Save Our Cumberland Mountains, or SOCM, is a Tennessee activist group best known for their opposition to strip mining. They were founded in 1972 to oppose what they said were unfair imbalances in property taxes, described by a group of Vanderbilt students, between small and large landowners in the rural coal mining counties of East Tennessee. Their focus later grew beyond the Cumberland Plateau and Cumberland Mountains regions, to include all of Tennessee.[1]
J. W. Bradley of Petros, Tennessee is a cofounder and longtime leader of the group.[2]