Computers, Society, and Nature

My pal Dave Tulloch delves into the potential of empowerment and greater participation through online mapping.

He also points to the February 2006 cover article in the journal Nature, Mapping for the Masses.

Online mapping is the current killer app. What Dave and Nature leave out, probably because of space limitations, is the concurrent need for physical participation. We’ll have many new virtual tools to allow us to create individual empowerment (of course, it may be the appearance of empowerment). But it also can isolate us from members of our own geographic communities. That’s no substitute for the power of the group when it derives from people getting together in the same physical place to work out their differences and come to shared solutions.

This time from the UK:

Helveta Ltd, a UK company, has developed an innovative software application called CIEarth, which is designed to enable accurate forest inventory and community resource mapping. The software is loaded onto a ruggedised handheld computer, data points are recorded via the touch-sensitive computer screen and the position of each data point is mapped according to its GPS location.

Appalachian Voices uses Google Earth to highlight the destruction of its mountain tops.

The first time I flew over southern West Virginia and saw mountaintop removal coal mining from the air, I knew that if everyone could see what I had seen—mountain after mountain blown up and then dumped into streams in the neighboring valleys—they would think twice about where their electricity came from the next time they flipped a light switch.

That’s why we at Appalachian Voices, and our partner groups, created the National Memorial for the Mountains, using Google Earth to tell the stories of more than 470 mountains that have been lost, as the centerpiece of our website www.iLoveMountains.org. We never imagined that those stories would now be available to over 200 million people as part of the latest release of featured content in Google Earth.

Mongabay, a conservation and environmental news aggregator, reports on the efforts of the Amazon Conservation Team to assist Amazon natives in using Google Earth and global positioning systems (GPS) to protect the rainforest.

This is my favourite part.

“Indians log on to Google Earth and study images, inch by inch, looking to see where new gold mines are popping up or where invasions are occurring. With the newly updated, high-resolution images of the region, they can see river discoloration which could be the product of sedimentation and pollution from a nearby mine. They are able to use these images to find the smallest gold mine.”

Once the Indians pinpoint suspect areas using Google Earth, they note the coordinates, then go on foot patrol to investigate further or mark the spot for future airplane flyovers, where five to six Indians go up with government officials to scout for illegal incursions. Van Roosmalen says that without the aid of satellite imagery, flyovers can be of limited effectiveness due to the extent of the forest.

Of course, the satellite images can aid in further destruction of the rainforest and marginalization of indigenous peoples, even as the images and technologies aid preservation. There are many caveats — see

Robert Rundstrom 1991 Mapping, Postmodernism, Indigenous People and the Changing Direction of North American Cartography. Cartographica 28(2): 1-12.

Robert Rundstrom 1995 GIS, Indigenous Peoples, and Epistemological Diversity. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 22(1): 45-57.

Nonetheless, there’s ample evidence that advanced spatial technologies are increasingly becoming an appropriate technology to counter the mining companies, preserve habitat and a community’s way of life, advocate for land claims, allow native people to make maps using their own symbols, and enable and values to be transmitted from generation to generation. GIS, GPS and RS (remote sensing) are becoming the “killer app” for the rest of the world too.