News
“National Memorial for the Mountains” Featured Prominently in USA Today
Thursday, June 14th, 2007
June 8th, 2007
Today, the USA Today featured an article with Appalachian Voices’ Executive Director Mary Anne Hitt that prominently featured our use of Google Earth in the National Memorial for the Mountains to pull back the curtain on the coal companies’ destruction of Appalachia.
Environmentalists warm to Google Earth
– by Stefanie OlsenBERKELEY, CA, June 8th, 2007
Three-dimensional maps from Google Earth are giving non-profits new artillery in their battle to raise awareness of issues like deforestation and genocide.For example, Mary Ann Hitt, executive director of non-profit Appalachian Voices, said a collective of grassroots organizations is using 3D maps in Google Earth to show how millions of acres of Appalachian Mountains across four states have been destroyed by mining companies. In a process called mountaintop removal, the coal-mining industry blows off the tops of mountains with explosives to get at coal faster and cheaper, she said. As a result, surrounding areas are buried by pollution and waste, streams dry up and a soot lingers in the air, she said.
So with the help of Google, the non-profit built a virtual “national memorial” for 470 topless mountains in the area-marked by half-mast flags-with information and guides on the process of mountaintop removal. The map layer, found in Google Earth’s “featured content,” also shows historic before and after aerial photos of the mountains; overlay comparisons to illustrate the scope of destruction; and links to first-hand stories and videos from the communities affected by mountaintop removal.
“This has revolutionized our thinking,” Hitt said here Wednesday at the Fifth International Symposium on Digital Earth. “It’s given us the ability to give the kind of tour of the mountains that we only could give previously to the media or government officials. This gives an audience of 200 million people,” she said.
. . .
On their website, the organizers of the “International Symposium on Digital Earth: Bringing Digital Earth Down to Earth” explain their mission:
Digital Earth is a visionary concept for “spaceship Earth” sparked by R. Buckminster Fuller, grokked by the Apollo astronauts returning from their moon missions, and popularized by Vice President Al Gore
. . .
This is the first time the bi-annual symposium is being held on U.S. soil – previous gatherings have been held in China, Canada, Czech Rebuplic and Japan. The five day gathering will feature world-class representatives from industry, academia, government, NGOs and the private sector who have come from around the globe to highlight a central theme regarding shared interest in the concept of a digital Earth.
The symposium was sponsored by the following organizations:
ESRI | Google | University of California, Berkeley | Buckminster Fuller Institute | Chromatrope | International Center for Remote Sensing Education (ICRSE) | Imaging Notes Magazine | International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) | National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) | NextNow | Stanford University | UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) | UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme)
