Rebecca Moore Founder & Manager Google Earth Outreach
Andrew Currie: You are putting the most powerful high-tech mapping, visualization, and storytelling tools into the hands of people doing good, who would otherwise not have access to them. Google Earth Outreach is a game changer. How do you think about what you have created?
Rebecca Moore: It’s really a team thing. It’s not a solo thing. More than a billion people have downloaded Google Earth. More than a billion people use Google Maps. They are very comfortable tools for people to explore the planet in high resolution. Most people, originally when Google Earth first came out in 2005, they thought, well, what can I do with it? I can figure out where to go on vacation, or I can look at my neighbor’s backyard from space. But the point is, you can do so much more. What we’ve helped these groups understand is, you can take the whole world on a virtual guided tour of places on the planet that may be under threat. Whether it’s deforestation of the Amazon or elephants being poached in Africa or Appalachian mountains being blown up for coal in a very unsustainable fashion—often these are happening in remote places, and it’s difficult to communicate to the general public, policy makers, and media, what’s at stake, what’s really happening. There’s that statement, “A picture is worth a thousand words”—well, I think flying around in Google Earth is worth a million words. It’s
That’s when Earth Outreach was born—when I thought, rather than emailing everybody back, what if we actually created a site where we gave case studies, tips, tricks, and tutorials? We allowed those nonprofits who had used Google Earth successfully to communicate what they had done. The impact they’ve had. It’s gone viral. How could I not be excited about it? It grew very organically. I feel very fortunate to have been sort of a tiny instigator, using technology for good.
RM: Google is great. Brian McClendon, who’s VP at Google leading all Google Earth and Maps development, and was one of the original inventors of Google Earth. He’s been a fantastic supporter from the very beginning of this idea of “geo for good, maps for good,” as part of Google giving back to the world. He gave me the support to build a team and give training workshops all over the world. It really ramped up when the Appalachian mountaintop removal project came out in 2007 and got a lot of attention. We also worked with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to reveal the genocide that was happening in Darfur, by taking people on a guided tour of all the villages that had been burnt to the ground, that you could see in the high resolution satellite imagery. Groups like Amnesty International annotated Google Earth with stories, photographs, and interviews of people whose lives have been affected. When this came out, it got a huge amount of global attention. In fact, human rights activists used this to galvanize changes by the government of Sudan.
RM: The Halo Trust, which is the oldest land mine eradication organization in the world, are on the ground in some of the most wartorn regions of the planet, where there are old landmines and other kinds of detonating devices, left in the ground after war is over. So this
AC: How is all this paid for?
Clockwise from upper left: Appalachian mountaintop removal - former Cherry Pond Mountain - West Virginia. Crisis In Darfur. Rebecca Moore with Chief Almir Surui. surui cultural map Appalachian voices
amnesty International: Crisis In Darfur
very visceral, it’s extremely concrete. You take an abstract idea, like deforestation of the Amazon, and you make it incredibly concrete. People get quite emotional, and it galvanizes support for the causes that these groups are advocating on behalf of. For me it started very personally, in a small way in my own local community—seeing how just one person, by putting some information in Google Earth over a weekend, could help galvanize opposition to a very poorly conceived logging plan for the redwood forest in my community, and end up actually proving, using Google Earth, that the proposal was illegal. It started there for me. I see it playing out over and over again, for everything from small grassroots organizations all the way up to the United Nations Environment Programme. It’s an incredible tool.
...you can take the whole world on a virtual guided tour of places on the planet that may be under threat. AC: You’re so passionate. Why do you do what you do?
RM: Well, I didn’t start out as an activist. I’m basically a computer science nerd. I love nature and I love my community, and so when there was this very inscrutable public notice that was sent, I took this piece of technology that had just come out, Google Earth, and used it. Very simply used it, and it was so powerful and so effective, and I realized that everyone could do this. In fact, when the word got out— it did get picked up in the media that Google Earth had saved this forest of a thousand acres of redwoods—all these nonprofits started
photo: Andrea Ribeiro (This page and opposite page lower right) 56 ORIGINMAGAZINE.COM
may be in Afghanistan or Angola, and so on. Literally, children cannot safely walk to school across a field without risk of their legs being blown off. The Halo Trust is now using the high resolution imagery with a grant from Google Earth Pro, to give them certain additional features, to plan and manage these landmine eradication programs.
AC: You were much more than a tiny instigator! It is an inspiring story. Google Earth Outreach has projects that are saving lives also, right?
Interview: Andrew Currie. Global Eco Editor.
There’s that statement, “A picture is worth a thousand words”—well, I think flying around in Google Earth is worth a million words.
contacting me. Sierra Club, Greenpeace. From British Columbia to Australia, people were emailing me to say, We thought we might be able to use Google Earth in some way, but seeing what you did—please teach us. How did you do that? How did you bring the data into Google Earth? How did you create the animated flyover of the Los Gatos Creek Canyon? How are you presenting it to politicians? Can you give us advice and tips?
Amazon Conservation team
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