BLACKSBURG - Big passions often start with small things. For Kim Murphy, it was ponies. Mine ponies, to be exact.

She was 5 years old and her father, a Fayette County, W.Va., miner, was on strike and out of work. The young Murphy was worried about what would happen to the out-of-work mining ponies. She didn't realize they had already been replaced by machines. It was a tough pill to swallow and it motivates her still today as the 33-year-old Virginia Tech senior spends her free time trying to rally students and community members to the cause of fighting mountaintop removal mining.

"It was my first brush with mechanization in the coal industry, machines replacing animals, men and now whole communities," said Murphy. "Mountaintop removal is the most devastating extension of that mechanization."

Murphy and a dozen or so Tech students and Blacksburg residents last June formed Mountain Justice, an activist group dedicated to educating folks about the effects of removal mining, a process the coal industry calls "peak reduction."

Mountain Justice was conceived in the back of a car last April on the way back from a trip to Larry Gibson's homestead on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia, explained Mary Dickerson, one of four core members who gathered Wednesday night in Murphy's house to talk about Mountain Justice's mission and plans for this semester.

"Larry's doing such a service by inviting groups to his place to see firsthand what mountaintop removal does," said Dickerson. "You can't see it like that and not have it change your life."

Gibson's 50 acres on Kayford Mountain sit above thousands of acres of mountaintop removal operations, some ongoing, others in what passes for reclamation.

His family cemetery, which used to be the low peak on the mountain, now sits hundreds of feet above the surrounding mining operations, which use heavy machinery of a colossal scale to shave mountaintops down hundreds of feet layer by layer, scraping small seams of coal unreachable by traditional deep-mining methods.

The waste, everything that was the mountaintop but isn't coal, is dumped into hollows, filling streambeds and covering habitat under permits approved by federal and state agencies.

"We were brainstorming on the way back about what we could do to help Larry and stop MTR," said Dickerson. "We thought, let's do some benefits, hold seminars. An incredible energy took hold."

Since then, Mountain Justice has held a series of seminars and panel discussions featuring speakers involved in the fight against mountain removal mining, and other activists in the Appalachian region.

Mary Ann Hitt, a Blacksburg resident and executive director of the 2,000-member-strong Appalachian Voices activist group, said she believes small groups like Mountain Justice can do a lot to educate the public on issues such as mountaintop removal.

"They can have a great impact, especially when a group has the energy of this one," said Hitt, who participated in a panel discussion hosted by Mountain Justice last fall thatdrew about 75 people. "Small grass-roots groups have strong, passionate voices and create a network of activists that can work together."

Mountain Justice, whose credo allows for people with a wide variety of views about the coal industry, does not plan to get involved as a group this year in a series of events being billed as Mountain Justice Summer. The names are coincidental. And the summer campaign involves many groups, like Earth First, which advocate more hands-on methods of protest.

Mountain Justice in Blacksburg will continue to focus on education, letter-writing campaigns and awareness. It also hopes to begin building a database of the effects of mountaintop removal sites on nearby streams and ecosystems. One of its main focuses this semester will be to raise campus and community awareness about the possibility of a new power plant for the growing Tech campus. Mountain Justice favors a switch to a biomass-fueled plant instead of the coal that the university currently uses.

Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski said Tech officials are only in the beginning stages of considering options on how to provide power and heat to the campus for its new 10-year master plan. But he said input from groups like Mountain Justice is always welcome and can often have an impact.

"We try to listen to voices from campus and the community," said Owczarski. "The university as a whole needs to be informed on these and a wide variety of issues."

For more information, call Kim Murphy at 961-6406 or Chris Dodson at 552-4307.

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