Ann Scholl Rinehart Carrie La Seur, founder and president of Plains Justice, a nonprofit environmental law firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

For Carrie, this wasn't a sightseeing tour. Her objective: to show the destruction that can happen when an area is strip-mined.

Carrie, an energy and environmental lawyer, founded and serves as president of Plains Justice, a Cedar Rapids-based public interest environmental law center. Plains Justice works for environmental justice and sustainable communities in the Northern Plains region of the United States, including eastern Montana and Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa. On its docket: the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and energy policy work.

"This is the work I was born to do," La Seur says.

The photos she took in Wyoming are meant to serve as a visual, "so people can understand what they're doing" when they say "yes" to coal plant development.

"People need to know where the juice is coming from when they turn on the lights," she says. "We're making decisions with every appliance we choose, with every house we build. If this is truly what we want to do, I want them to look at this with their own eyes and make that decision."

Growing up, Carrie, a seventh-generation Montanan who now makes her home in Mount Vernon, Iowa, knew the Powder River region as the "last true cowboy country -- one of the most desolately beautiful places on the planet. I take it personally that it -- being blown to smithereens."

In Iowa, Plains Justice has helped nonprofit organizations to stall Aliant Energy's proposed 642-megawatt coal plant in Marshalltown. It's also helping local advocates fight a 750-megawatt plant a New Jersey company wants to build in Waterloo. Seeing people turn out there in huge numbers of opposition was gratifying, La Seur says.

"It's democracy at its best," she says. "I love to see people getting involved, standing up for the rights of their own community. There's been a tremendous amount of that in Waterloo. The advocates there have gotten so good at advocating for themselves, they don't need us as much anymore, which is wonderful."

Carrie spent part of her childhood in Grand Island, Neb., and Minot, N.D., as well as Billings, Mont., where her family spans five generations. "I consider it home," she says of Billings. Her father, a grocery buyer, and her mother, a stay-at-home mom who later taught high school, were first-generation college students. Carrie says she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life when she accepted a scholarship to attend Bryn Mawr, a women's college in Pennsylvania. There, she earned a bachelor's degree in English and French. She earned a doctorate in modern languages as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a law degree from Yale Law School.

By the time she attended Yale, she had a clearer picture of her life's work. "Ultimately I realized what was most interesting and most compelling to me was being a community organizer and providing some of the skills I acquired to communities like the one I grew up in -- to make sure that people had the resources and support they need to speak up for themselves and defend their rights."

La Seur served a clerkship with the Federal Court of Australia. Back in the U.S., she worked for the prestigious Preston Gates & Ellis, once ranked among the top 100 law firms in the country. When her husband Andy Wildenberg (now a computer science professor at Cornell College) wanted to move back to his native Iowa, La Seur went to work at a Cedar Rapids law firm and as an adjunct professor at the University of Iowa. In August 2006, she quit to devote herself entirely to getting Plains Justice off the ground.

She says that Plains Justice had "wonderful support" from private donors and has been successful in securing grants. It also has a significant amount of for-fee cases.

"It's absolutely a David and Goliath model we have, but what's empowering to remember is that, throughout history, it's always been the little guy deciding they weren't going to take it anymore. And they went out and changed things. It's one of the archetypes of human progress. Someone has to decide that something has to change. That's the only thing that ever works."

Asked what she hopes she's teaching her 8-year-old son, Malcolm, La Seur responds, "He's the one who is teaching me."

"Malcolm says things to me about the way we need to live in balance with the world around us," she says. "He told me he's not going to drive a car because it hurts nature. He's not the only one. A lot of kids are already that far ahead. They see the challenges coming up. I look forward to the things they have to teach us."

Ann Scholl Rinehart of Cedar Rapids has been a professional writer for over 25 years. She is a frequent contributor for Radish.