Envisioning Solutions

Late last year, after numerous meetings and agency reviews, the utility company’s permit request was denied. Ultimately, the ruling was made on the basis that the utility company owned too much land to qualify for the type of permit it was seeking. But organizers and supporters alike say the ability to provide an aerial tour of the impacted area played an essential role in keeping the plan in the spotlight and organizing community opposition.

“For policymakers or environmental activists, this kind of tool that allows you to accurately fly over a site is extremely useful,” says the area’s state assembly member, Ira Ruskin. “It obviates the need for a more arduous way of taking a look at things.”

Following media coverage, environmental groups started contacting Moore to learn how they could use Google Earth for their own campaigns. At Google, Moore started setting up in-house programs to help non-profits. As demand continued to grow, the company began to realize there was an enormous opportunity to help organizations illustrate and advocate for their causes. In 2007, the company set up a new unit, Google Earth Outreach, to do just that — and tapped Moore to lead it.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington has used Google Earth to disseminate information about what some are calling genocide in Darfur. Google Earth users can fly in on villages that have been destroyed and learn more about how many people have been displaced. An east coast non-profit has successfully used the tool to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia and to generate support for a clean water bill in Congress. UNESCO has used it to call attention to endangered world heritage sites. And over the summer, Moore and a Google Earth Outreach team flew to South America to teach an indigenous Amazonian tribe how to use the tool’s satellite images to spot illegal logging and mining activity on their land.

The tool can be used to envision potential solutions as well as to identify problems, Moore says. The Appalachia group, for example, used Google Earth to envision a future where mountaintops were covered with wind turbines, and to show how a renewable energy source like wind could produce far more energy over time than the finite amount of underlying coal.

The work has become a personal mission for Moore, whose environmental leanings germinated during childhood summers spent gamboling on her grandfather’s property in upstate New York. “I want to work on making this tool available to everyone so they can use it to strengthen their communities and protect their environments,” she says.

A strengthened community was just one by-product of the NAIL campaign. Previously, Los Gatos Creek Canyon residents had identified primarily with the specific neighborhood in which they lived. The flyover showed how all the neighborhoods were connected. “Google Earth made it possible for everyone to see what a close-knit community we are,” Clark says. “It bound people together.”

E.B. Boyd is a journalist based in San Francisco who, yes, has used Google Earth to look at satellite pictures of her home.