From Conscious Choice: Life on Google Earth

This is a great article about how one woman motivated not just her own community, but is helping a host of activist groups, to change they way people see their world.  Apparently a moving picture is worth a thousand words...

From the article...

At first the audience was quiet. But as soon as Moore began to guide the room through the canyon they all knew, people started leaning forward. Real images of the actual trees, roads and buildings in their community popped up. The logging area was marked in a translucent red, clearly bumping up right next to the roads, homes and businesses where audience members lived and played. Using Google Earth’s ruler tool, Moore showed them exactly how far logging would take place from their houses and communities. She showed them the locations of proposed helicopter landing pads for logs that couldn’t be removed by truck and demonstrated how closely timber-laden choppers might pass the local day care center and schools.

“Within 10 minutes of looking at the flyover, people were saying, ‘We can’t have this. This has to stop. We have to get active,’” says Terry Clark, a Los Gatos Creek neighbor and a member of the NAIL steering committee.

“I thought I was well-informed... but I nearly fell off my chair when I had a good look at [the] Google Earth presentation of the logging zone,” resident Lisa Sgarlato wrote to a local magazine after the meeting. “This three-dimensional presentation gave an amazing topographic bird’s eye view of how invasive the logging will be.”

Click the link above to read the whole article.