Using Google Earth to See Destruction 194
An anonymous reader writes "On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell "the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth."
Re:yamato! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:yamato! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yamato! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ridge/kmzgenerator.php [noaa.gov]
(I knew that had georef images, but I didn't know they had this)
Re:The real story (Score:3, Interesting)
More than environment (Score:1, Interesting)
The problems we have with coal are a big issue, but if you would prefer the United States rely on old dirty power sources so the coal companies can make more money instead of investing in new, cleaner technology, then you should be concerned about the people who are being affected in the area. http://www.crmw.net/campaigns.php?camp=mfe [crmw.net]
True self sufficiency should be achieved through sustainable methods that do not harm the property of individuals and their communities. Mountain top removal harms more than the environment.
Re:The real story (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem that most people don't get is that many of the people who stand to feel the negative effects from this type of mining are those that actually live there. On the average, they don't have any clout or power to do anything about it. Even worse--they often make their living from it so that it is needed as much as it is hated.
Want to extract energy from Appalachia? Heck, if you're willing to turn the beautiful mountain views into a wasteland, just stick lots and lots of windmills on top of the mountains. 50 to 100 feet off the tops of the mountains, the wind blows quite strongly virtually all the time. At least that way the people in the valleys can still drink their well water.
Next: Environment Damage Censored for Security (Score:2, Interesting)
Ron
hydrogen (Score:5, Interesting)
So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars.
Actually reforming [hydrogen.co.uk] natural gas makes a better source of hydrogen than coal. The best way to produce hydrogen though may be using algae [zetatalk.com] to produce it.
Falcongenocide (Score:5, Interesting)
The term isn't strip mining. This is worse. They call it Mountaintop Removal Mining, although really they destroy entire mountain ranges, then shovel the rubble into what were valleys, destroying thousands of miles of freshwater creeks. The work takes a crew of no more than a couple dozen, whereas traditional "deep" mining needs hundreds, so the jobs that the Appalachian hill culture depends on have disappeared along with drinking water, wildlife habitat, and resident's health. The destruction is complete. The mountains, their ecosystems, and the cultures they support will never return. Dirty King Coal, meanwhile, reaps unprecedented profits.
Remember, energy from coal is anything but clean. Coal plants push massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating the mass extinction we all are witness to.
What's happening in Apallachia, one of Project Censored [projectcensored.org]'s 25 most censored stories of 2005, is a crime against humanity and the planet. I applaud Google for helping to bring attention to it. If any of you feel like helping in this struggle, www.climateaction.net/mjsb [climateaction.net] is a good place to start.
Re:genocide (Score:1, Interesting)
Looking at the same thing in Google Earth, you and I see two very different things. I see a few small grey mines in a sea of thousands of untouched mountain peaks. Yes, entire mountains are being leveled and the nearby valleys are being filled. This is the way mining works. But the important thing to remember is that this is not environmental damage - it's a rock moving exercise on a large scale. The material that's being moved is clean overburden that doesn't produce acid, and there are no harmful chemicals used in the processing of the coal. Streams are sometimes diverted, and sometimes they're actually routed underneath fill through engineered structures known as rock drains.
The simple truth is that your concerns are *aesthetic* and not environmental. You're screaming genocide (remember, that's the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic group) over the *scenery* in and around a few mining operations that, compared to the scale of the mountain range, are tiny.
We need coal. It would be nice if we didn't, but we do... just like we need copper, nickel, zinc, and all the other elements that form everything you touch and use on a daily basis. This stuff doesn't magically appear at Costco as a finished product, but the good news is that an incredibly tiny percentage of the earth's land area gives us all the metal we need. If you want to live in a society with things like plumbing and computers, you need to level a few mountains... even if they're really, really pretty.
It's especially telling of your ignorance that you suggest underground mining as an alternative. First, because the viability of a mining method depends on the thickness, orientation, and geology of a deposit, and second, because you suggest using an inefficient and expensive technique under which these mines could never compete - and then suggest to us that an ancillary benefit would be job creation. The reality is that it's not a choice between mountaintop removal and underground mining - it's mountaintop removal or nothing at all. Let's see you sell that to the local residents.
Sorry if coal mining offends your sense of aesthetics. If you must be a crusader for something, at least find a legitimate environmental cause.
Greenpeace founder debunks environmental myths (Score:4, Interesting)
the issues _behind_ environmentalism, instead of picking up a cue sheet of things to moan about from
your local environmentalist outfit.
Man-made or naturally occuring CO2, the latest science shows that neither are the cause of global
warming but a symptom. Looking at the data first the temperatures go up and _then_ CO2 lagging after
the temperature curve of hundreds of years. I suppose they prefer to talk about 470 mountains and
hills instead. Those are obviously man-made.
Don't believe me, go and watch this BBC documentary titled "The Global Warming Swindle" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU [youtube.com]
Dr. Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace makes an appearance in that documentary so you might
want to hear it from the mouth of the horse itself.
Scary and revealing (Score:1, Interesting)