A David vs. Goliath story:

How did a few neophyte activists from Appalachia get the rest of America and Congress to care about the ostensibly hyper-local issue of mountaintop-removal coal mining?

Background: It’s cheaper for energy companies to extract coal from the earth by slicing the tops off mountains than it is to tunnel underneath them. The result: over 470 mountains in Appalachia have been demolished, leading to a host of environmental problems: destruction of natural habitats, flooding, pollution, etc.

At first, spreading the word was done via old-school Web 1.0 websites, earned media coverage, and face-to-face organizing by local and regional organizations.

Problems with that approach:

• Hard to convery scale of mining
• National face-to-face organizing costs a lot
• Missing an organizing presence
• National legislation needs a national network

Solution: iLove Mountains.org — a Web 2.0-tricked out resource center and action center

Check out the highlights of the site after the jump…

Web site elements

Multimedia initiatives:

• National memorial for the mountains — audio and video clips of communities affected by mountaintop removal
• Used online maps to document all ~470 mountains that had been destroyed. Asked people to contribute stories about destruction. Took best 22, called them featured mountains.
• Sprout widgets embedded with those videos and custom RSS feeds

Spread the word initiatives:

• ‘Forward Track Map’ — tool for tracking someone’s impact in campaign: On a map, you see bubbles representing each person who you successfully referred to sign a pledge to spread the word; you see how many people those people got to sign, and so on, up to 5 degrees of separation.
• Similar to the above, bloggers who sign up can see the nationwide impact of their posts about the issue
• ‘Contact your rep’ to prod them to co-sponsor legislation against mountaintop removal
• Embeddable badges

Google map-powered initiatives:

• My Connection: Put in your zipcode, see a Google map of how your locality is connected to a power plant fed by coal mined from Appalachian mountains.
• Created Google Maps layers (KML files) that show mountain areas before and after their destruction — and overlayed familiar elements like skyscrapers and the Golden Gate bridge to give people a sense of the massive scale of the destruction.
• Google used the layers to demonstrate the power of user-generated layers (KML files).

Cost of campaign:

Initial launch: 80K for design, tech issues (not including staff time, 3-4 staffers working part time)

Result: the Clean Water Protection Act (which would limit mountaintop removal) has 140 sponsors in the U.S. House. 150 is usually a tipping point — which would trigger action in the Senate, and then, on to the president’s desk.