Teri Blanton
Teri Blanton has been fighting mountaintop removal mining and toxic pollution in her home state of Kentucky for 20 years. She is former chairperson and current fellow of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, a statewide group that is working to protect communities from coal pollution and promote environmental justice in Kentucky, and a member of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a federal advisory council to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. While struggling to fight coal pollution and mountaintop removal mining in her community, she also learned that her home in Harlan County had been the site of decades of toxic waste dumping by an electrical manufacturing company. All at once, she found herself fighting for protections from two separate industries that both had been dumping on her community and working to educate her neighbors on the harms of both.
