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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 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?
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.
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.