"A Crisis of God's Creation"

The NYT (hat tip to Ed) has a good article on religious opposition to mountaintop removal mining:

Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith.

They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interreligious alliance. Increasingly, religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining.

“People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life,” Mr. Gorman said. “They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis of God’s creation made by God’s children?”

Although Christian environmental activists speak out against mountaintop removal at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice’s toll will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, if not an outright ban.

The scope of destruction caused by mountaintop removal mining is nearly impossible to imaging for those who haven't seen it, which is one of the reasons I worked with a group called Appalachian Voices to create ILoveMountains.org, which uses Google Earth and satellite mapping to allow users to "fly through" the more than 450 mountains in the United States that have already been destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.

Another feature we created to help people understand the scale of mountaintop removal projects are city tours that overlay mountaintop removal sites on top of maps of major cities. (New York City is in the image above left; click on the image to play a video that "lifts" a mountaintop removal site from West Virginia and lays it over Manhattan.)

You can also see the overlay in this introductory video:

So what can you do to end the practice? Start by adding your voice to the more than 2,600 Americans who have already pledged to help end mountaintop removal mining. Then, take a moment to forward a YouTube clip or invite your friends and family to join you in the effort after you've signed up.