How Google Earth Is Calling Attention to an Environmental Group’s Crusade

The environmental blog Green Media Toolshed shows how Google Earth is being used by a charity to highlight an important cause.

The organization, Appalachian Voices, is using Google Earth to allow Web users to see the destruction of more than 470 mountains through mountain-top removal.

Google Earth uses satellite imagery, maps, and pictures of three-dimensional buildings to provide a searchable database of geographic information from around the world.

“This is a great tool because it can help you reach out to audiences you may not have reached before,” GreenMedia Toolshed writes.

To highlight the project, Google offered Mary Anne Hitt, executive director of Appalachian Voices, an opportunity to explain the issue on its blog.

“The first time I flew over southern West Virginia and saw mountaintop removal coal mining from the air, I knew that if everyone could see what I had seen—mountain after mountain blown up and then dumped into streams in the neighboring valleys—they would think twice about where their electricity came from the next time they flipped a light switch,” Ms. Hitt writes on the Google blog.

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