GOOGLE EARTH: SANTA CRUZ LOGGING

Google Earth view of proposed logging area (coloured red) in the Santa Cruz Mountains by Rebecca Moore, who lives in the area and prepared this presentation. She believes Google Earth "has the potential not only to raise people's environmental consciousness but to raise their consciousness of humanity."

'Rebecca Moore is an environmentalist who now works as a software developer who works on Google Earth. She says: "Suddenly ordinary grassroots environmentalists have a tool that up until now only government agencies or commercial interests had. It's leveling the playing field."

'Shortly after Google Earth was released, Moore had a chance to put [the programme] to the test. A company wanted to log in the Santa Cruz Mountains, expecting little interference from the community. "They sent out a one-page map that was just a grainy sketch," says Moore. "It did not convey what was at stake -- it was difficult to decipher and people didn't understand it. So I put together a model in Google Earth. I drew the region and filled in the watershed -- the source of drinking water for over a million people in Silicon Valley. I mapped the whole thing, annotating the whole canyon."

'At a public presentation of more than three hundred residents, Moore "flew" in from outer space to the Santa Cruz Mountains, then turned on the swath of red that represented the proposed logging. "There was a gasp from the audience," she recalls. "It electrified the room."

This sophisticated presentation -- including a low-elevation flyover constructed from Google Earth's imagery that shows individual trees that were going to be cut and dozens of layers of information -- took Moore only a couple of days to put together. And it got results: The logging plan was withdrawn. '

Read full account of this case and others in which Goggle Earth has been used in this manner:
'Green Eyes in the Sky: Desktop satellite tools are changing the way environmentalists work'
by www.dicum.com/list

You can download the model, a fly-through video sequence and the programme Googgle Earth from http://www.mountainresource.org/node/52