“There is a war about coal . . . but the war is not on coal. The war is the one that coal has waged on West Virginia for the last 150 years.”

So says attorney Bruce Stanley in the documentary Blood on the Mountain, now streaming on Netflix. Stanley was part of a team that litigated against coal baron Don Blankenship, whose tenure as the CEO of Massey Energy was marked by 52 coal miner deaths in Massey-owned mines. Blankenship was released on Wednesday after serving a year in prison for conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards. (You can check out his post-release Twitter tirade here.)

Blankenship’s conviction was extremely rare for a coal industry executive. But mining disasters—the hot ones like explosions and cave-ins, and the slow-burning ones like dangerous working conditions and unfulfilled pensions—don’t lack for precedent.

Directors Mari-Lynn Evans and Jordan Freeman use talking heads, excellent archival footage, and modern-day shots of protests and mountaintop mines to expose coal’s impact on the well-being of West Virginians from the 1880s to today. In the process, we witness an industry that built the state—constructing whole towns from the ground up—in order to exploit it.

We learn how miners in the industry’s early days were considered expendable: If they died, their wives and children would be kicked out of their houses to make way for more miners. Says one interviewee: “If you killed a man, you were OK. If you killed a mule, you got fired.” New Deal reforms in the 1930s made things a little better for miners, granting them the right to unionize, but industrial influence over politics remained. A lack of government oversight paved the way for disaster after disaster—from the breach of Pittston Coal Company’s Buffalo Creek dam that left 125 dead and thousands injured or homeless in 1972, to the Upper Big Branch explosion that killed 29 miners in 2010. Time after time, the government refused to impose stricter regulations no matter how many miners wound up dead. “Why do all the bad things have to happen to West Virginia?” asks Arch Moore, West Virginia’s governor for much of the 1970s and 80s, during a press conference. Moore ultimately pleaded guilty to extorting more than half a million dollars from a coal operator during his time as governor.

Some disasters are more subtle: With some coal companies declaring bankruptcy due to decreased demand—like Patriot Coal in 2012 and again in 2015—tens of thousands of West Virginians have been stranded without pensions or health benefits. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been destroyed for mountaintop removal, a method that spreads the health risks of coal mining from miners to anyone living downwind or downstream from a mine.

Still, many West Virginians remain loyal to the industry, perhaps in part because of the industry’s not-so-subtle form of brainwashing: We see coal executives speaking to elementary schoolers about the virtues of coal, parades and fairs sponsored by coal companies, and Ted Nugent performing at a pro-coal rally. The virtues of coal are ingrained in the state’s mythology, the film argues, making the state a tough terrain for critics.

To be sure, Blood on the Mountain is unabashedly one-sided. It would have benefitted from voices opposed to unionization or clean energy outside of footage from rallies and press conferences. Still, the film manages to complicate the typical environmentalist narrative. Footage of a July 2014 protest in Pittsburgh shows United Mine Workers of America members and clean-air activists shouting past each other. One man whacks a pro-coal protester in the face with a “climate action now” sign. Granted, protests aren’t an ideal venue for reasoned discussion, but it’s symbolic of a greater challenge of the environmental movement.