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.
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 in Inner Mongolia. Take a look.
“Reign of Sand” represents the leading edge of global environmental journalism. It’s not only that the package joins traditional narrative reporting with superb multi-media story telling. It’s also that this ambitious journalism was produced by an independent news organization based in Traverse City, Michigan.
As environmental reporting and most other important journalism is gradually pushed out of the newspapers and television reports of America’s mainstream news business, it is flourishing in independent news organizations, among them Circle of Blue.
“Reign of Sand” achieves the highest standards of probing original reporting and exceptional multi-media presentation. Frankly the reporting is as solid as anything produced by the New York Times, the pictures achieve the same striking quality as National Geographic, and the interactive map and video are simply superb.
For this old salt, the posting of “Reign of Sand” is an exciting moment in a long and productive career in writing about the competition between man and nature. Over the years I’ve reported and published in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sacramento Bee, International Herald Tribune, 60 Minutes, NPR, Esquire, and Outside. And I’ve reported for those out of the mainstream — In These Times, Sierra, Amicus Journal, E Magazine, Mother Jones, Oceans, Grist.
During all that time I made it a practice to keep my feet firmly set in both camps, and to keep pace with new technology and dissemination practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I wore out a Smith Corona electric typewriter just in time to buy one of the first IBM PCs in 1983, a system with a Volkswriter word processing program and a Xerox daisy wheel printer that set me back $6,000. I borrowed two-thirds of it from my Dad.
At that time I founded and edited two independent news services — SC Featured in Charleston, S.C., and NewsWest in Sacramento. I syndicated articles in national publications, along with black and white pictures. I sent my work in big yellow envelopes through the mail. When I wrote for the Times as a stringer, I read the copy into a recording machine in New York.
When I joined the Times in 1985 we used Radio Shack TRS 80 computers that showed three lines of type in a narrow window. The machine came with two black rubber cups, which you had to squeeze onto either end of a telephone receiver. Sending a file involved finding a pay phone with a good signal, dialing up New York’s computer, waiting for the high-pitched computer squeal, punching a key or two on the Trash 80, and hoping the connection would hold long enough to send the whole file. Often it didn’t. But it was easier than reading into a recording machine.
By the time the Web made its presence felt in the mid-1990s I’d jumped out of the mainstream and into the new media of the Michigan Land Use Institute, managing a team of journalists who broke stories and framed the environmental story in this state not as a litany of toxic assaults but as a story of opportunity and economic competitiveness. The Institute gradually discarded much of its expensive print reporting and posted most of its work on our own online news services, email alerts programs, and a Web site that eventually attracted nearly 200,000 visitors a month.
Circle of Blue advances and improves that model, applying great reporting and multi-media story telling to global environmental issues, and doing it in a way that is both fresh and absorbing. The reporting was undertaken by a writer based in South Korea, a photographer from Malaysia, and a videographer and editor from Traverse City.
The story the Circle of Blue team brought back from Inner Mongolia has global significance. The tools the organization used to produce and disseminate it sets a new standard for environmental reporting. For a writer who once earned his keep with an electric typewriter and postage stamps it’s both amazing and a ton of fun.
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 strategy is to merge great independent reporting with the new online multi-media production and dissemination tools to elevate freshwater scarcity to a global priority. The project is the inspiration of Carl and Eileen Ganter, multi-media journalists who live in Traverse City and covered the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. They returned with the idea of doing what no mainstream media organization wanted to do: invest in producing great reporting and images to galvanize public attention around an emerging global environmental, cultural, and political crisis.
Circle of Blue is finishing its “Reign of Sand” multi-media report from Inner Mongolia, which includes more video, articles, photographs, and an interactive motion graphic map. This video is a taste of the great work to come from this online journalism project.
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 I’ve seen.
Achitecture 2030′s terrific work also includes examples of expert messaging that adorn almost every section of its first-rate Web site. The call to action surrounds a single essential assertion: America doesn’t need and shouldn’t even think about building one more coal-fired power plant.
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That also is a message that the world’s climate change scientists and activists need to carry to Bali, where the 11-day United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change got started today.
More quickly than many advocates of clean energy ever imagined, the idea of halting every new power plant proposal is gaining mainstream acceptance in the United States. The only comparable example in American environmentalism of citizens and scientists coalescing so quickly around a big idea to ban an industrial technology occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s with the global pact to end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. It still took more than a decade to ratify the first nuclear test ban treaty in the early 1960s.
Who knows how long it will take to convince Americans that coal-powered plants are a fundamental hazard to themselves and their children. But the path to a national ban is now slowly being strewn with cancelled plants. Kansas halted a new plant in October. An Idaho utility in November abandoned its plan to build a plant. In 2004, citizens in Manistee, Michigan halted a proposal to build a coal-fired plant along the shore of Lake Michigan.
In each case, the idea of turning aside a bad idea began with one person deciding to make a difference. That is certainly the case with Ed Mazria, who became interested in energy efficiency and architecture, and very quickly expanded his vision to include activism to respond to climate change. What’s so hopeful is that online technology, global dissemination tools, interactive multi-media, adept presentation skills, and some cash invested in the right places (great GIS and multi-media, and full page ads in the New York Times) made its possible for one individual to add real value to a necessary conversation.
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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 landings, the introduction of color television, jet travel, push button phones, daisy wheel electric typewriters, central air conditioning, power windows, and six-lane concrete highways.
The other day Eric Daigh, a young multi-media producer and colleague raised in the new era of cell phones, the Internet, Ipods, and broadband showed me a couple of amazing videos of ballons bursting and a man dancing shot that were shot on a Phantom ultra high-speed, high definition video camera manufactured by Vision Research Inc. in Wayne, New Jersey. The camera was introduced earlier this year. Ultra high speed photography, of course, produces ultra slow motion images that are capable of completely changing how we view ordinary events, like water momentarily retaining the complex liquid structure of the rubber balloon that a fist vaporized.
The scientific applications for such technology are well-understood in materials design, defense, soil erosion research, engine performance, emissions studies — anything that requires careful evaluation of movement over time. But it’s keen to see how the technology is applied to art and other pure entertainments associated with seeing the same-old in extraordinary new dimensions.
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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 Michigan. It also gives expert guidance on local factors that would advance wind energy farms – like nearby railroads and highways, and the amount of contiguous open space available in the region — or impediments, like wetlands or sensitive ecosystems that might lie in the way.
Users can view the potential wind sites from the height of an orbiting satellite, taking in the entire expanse of this 37 million acre state, or dive down to see the land use and environmental details of a single township. The prospecting tool , unveiled at a conference that the Land Policy Institute held last week to promote Michigan’s ability to manufacture the components of wind energy systems, provides developers an easy way to scan potential sites for new turbines. It also gives local government officials in Michigan, particularly those along the windy shores of Lake Huron and northern Lake Michigan, new knowledge that is tremendously useful in promoting a clean energy source that has the potential to help revive foundering rural economies.
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 this development, one problem is that confining huge numbers of animals produces quantities of manure that often exceed the levels of raw sewage produced by major cities. A second problem is that neither the federal government nor the states require modern waste water pollution controls. Owners of factory farms, several of them multi-billion dollar food companies, have convinced state legislators they are mere farmers, unable to afford the settling basins, digesters, and filtration equipment that municipalities have used for years to clean their waste water. Instead they generally dump manure into smelly lagoons that inevitably leak and pollute the nearest stream or lake.
In this edition of Flip, Mode Shift’s spotlight of useful applications of Internet technology, we draw your attention to the interactive Factory Farm Map, which details how many factory farms there are in the United States, and does so state by state, county by county, and sector by sector. The map, for example, can show you have many factory dairy farms there are in Barry County, Michigan (3), the number of factory hog farms in Allegan County (38), and how many cattle operations exist in Huron County (13). The Factory Farm Map is a genuine breakthrough in data gathering and presentation for a sector of the agriculture industry that is deserving of the pubic attention it is starting to attract.
My organization, the Michigan Land Use Institute, has been interested in factory farms since our founding in 1995. Patty Cantrell, who wrote “Hog Wars,” a first-of -its-kind report on the subject while working for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center early in her career, brought that expertise to Michigan in 1998 and helped build the statewide campaign to limit the expansion of factory farms. Three years ago, Stephanie Rudolph, an intern from Haverford College then and now a graduate fellow at the Institute, reported on the worst of all factory farm polluters in Michigan, the Vreba-Hoff dairy farms of Hillsdale County. In 2004, Governor Jennifer M. Granholm’s administration brought sanctions against the farm that have curtailed pollution.
The Factory Farm Map was produced by Food and Water Watch, a non-profit healthy food organization founded last year in Washington. The New York Times this morning noted the map’s contribution to the public interest in an editorial: “It’s important to read this map not as a static record of farm sites or a mere inventory of animals,” the paper said. “It is really a map of overwhelming change and conflict. It raises two of the fundamental questions facing American agriculture. Do we pursue the logic of industrialism to its limits in a biological landscape? And how badly will doing so harm the landscape, the people who live in it and the democracy with which they govern themselves?”
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 sorts of intriguing uses for this data by realtors, builders, homeowners, economic development specialists, marketers and the like. Knowing what’s being built and where is among the most authentic gauges of a community’s well-being. But as a writer and researcher who uses building permit numbers and trends to measure whether development patterns are changing in communities, this new tool is just going to save loads of time and add immeasurably to the quality of my reporting once it’s applied to more places than New York.
Used to be that acquiring building permit information was an exercise in tedium. I once spent hours in the county clerk’s office in Manistee County, Michigan, poring over monthly building permit surveys from every township and municipality. The surveys, on plain white paper, were generally filled in by hand. More recently, regional councils of government collected the county and township building permit data, and published online summaries that provided raw numbers but not locations. Generally the most recent data was months old.
The New York City building permit data is up to date through the end of June, includes summaries of each permit, and is displayed on a map that gives actual locations. I’ve not encountered a more accurate and timely assessment of such a basic measure of economic activity and housing preferences. Neat stuff.
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, and a much more compelling narrative of our time.
One of the more interesting sections of the site is the multi-media section, which presents the richest collection of first-rate multi-media productions I’ve come across on any news and information site managed by a non-profit, and among the best in any realm, mainstream media Web sites — NYTimes.com, Washingtonpost.com — included. The site publishes timelines, photographs, audio, and motion graphics about issues as diverse as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and the conflict in Darfur.
I spoke with Moran today for a piece I’m reporting for the New York Times on multi-media producer Brian Storm, another former MSNBC.com staffer who’s moved on to launch and oversee Mediastorm.org, the hottest independent multi-media production shop in American journalism. Mediastorm produced CFR.org’s first crisis guide on Korea in January, the Darfur piece in April, and is working on another guide to the crisis in the Middle East.
Moran also told me that the new multi-media productions, and several more features including podcasts and complete video of Council meetings and speakers, has helped to drive traffic to CFR.org from 109,000 visitors and just over 400,000 page views a month in May 2005, to 390,000 users and 1.4 million page views in May 2007. Moreover, visitors who used to spend an average of six or seven minutes on the site now typically spend 12 to 14 minutes. More evidence about the power and influence of new story telling tools.