By jackinthegreen | In

Greetings,

Kit Robinson here (aka: jackinthegreen). And as advertised in Andre’s recent post, I’m the new kid in town who’s beat will be covering online environmental mapping and it’s application in promoting sustainability; a fast-growing trend these days, that’s exploding right along with all things green in general. From here on out, I’ll refer to this trend as green mapping (small g, so as not to be confused with The Green Maps initiative, which I touch upon below).

Before I talk about some current mapping examples, a bit of background..I’ve been an advocate and practitioner of green mapping since those heady early days of the web when I built and ran a community website project in Northern California . The site had the theme of sustainable communities in general, and a focus on the Humboldt Bay Watershed community in particular. It also featured what was then a pretty cutting edge, but - in retrospect - a rather clunky attempt at online green mapping: essentially a clickable satellite image map of the bay’s drainage basin, with linked hot spots highlighting green and not so green locations of interest. In keeping with the bioregionalist philosophy of promoting a sense of place, I regarded that map as the potential killer app. If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, then an interactive map of a place is worth at least as much textual content on the subject, or more. Why preach at people about a pollution source in the headwaters of a local stream when you could show them that site, and in the visual context of all the effected sites and resources downstream? Alas, that web site is long gone, but online green mapping is still with us, growing, and - with the advent of GoogleMaps and it’s ilk - cooler than ever!

Web-based green mapping did not,of course, begin with GoogleMaps, In the years between my Humboldt bay project and Google’s innovative offering, several online mapping tools with an environmental or ecological theme were launched. The EPA’s Enviromapper and the USGS’s GAPServe Maps are two good examples of powerful but information and data dense tools that only a GIS geek or natural resource management wonk could really appreciate. These are real research tools for real science and policy making, and obviously that’s crucial. But I subscribe to the view that if we leave sustainability to the wonks alone, then ultimately were hosed. We need green mapping for the rest of us as well, and the GoogleMaps technology, followed by Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s, and some worthy open source initiatives, made the technology much more accessible and user-friendly for a bandwidth and patience challenged general audience to engage with. 

So, you ask, just what are some good examples of this green mapping for all? Well the current gold standard in my humble opinion is the Green Map (big G) project. It actually began as an initiative to promote the creation of paper (snail?) Green Maps for localities and regions. But before long, online versions like the Dublin Green Map have been added. Now a global project is in the works over there that will allow anyone interested to register and add their own green map locations to a global Green Map central database that can be viewed in the project’s map tool or consumed remotely via a data feed. I’ll be watching this one with interest and reporting back on progress.

Another notable and very cool web-based green map offering is the Sundance Channel’s Ecommunity tool, a customized GoogleMap leveraged as an way to Connect Green enthusiasts from around the world interested in bettering the environment and living a more green lifestyle; think:online mapping meets social networking meets sustainability. .

I’ll be highlighting and opining upon many other green map sites, tools, and even desktop apps. But that is for another day and another post. So keep watching this space for more of my musings and happy green mapping!

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