To develop a planetary consciousness, we must overcome anthropocentrism, among other things. This applies to discussions about monitoring technologies as well, which predominantly focus on human life and ignore the fact that these technologies are also used in the realms of other-than-human life, such as in wildlife monitoring and atmospheric surveillance. In their contribution, Lynda Olman and Birgit Schneider explore forest mapping. They deconstruct the metaphor of the zoom and discuss using cartography technologies without perpetuating underlying power structures.
*
A Nicaraguan farmer goes out to his fields to check on the trees he has planted as part of a carbon-credit program, and he finds a European man standing in the middle of his plantation holding a smart phone. The man from Europe doesn’t know enough Spanish to have asked the farmer for permission to be on his land. He just used an app on his phone — provided by the carbon-credit program his employer participates in and powered by the Google Earth engine — to navigate his rental car to the plantation. If he reports that they’re not growing as well as expected, the farmer’s payments from the carbon-credit program will be reduced. This will result in the farmer having to tear out the trees and replant corn to feed his family.
This is a true story, related to us by a colleague who works on sustainability and agriculture in Nicaragua. It illustrates multiple problems, most of which we can’t easily solve. But, we can provide insight into one part of the story – the interactive web-based forest-visualization platform that helped give the European man the idea that he was authorized to trespass on the farmer’s plantation, evaluate his forestry, and impact his livelihood. However, even that small aspect of the problem – the technological tool – is complicated because within 100 kilometers of that plantation, Indigenous activists are using a very similar visualization platform to defend their territorial forests against illegal logging.
So, our question is: is it possible to use these platforms in a way that avoids the first scenario and promotes the second? After researching the premiere forest-visualization platform, Global Forest Watch (GFW) and reporting the results of our analysis in our open-access book, “Global Forest Visualization: From Green Marbles to Storyworlds” (Routledge, 2024), we think the answer is yes. Here, we’ll briefly recap our argument for BG readers.
“Forest monitoring designed for action”
Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an online platform, hosted by the World Resource Institute (WRI), that offers open data on the status of forest landscapes on a global level. Its purpose is “forest monitoring designed for action.” It was founded in 1997 as WRI’s Forest Frontiers Initiative, which published forest atlases of countries such as Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, and Gabon “to support government and civil society actions for effective and equitable land use in that country.” The static atlas became dynamic and interactive when the new online tool was inaugurated in 2011 on the Google Earth engine.
A Mercator world map with Europe at its center serves as the landing page for GFW’s Map function (see image at the top). The navigation dashboard allows users to obtain up-to-date knowledge about forest losses and forest gains, protection areas, forest fires, commodities related to forest changes and climate impacts of forests like carbon losses. From the base map, using the Google Earth Engine Zoom tool, users more closely examine patterns of change in their particular forests of interest and the interaction of those patterns with geopolitical areas such as mining concessions or national parks.
Apparently continuous zooming
Working from the disciplines of media ecology and rhetoric, we recognize zoom tools like the one central to GFW as participating in a process called “glocalization,” which refers to the simultaneous interplay of local and global processes. GFW, via its apparently continuous zoom tool, generates a singular, seemingly completely scalable space that delivers an aesthetically controllable, totalizing representation of the globe. However, ‘zooming’ relates global and local scales not physically or literally but via a metaphor borrowed from cinematography: think of the famous film “Powers of Ten” by Charles and Ray Eames, which creates from a montage of static images the illusion of zooming out from the cells in a hand to our cosmos. Similarly, no single satellite map or view contains all of the information that GFW delivers at each scale/step in the zooming process; rather, multiple maps from diverse sources are interpolated at each step, with data being continually re-processed to adjust the relative pixel size of the thematic maps against the base map (see image below).
Notwithstanding, the metaphor of the cosmic zoom persists in Google-Earth-related visualization platforms, and its persistence has political consequences. As Zachary Horton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, when we use the zoom tool in a platform like GFW, we succumb to a pair of political illusions: first, that as holographic slices of a ‘global forest,’ all forests are functionally interchangeable; second, following a principle that Leon Gurevitch has called “Google Warming,” that we can control these forests (usually in the Global South) from a computer screen (usually in the Global North). This is the politics of zoom in forest management.
One example of zoom politics in action can be found among the non-profit organizations, such as Taking Root, that sell corporations carbon credits produced by a network of tree-planting farmers in the Tropics, primarily Southeast Asia and Central and South America. Client corporations use visualization tools provided by the organization to zoom down into the plots they have ‘bought’ and check on the progress of trees and farmers, as in the Nicaraguan case we introduced above, or in the example below.
Another example can be located in Big Pharma’s predatory ‘bio-prospecting’ of pharmaceutical ingredients in Indigenous forests in Brazil on the grounds that those ingredients – for drugs designed to treat cancer, etc. – belong to the ‘global commons’ and not to any one people group. Licensed in part by a politics of zoom, pharmaceutical companies trespass on Indigenous lands and take forest products without permission.
Empowering forest guardians
Yet, at the same time, platforms like GFW are being successfully used by Indigenous activists and NGOs in forests around the world to stop poachers and illegal loggers as well as to control wildfires that threaten endanger wildlife and heritage groves. The near-real-time alerts provided by the PLANET data layer in GFW, among other sources, enable forest guardians to monitor areas difficult to access by other means, and from a distance that protects them from retaliatory action; they can then call in law enforcement officials or investigate on their own if it’s safe to do so.
We learned this from interviewing people involved in the development of GFW as well as power users from Peru, Cameroon, Indonesia, and Georgia, as we describe in our book in detail. We also observed how users employed the platform in their stewardship work through think-aloud protocols. As a result, we were able to witness how activists worked around and through zoom politics to achieve their environmental justice goals. After analyzing our data, we arrived at the following practical recommendations for both developers and users of systems like GFW who wish to leverage the power of global monitoring platforms without replicating the politics of zoom in their home forests.
The power of global monitoring platforms
First, we recommend that users of global environmental monitoring platforms remain aware that by default, if not actively counteracted with other views, satellite views of forests (and other ecosystems) encourage transnational, neo-colonial solutions to forest management. Thus, we recommend that they be vigilant about data sovereignty on the one hand and make sure that any visualizations of their home forests tell their side of the story using countermaps, storymaps, and other multimedia transformations. We assembled some great examples of these forest ‘storyworlds’ in the book, including the Environmental Justice Atlas, Forensic Architecture, and Ciclos Tíquie projects.
For developers of platforms for global environmental monitoring, we suggested, among other recommendations, that they build in safeguards for client data privacy and make data sharing settings transparent and flexible; that they consider integrating drone GPS and camera data with handheld/field mapping apps and in general focus development on mobile applications; and, that they make it easy to print and export maps, videos, and GIS data in multiple formats (including a dedicated grayscale mode that supports black-and-white printing).
There’s no putting the genie back into the bottle in environmental visualization; we can’t run the timeline, in GFW or any other platform, back to a moment when our home forests and ecosystems weren’t automatically seen as part of a global regime. Nor can we undo the colonial history of mapping that encourages transnational corporations and organizations to think they can intervene in ecosystems halfway around the world. However, we believe it’s possible for makers and users of environmental visualization tools to cultivate a critical self-awareness of participation in the politics of zoom that can lead to a more just application of those tools.