[cross-posted at NancyScola.com]

I've been completely enraptured by Google Earth for about the last day or so. What Google Earth has done to so grab my attention is to partner with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. The idea is to document and display the effects of mass atrocities in their early stages:

Beginning with Darfur, we are building an interactive "global crisis map" that will provide citizens, aid workers and foreign policy professionals with a new tool to share and understand information quickly, to "see the situation", enabling more effective prevention and response.

Google Earth's current release now features a pre-installed Global Awareness layer that not only includes information on Darfur, but also data on World Wildlife Federation projects (screen cap in Flickr) and Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research sites in Tanzania. Particularly cool is a sub-layer showing mountaintop removal sites (another screen cap) in Appalachia, including data on 470 mountains destroyed by coal mining.

Back to Darfur. Enter into Google Earth, fly to Sudan, zoom down to the western part of the country, and click on the Crisis in Darfur icon. An additional layer of more granular content like photos, videos, and testimonials is added to the map.

One thing that's pretty fascinating to me here is that we're dealing with a world that has a pretty poor record of responding to mass atrocities. The Holocaust, Rwanda, now Darfur... the list goes on. As we're seeing in Sudan, our national and international institutions aren't optimized for dealing with these events. But this initiative is truly collaborative, it seems. The U.S. State Department provided information on the 1,600 villages destroyed or damaged in Darfur. UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees) plotted refugee camps in Sudan and Chad. Independent photographers contributed pictures. Amnesty International added testimonials collected from survivors of Janjaweed attacks.

There's something important going on here. I'm not sure what exactly yet, but I think it has to do with scale. Google Earth is a bridge between the intensely local and the intensely global. One of the more salient frustrations of modern life is, I think, that we're intimately familiar with the world and its problems while at the same time feeling like we lack the tools to do anything about them. I'd argue it's why watching the news today is so depressing. We humans aren't really built to understand things globally. We never really had to be before. But there's something about Google Earth that let's you conquer that limitation by freeing you to zoom in, zoom out, fly all over the planet. You inspect one destroyed village after another while at the same time really grasping the fact that they're on the very same ball of Earth as Darfur, Minnesota (where I stumbled when I first typed "Darfur" in the search box.)

Scale is why, I think, the most haunting images I still have in my head from my post-Katrina trip to New Orleans aren't of the remarkable people I met. It's images
like this:

-- the scope of the situation I saw from a Blackhawk helicopter a few hundred feet up off of the ground. That, and what I saw while high while up in the balconies at the Baton Rouge convention center with a sea of beds and people down below me. Images that conquer scale are powerful, as Google found when they rolled back to pre-Katrina data in a recent update to Google Earth. In heeding public demands that New Orleans in Google Earth look like New Orleans looks on Earth today, Google said that they had come to "recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse."

By the way, you'll see Google Earth referred to in news accounts as a "website" or something similar. It's not. It's stand-alone application that you install on your computer. And the basic version is free. It's amazingly fun to play with -- there's something intensely thrilling about sitting in your desk chair and manhandling the universe, or at least our little corner of it. It almost feels like a game. But it's more fun than a game, because it's real.

Darfur | genocide | Google Earth
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