Bird's eye spew

Before and after shots of mountaintop-removal in Google Earth.

Posted by Corey McKrill at 8:20 PM on 15 Mar 2007

Back in January, Grist's InterActivist column featured John Amos, the head of SkyTruth. SkyTruth uses satellite photos and digital mapping technologies to reveal what is difficult to see from the highway: just how exactly we're changing our planet. Seeing a clearcut or a mine from a bird's-eye perspective often adds a visceral dimension to an otherwise rather abstract-seeming issue.

One especially useful application for this sort of imagery: showing the extent of the havoc wrought by companies doing mountaintop-removal mining. Recently a coalition of Appalachian grassroots organizations, ILoveMountains.org, released a series of overlays for Google Earth showing "before" and "after" landscapes in several heavily-mined regions.

mountaintop mining

What really boggles my brain is that some of the mine footprints are visible in a view of the entire eastern half of the United States.

The Google Earth file is available here. A tutorial on how to download and use Google Earth to view the overlays is here.

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hard to interpret

It is a good thing that these Appalachian grassroots organizations exist, and that they are uniting in the ILoveMountains organization. To make the terrificly destructive effects of mountaintop-removal mining readily visible is clearly a valuable service, seeing that that disgraceful practice has been tolerated for so long by Americans, more out of ignorance than lack of interest (I hope).

By the same token, I loathe the series of TV ads that the coal industry has been running, showing bright, polite children, in sunny and pleasingly decorated bedrooms, looking up from their computers and cheerily teaching us that coal is the solution to all our problems.

That said, I find the Google Earth image hard to read. (I am only considering the side-by-side photos in Corey's post.) In the image on the right, the only obvious signs of destruction that I can make out are the light brown areas in the background. The green areas actually look as though the foliage is thicker. And all the white areas, the most obvious difference from the image on the left, have the appearance of snow cover, not new mining operations.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 10:30 AM on 16 Mar 2007

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