We briefly spoke yesterday about the recent launch of the Google Earth Outreach program, through which charities are given professional tools to build information layers upon Google’s virtual globe. What we learn today from a story by Geoffrey Lean, environment editor of The Independent, are particular details of a collaborative effort between Google and an Amazonian tribe, the Surui, in which those living deep inside the world’s largest rainforest have requested that the Web giant surveil the wilderness through up-to-date high-resolution satellite images in order to more effectively combat illegal activity of loggers on the landscape.
Ties between Google and the Surui, whose chief, 34-year-old Almir Narayamoga, “visited the company...to ask it to help monitor the loggers’ incursions” were first established last year. In that time, Google has not only offered the Surui photographic assistance, but will use the Google Earth Outreach initiative to “alert the world” of the ongoing illegal cutting of 600,000 acres of Rondonia forest.