthma.

Respiratory-relief supplies at the Hernandez home.

Jennifer Samson pays a hospital visit to her cousin Russell Samson, who died less than two weeks later. In a television interview shortly before he was hospitalized, Russell said that the power plant emissions made him sick: "This got inside my chest, my lungs, where I couldn't breathe."

Moapa Paiute tribal member Vernon Lee at the cemetery. "There aren't very many elders left, because people don't grow old anymore," he said.

"The coal business is archaic," said Lee. "It was good for the past, but it doesn't fit with the future. It's polluting, and it's polluting some more, and it's polluting some more beyond that. And unfortunately, this tribe is in direct line of fire."

Trainloads of coal in Williamson, W.Va.

Mountaintop-removal mines in Appalachia have demolished an estimated 1.4 million acres of forested hills, buried an estimated 2,000 miles of streams, poisoned drinking water, and wiped whole towns from the map. Mining firms must maintain a 100-foot protective zone around burial grounds. Shown here, the Jarrell Cemetery is a tree-studded atoll rising from a moonscape sea.

Tori Wong of Virginia traveled with friends to the West Virginia State Capitol in Charleston to participate in the Memorial Day protest against mountaintop-removal mining.

Donna and Charlie Branham at their Lenore, W.Va., home. "It's a hard decision to take your hair off," Donna said. "But it's not as hard as watching them destroy my land, watching them destroy my children's future."

For generations, people in River Rouge, Mich., have lived within sniffing distance of a coal-fired power plant, an oil refinery, a sewage-treatment plant, a steel mill, and other industrial polluters. In front of her River Rouge home, Siobhan Washington hugs granddaughter Marianna Hildreth while some of her other grandchildren play. "I don't understand why more people aren't concerned about it," she said of her hometown. "People are dying off, slowly but surely, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s."

La'Miyah Hildreth, 5, wears a nebulizer in the kitchen of her grandmother Siobhan Washington.

Marianna Hildreth, 7, holds her cousin Mariyah McGhee, 1, who has asthma, in their grandmother's kitchen in River Rouge, Mich.

Sondra Cartwright and her granddaughter, who has asthma, outside Cartwright's home in Ecorse, Mich.: "If I could talk to one of the people who run these companies, the first thing I'd want to know is, do you have children? How can you look at yourself in the mirror?"