A Tree Hugger is Watching You

[bobabode]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/skytruth-the-environment-and-the-satellite-revolution/2013/07/31/3a1d181a-d52b-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html?hpid=z1

[bobabode]

"The nose of the plane settles, and we’re about 3,500 feet above the rolling hills. The land and mountains below are all deep green, a fresh-bloomed expanse of chlorophyll, dirt roads slicing through the hills, shadows of clouds drifting across the land, soft as a feather, fragile as smoke, a daydream, beautiful West By God Virginia.
And then there they are, great scabrous strips of gray and brown and ochre and some shade that looks like sand — the mines. What they do, they clear-cut tops of hills and mountains, then dynamite ridge lines to find the seams of coal. They dig and dig, and then dump millions of tons of rock and the dirt in the valleys below, burying streams and anything else in the way, altering the very height and depths of the mountains and the valleys.
On the ground, it’s impossible to understand the scale of the practice. But up in the air — the SkyTruth view of life on Earth — the scabs go on and on. Scab here, scab there, then another and another, breaking up the green expanses, going to the horizon and beyond. Even the “reclaimed sites,” the used-up mines, are dull brown, lakes of dirt with little sprinkles of green, the grass struggling to grow.
This is the world we’ve built for ourselves — the modern world runs on hydrocarbons — but you have to wonder, floating in a little metal box thousands of feet in the air, if this is the kind of truth we want to leave behind as our mark on Earth, as our scratchmark, as Faulkner had it, on the face of oblivion."WaPo