This spring, Montanans will have a chance to follow up on the largest climate-related act of civil disobedience in Montana history, which saw 23 arrests over five days, as hundreds gathered at the State Capitol in opposition to Big Coal. A subgroup of the protesters — myself included — are now taking our case to court, arguing that the threat of climate change necessitates peaceful civil disobedience. If we are successful, it could set an encouraging precedent for nonviolent protest in Montana and elsewhere.

This campaign started on Aug. 13, 2012, when seven of us sat down in the State Capitol rotunda and refused to leave at closing time, an act of protest against elected officials’ leasing of state lands to the coal industry. We were particularly concerned about coal mine-for-export projects — like the massive Otter Creek proposal in Southeast Montana — which would add to climate change while exposing communities throughout the Pacific Northwest to coal dust and diesel pollution. The mine itself would damage or destroy precious aquifers and agricultural land in eastern Montana.

For many Montanans, the fight over coal is reminiscent of battles that pitted the politically powerful copper industry against communities over a century ago. “Montana has a long, sad history of resource extraction followed by pollution,” said David ...

Joe Sacco and I, one afternoon when we were working in southern West Virginia on our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,”parked our car on the side of a road. We walked with Kenny Kinginto the woods covering the slopes of Blair Mountain. King is leading an effort to halt companies from extracting coal by blasting apart the mountain, the site in the early 1920s of the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War.

Blair Mountain, amid today’s rising corporate exploitation and state repression, represents a piece of American history that corporate capitalists, and especially the coal companies, would have us forget. It is a reminder that citizens have a right to resist a corporate machine intent on subjugating them. It is a reminder that all the openings of our democracy were achieved with the toil, anguish and sometimes blood of radicals and popular fronts, from labor unions to anarchists, socialists and communists. But this is not approved history. We are instructed by the power elite to worship at approved shrines—plantation estates erected for wealthy slaveholders and land speculators such as George Washington, or the gilded domes of ...