Nearly five years ago, the United States Department of Energy, or DOE, began an unusual partnership with the country’s largest lobbying group for the plastics industry.

A coal mine was the first to wreck the land. Now activists want to keep another extractive industry from taking root there: prisons.

Saket Soni, founder of Resilience Force, says skilled restoration workers are doing the arduous task of repairing US cities affected by disasters.