06 November 2008
Google Earth Gives Amazon Tribe Tools to Protect Forest Homeland
Digital maps allow Surui tribe to preserve heritage
Washington — In 2007, a remarkable figure appeared in the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the Internet firm Google: Chief Almir Surui, head of the Surui people in Brazil. His mission was to find out if Google could help his small tribe protect its rain forest homeland, the Sete de Setembro Reserve of some 250,000 hectares in northern Brazil. The area was beleaguered by illegal logging and other threats.
Within a year of his visit, a team from Google Earth Outreach traveled to Brazil for workshops that gave the Surui people and other local tribes the computer skills and sophisticated mapping tools that Almir requested.
“It was Chief Almir's vision to enhance the tribe's cultural and political presence through online communications,” said Google Earth manager Rebecca Moore in a Google blog. “He wants his people to adopt digital images, video, blogs — ways of communicating and collaborating — that will give their youngest members both a foothold in the future and ways to capture and preserve the past.”
FOREST MAPS
Google Earth's free software combines space imagery, digital maps and three-dimensional depictions of terrain and buildings around the world and into space. Google Earth, in essence, lets a computer user swoop down from outer space and explore virtually any location.
Users can add layers of data and annotations to Google Earth base maps. This information is typically accessible through clickable icons that can reveal text, photos, even YouTube videos.
Almir, for example, brought with him an extensive hand-drawn map, produced in partnership with the Amazon Conservation Team of Brazil, that documented the reserve's historical, cultural and natural resources.
This process, known as ethnomapping, was later combined with Google Earth's satellite and digital imagery.
Working together, said Moore, "we can annotate Google Earth with informative markers and photographs that show the Surui villages, hunting grounds, sacred sites and cultural sites, as well as areas where they've found illegal mining and logging."
Such Google Earth data also can validate the Surui's long-term plans for sustainable development through handicrafts, reforestation and renewable use of forest resources.
INFORMATION AND EMPOWERMENT
The Google Earth—Surui partnership provides a vivid example of the positive effect an authoritative combination of data and images can have on an otherwise hidden or obscure conflict.
“We have provided the Surui with the tools to do their own work and decide for themselves what information they want and how to present it,” said Google's Kate Hurowitz, a member of the training team that traveled to Brazil, in an interview with America.gov.
“They can create a cultural map with historical events and battles and show where valuable medicinal plants are grown,” she said. “You can zoom into the Surui reserve with icons that reveal photos or video and tell the story of the land and people who live there. But how and when they publish their story is up to them.”
Google Earth maps and imagery can also monitor the destructive intrusions of illegal loggers, miners and settlers.
“A lot of what's happened today is happening in silence — the fact that their lands are being overrun,” commented Vasco van Roosmalen, head of the Amazon Conservation Team in Brazil. “Google mapping gives indigenous people a tool to tell their own story to the world and to tell it in a positive light,” he said in a recent blog.
GOOGLE OUTREACH
Google Earth Outreach began, in part, as a result of the company’s policy that employees can devote up to 20 percent of their time to any project they are passionate about, according to Hurowitz. One of those employees was Rebecca Moore, now Google Earth Outreach manager, who wanted to find ways of using Google Earth software to help nonprofit and volunteer organizations. (See “Google Aims to Retain Entrepreneurial Spirit as It Grows.”)
For example, Google Earth Outreach is working with the U.S. Holocaust Museum to monitor the plight of refugees in Darfur and helping draw attention to endangered wildlife in cooperation with the Zoological Society of London.
For its innovative training partnership with the Surui people, Google Earth Outreach, nominated by the U.S. Embassy in Brazil, was named one of 11 finalists for the secretary of state's 2008 Award for Corporate Excellence.
For more information, see Award for Corporate Excellence. See Google Earth and Google Earth Outreach Case Studies. Read an online account of the Google team's experiences in Brazil. A short video, entitled “Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops,” traces the history of the Surui people since their first contact with the outside world.
