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Using Google Earth to See Destruction
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."
On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth.
What a letdown. By "special interactive layer", I was expecting shared control of an orbiting laser cannon.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
We have to quit destroying all the mountains. We will need them to live on after all the coal we burn causes the water levels to rise due to global warming.
Paint the mountains green!
... should be that the US has a 200-800 year supply of coal, and if OPEC or anyone else in the world says "screw the US", the US can just turn around and say "screw you". Coal can be processed to make fuel too. We shouldn't sell our independence and liberty down the river for the sake of some enviromental cause. Even if we used all the coal, only the tiniest percential of mountains would even have noticable changes.
So, if you want to check it out, the link that should have been in the story is:
http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/
I thought Google had stuck a satellite over the middle east and had it continually taking pictures or something. Then I read the summary. Bit of a disappointment let me tell you.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/birds-eye-v iew-of-mountaintop.html
-Ian
Have you ever been to West Virginia? It's called mountaintop removal.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
How can we save the earth?
Google should arm leftist guerillas in key areas with high-value ecosystems: e.g., the rain forest. In exchange for arming the guerillas, they agree to help the environments by killing poachers and blowing up companies that rape the environment.
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
Coal is not usually associated with mountains.
Never heard of the Appalachia and the Appalachian Mountain range then have you? Or Black Mesa? Coal mining was extensive in both places and still is in Appalachia.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So we'll probably burn coal to make Hydrogen that we can than use to power our cars.
Actually reforming natural gas makes a better source of hydrogen than coal. The best way to produce hydrogen though may be using algae to produce it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Suppose that Google gives 10 shoulder-fired missile launchers and an arsenal of 200 missiles to the guerillas in Peru. In exchange, the Peruvian guerillas agree to kill 50 poachers and blow up 10 Korean fishing vessels.
Those would be some sort of impressive shoulder-fired missiles, to hit Korean fishing vessels from Peru...
Unless those Koreans are really going out of the way to get their fish, that is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Coal CAN be extracted from the earth in a less destructive manner. It can even be burnt in a relatively clean fashion with minimal emissions, if one is willing to build plants that are marginally more expensive.
Granted, nuclear beats coal on all of those counts
Have you ever seen what uranium mining does? Many of those who live where it is mined are opposed to the mining, such as the Diné or Navajo and those in Saskatchewan. Aboriginals in Australia have fighting mining since before it started, the Mirrar and Jabiluka have been fighting it since at least the 1970s.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Terraforming the area does mitigate the damage to the environment significantly, although some companies have replanted the area with grass instead of trees. There has been an effort to encourage replanting of trees, but it might also be interesting to see if switchgrass could be grown there.
The largest environmental concern, however, is the production of large amounts of slurry (a water suspension of coal, sulfur, and other minerals that is created as a byproduct of the mining and cleaning process) which ends up stored near the mining site behind large dams created during the excavation process. Long-term disposal of this slurry presents a huge environmental challenge.
However, much of the political opposition to mountaintop removal mining comes from labor union pressure, since it takes far less manpower to conduct a mountaintop removal operation than to run a conventional mine.
The problem is that many of the mining companies don't last long enough to put the mountaintop back where it belongs; they remove the mountain, take out some or most of the coal, and then go bankrupt.
There's a lot of finger-pointing when this happens, usually wherein management will blame astronomically expensive union employees and contracts, and the union negotiators and employees will blame mismanagement. (I suspect the truth is a combination of both, as usual.)
But the end result is that the company will go bankrupt and the mountain will get left torn apart. The same thing happens with some strip and open-pit mining operations; I know of a few places (mostly Pennsylvania) where there are open pit mines sitting around that were supposed to have been filled in, but the companies disappeared when the mines petered out.
IMO, the solution here is to require that before the first shovelful of earth is dug, that the mining company secures a bond for the cost of the environmental cleanup and restoration. If they go bankrupt or fail to restore the area within a certain number of years, the government takes over, calls in the bond, and has someone do it for them. The beauty of this is that it doesn't create a giant "trust fund" sitting around somewhere, for sleazebag politicans to raid for their own pork-barrel purposes, and it ensures that mining companies who don't fulfill their obligations will be pushed out of the marketplace: if you blow it and a multi-billion-dollar bond gets called in, you can bet nobody is ever going to underwrite anything you do again.
I don't know if this sort of bonding is anything like current policy, but it seems like the simplest way, and one that avoids actually delving into why the mining companies fail, which is a can of worms better left sealed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
More NGOs should follow this example and use technology like Google Earth to show where they are working, and what they are doing. This gives people a better idea of where the money they donate is being spent. It also gives people a better idea of what work needs to be done, be it to protect the environment, or to reduce poverty (although the two are fundamentally linked) - this is how technology should be used to make the world a smaller place. What would be great if WWF included on the ground photos of their program activities, so people could take a virtual tour of what was being done.
The next step is for NGOs to use GIS to help them with their work. A good example which I came across was in a refugee camp in Uganda, where they plotted to locations of Cholera outbreaks, and then compared this to the location of all the wells. Some of the wells showed high concertrations of outbreaks around them, indicating that they were contaminated - and so they were closed down. This is just a basic example, GIS could be used to make really interesting correlations between education, poverty and the environment.
However I work for an NGO and know how slow they are to adopt new technology, but that's a whole different story...
the flippant nature of the conversation so far kind of disgusts me. I worked for some of these campaigns in West Virginia a couple summers ago, and what's going on down there is terrifying and, in my mind, evil.
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'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 is a good place to start.
Why link a summary of content to a summary of content.
how about dropping that link right to something useful, not just another link site?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Not all mountains are of igneous origin. Some mountains are formed of heaved-up sedimentary rock. And there is a lot of coal in the deep seams of such mountains (Appalachians, Urals, no doubt others that don't come to mind offhand). Deep seams tend to be high-grade bituminous and anthracite (the result of putting sedimentary coal under pressure), which are more valuable because they burn hotter and cleaner.
Conversely, surface coal (the stuff you get from strip mines) tends to be low-grade bituminous, or worse, lignite (not-quite-coal-yet).
When I lived in Montana I heated my house with a coal stove (when it's -65F, wood just doesn't produce enough heat), and that's how I learned that coal from Montana was crap compared to coal from Wyoming, even tho the major strip mines were less than 200 miles apart. If I wanted decent coal, sometimes I had to drive down to Sheridan and pick it up off the side of the road (they'd let you do that outside the mines -- small chunks tend to fall off the trucks).
BTW when splitting coal for the stove, I often found fossilized "prints" from plants (leaves, tree rings, etc.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
For those who actually want to try out this, go to http://ilovemountains.org/memorial_tutorial/. It describes which layers to turn on in Google Earth to be able to see the Appalachian mountains removal.
Environmentalism has overextended its welcome in the public mind and it's time people talked about
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
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.
I grew up in appalachia, and have a deep love for the mountains of which you are speaking. While I do agree with you completely that the term genocide is wildly inaccurate, and in principle, rearranging rocks is not a big deal, even when done on a big scale; I take issue with the idea that mountaintop removal has no real environmental impact.
Please note that I am FAR from an environmentalist. I believe that we need to be responsible with the environment, balancing that with the energy needs that we have. We cannot return to an agrarian society which uses only renewable resources.
Factually, abandoned mines do leave acid runoff which does affect streams. While I make no assertion that the Charleston Gazette is unbiased in this matter, the linked article also contains links to a report from the Department of Environmental Potection about the cleanup costs.
In summary, while I believe that your points are valid, it's also valid to acknowledge that a legitimate business cost is the cleanup efforts which must be undertaken after the coal is removed so that the streams are unpolluted.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?