It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Google Earth

Los Gatos Creek Canyon, where Moore lives, is the kind of place people move to specifically because they love and care about nature. Secluded houses sit on acres of redwood forest, which is also home to osprey, beavers and even the occasional mountain lion. Hiking trails run up and down the canyon slopes, and neighbors form bonds over communal responsibilities like maintaining the winding roads that lead to their homes. If loggers were going to be removing trees in the area, Moore wanted to know exactly where.

Moore dumped her parcel information into the software and looked for the utility company’s land. The results alarmed her: it was a six-mile swath jutting straight up the canyon, right below private homes, schools and churches. The roads the loggers would take were a mess of hairpin turns. Just recently, a local woman’s car had been crushed after logs had rolled off another logging truck. These are the roads kids use to walk to school, Moore thought. There will be more accidents.

The creek at the base of the canyon provides water for 100,000 people living in the mountains and in nearby Silicon Valley. Soil erosion from the logging would surely degrade water quality, Moore thought, if not gum up the filtration machinery altogether. Plus landslides were already common; the removal of so many trees would certainly precipitate more slides.

A little more digging revealed that the proposal wasn’t even a one-time project. The utility company was seeking an ongoing permit that would allow them to remove redwoods and Douglas fir week in, week out, into perpetuity. It sounded like a bad idea to Moore, and also unnecessary. The proposal purported to be a fire-prevention plan, but from Moore’s point of view, the old-growth trees targeted in the plan weren’t a hazard. In the 1980s, for example, it was a stand of old-growth redwoods, with the fire resistance they’d built up over centuries, which had been credited with stopping a raging fire and saving many homes.

Moore soon learned she wasn’t the only one in the canyon worried about the proposed logging project. A small group of her neighbors were already discussing the proposal’s ramifications and exploring ways to fight it. Normally, community activists face an uphill battle in soliciting support for their causes. And in this case, the group, who adopted the name Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging (NAIL), was told to expect defeat. The utility company was a pro at these kinds of battles, they were told, and the regulatory agencies usually approved these types of requests.

But in this particular David and Goliath showdown, the little guy had a secret weapon. Moore realized she could use Google Earth to take canyon residents on the equivalent of an aerial tour of the proposed logging site, helping them to understand the various risks of running such an operation so close to their homes and communities. Over the course of a weekend, Moore marked up the images in Google Earth, coloring in the land where the logging would take place, and inserting labels to denote well-known landmarks, like schools and playgrounds.

Moore unveiled her work at a community meeting in front of 300 neighbors who so tightly packed the room that some had to stand outside and watch through the windows. She began her tour in outer space with a view of the Earth floating in inky blackness. Then, Moore zoomed in on the planet, like the pilot of a spaceship. The United States came into view, then the West Coast, then the Bay Area, until Moore finally flew to the base of Silicon Valley. The image pivoted toward the local reservoir and then started flying up the canyon.

At first the audience was quiet. But as soon as Moore began to guide the room through the canyon they all knew, people started leaning forward. Real images of the actual trees, roads and buildings in their community popped up. The logging area was marked in a translucent red, clearly bumping up right next to the roads, homes and businesses where audience members lived and played. Using Google Earth’s ruler tool, Moore showed them exactly how far logging would take place from their houses and communities. She showed them the locations of proposed helicopter landing pads for logs that couldn’t be removed by truck and demonstrated how closely timber-laden choppers might pass the local day care center and schools.

“Within 10 minutes of looking at the flyover, people were saying, ‘We can’t have this. This has to stop. We have to get active,’” says Terry Clark, a Los Gatos Creek neighbor and a member of the NAIL steering committee.

“I thought I was well-informed... but I nearly fell off my chair when I had a good look at [the] Google Earth presentation of the logging zone,” resident Lisa Sgarlato wrote to a local magazine after the meeting. “This three-dimensional presentation gave an amazing topographic bird’s eye view of how invasive the logging will be.”

Soon Moore was schlepping her presentation to more community meetings as well as to sit-downs with local politicians. Area news organizations clamored for tape of the flyover to run in primetime. The area’s state assembly member had been planning to travel to the land to take a look for himself. But the flyover gave him the tour he needed and confirmed his opposition to the project. Local papers wrote editorials against the logging plan. Even former Vice President and uber-environmentalist Al Gore signed NAIL’s petition and issued a statement against the plan after seeing the flyover on a visit to Google.

“We didn’t even have to try to convince people,” says Clark, who had struggled with more conventional means of persuasion on previous neighborhood campaigns. “We just put [on the visualization], and they would automatically respond, ‘Oh yes, this has to stop.’”