At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
SkyTruth is an eight-year-old non-profit that uses satellite and aerial imagery to study landscapes. I’ve been keeping track of the Gulf Disaster with this organization’s state of the art remote sensing capabilities, all of it online and extremely useful. I’ve used SkyTruth’s work before in tracking big spills, and other disasters. Check it out. — Keith Schneider
The University of Michigan Center for Sustainability Systems just posted this very good online interactive primer on how we use resources. This is a clear and concise check on our excessive use of resources, and a strong way to get kids engaged. It’s also a keen deployment of design and online interactivity. Nice work Michigan.  Â
Since the day back in 1981, when Inquiry Magazine dispatched me to the mountains of Cherokee County to find out why a popular defoliant was causing so much trouble in the forests and small towns of western North Carolina, I’ve been an environmental reporter. Today, Circle of Blue, where I serve as a senior editor and producer, posted “Reign of Sand,” an online multi-media report on the transition from grass to dust that is occurring …
Late last summer Circle of Blue, a global multi-media journalism project based here in Traverse City, sent a reporting team to Inner Mongolia, China to cover the front lines of the freshwater crisis in Asia. The members included a writer based in South Korea, a photographer from Australia, an artist and grasslands specialist from Beijing, and Eric Daigh, a videographer and multi-media producer from Circle of Blue’s main office in northern Michigan. Circle of Blue’s …
How useful can imagination and multi-media imagery be in helping to explain the risks of global warming? Check out this remarkable interactive map produced by Architecture 2030, the non-profit founded by Ed Mazria, an architect based in New Mexico. Each of the red hot spots identifies a coastal community that would largely disappear in a torrent of tidal flooding caused by the melting ice caps. It’s among the most immediately visual scenarios of a potential national calamity …
[youtube]LDbR-yW8Pf0[/youtube] A long time ago I followed my parents to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and saw for the first time how a television and a phone (so what, say the teenagers who hang around my house) would eventually converge into a new communications appliance that At&T  called a “picturephone.” That was big stuff, though, in those days and it cemented in me a keen curiousity about gadgets and technology.  That was the era of space shots and moon …
 This entry in Mode Shift’s Flip category, which spotlights great online applications of multi-media technology, introduces a brand new mapping tool to help local government officials, utilities, and entrepreneurs identify suitable places to build commercial-scale wind turbines in Michigan. Developed by the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University, and dubbed the Michigan Prospecting Tool by its developers, Charles McKeown and Benjamin Calnin, the online tool provides users an easy and elegant way to find the windiest places in …
 Among the priority hazards of joining capital and technology the way we do in the 21st Century is that it can blow up the ordinary and familiar — a farm, for instance — into shapes and sizes that are extraordinary. That is what’s happening in Michigan and in many other states in animal agriculture. American meat, poultry, and milk, increasingly, are produced on immense sites that have come to be known as “factory farms.” For those who haven’t followed …
The New York Times, my favorite newspaper, today published on its Web site a very useful and remarkably up to date online interactive map and directory of building permits issued by New York City. The building permit feature is a collaboration between New York City, the Times, and Google and represents another vivid display of the Internet’s capacity to store, organize, and disseminate useful land use and economc data in a way never possible previously. I can imagine all …
Mike Moran, a journalist, editor, and multi-media specialist who spent nine years of his career at MSNBC.com, an incubator of great talent and technique in the late 1990s, has been executive editor since August 2005 of CFR.org, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Internet site. CFR.org, one of the best sites in the non-profit universe, is doing a lot of things very well in making the complex world of foreign affairs simpler to understand, easier to access, …