Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
GREEN
Guided by the Washington-based NGO Global Forest Watch, an
environmental organization that is part of the World Resources
Institute, and using a Landsat image as a reference, I ordered a
detailed image of a small section of a forest in Cameroon from
Ikonos and became a sort of investigator on their behalf. 54 A
road is visible. First identified by Global Forest Watch in early 2001, the illegal
logging road traverses a not-yet-allocated forest concession area known as UFA
(Unité Forestière d'Aménagement) 10-030. 55 The destruction caused by illegal
logging in the world's few remaining old-growth tropical rain forests has a direct
impact on global biodiversity, climate change, and indigenous people.
For my purposes, this became one of a series of images of vulnerable ecologies,
a cautionary image, displaying what happens at the more sparsely populated other
side of the globalization upon which many of us depend for resources and carbon
absorption. The image has a simple aesthetic—a detailed and undulating green
forest, seen from above, whose beauty is interrupted by a road that looks almost
natural, simply a part of the landscape. But it is new, not natural, and demands
that a viewer ask questions about it.
The image relies on a vast global network in the sky and on the ground. Global
Forest Watch's logo at the time reminded viewers that “the forests are online.”
They worked in physical and digital space simultaneously, using satellites to view
from a distance (the crucial forests are in places that are very difficult to get to)
and eyes on the ground, the local networks that are equally essential for monitor -
ing forests.
For Global Forest Watch, this was the first 1-meter-resolution satellite image
they had used, more than eight hundred times as detailed as the Landsat picture.
They used it in court as evidence of illegal logging. 56 This area did finally become a
legal concession area in 2002 and abides by the rules of sustainable forestry. 57 The
World Resources Institute regularly adds new roads to their forest atlas when they
become visible in satellite imagery. 58
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