Re: [plots-organizers] OpenHour Tonight!!
Stevie Lewis
This kite photo was discussed on the Open Hour Energy Call.
Ann Chen wanted to discuss how to document things other than energy infrastructure. Ann raised concerns that explicitly mapping natural resource could speed up destruction of those resources. In this case, the government, perhaps, has already, politically, answered the question "is the destruction caused by the energy project worth it?" and scientific documentation will not aid the decision making process.
This picture is not a map, but a photo of a brand new river. I find that it helps explain the thing that will be lost if the oil and gas company has its way.
Here, the Mississippi River threw off its shackles and created a new distributary. With it's large, muddy fist, it broke through a road. This road is maintained by an oil and gas company. The company wants to build their road back, but doing so will dam this river. I think this picture helps communicate the power of the river, the scale of the river versus the road and that sentiment without giving an explicit location. At the time, this new river was unmapped, and not recorded by US government photography (the USGS surveys that google earth uses). So, perhaps it would be difficult to find. I wasn't concerned with that as much as explaining the contradictory plans that the oil company and the river and river advocates had for this place.
Look how muddy the water in the new river channel is, compared with the water (top right) not in the new channel.
But maybe it doesn't communicate my story. in what ways does this photograph totally fail to communicate the story?
Aerial photography won't always be the right tool to speak truth to powers that be. but it's a broader tool than just mapping. Mapping doesn't have to be aerial photography either, but we didn't discuss that on the call. Mapping can be topological without being topographical, if that makes any sense. Power speaks through geography, though, so often when we are documenting things we are trying to document, in an official way, what local experts experience in the environment.
But sometimes we are merely trying to communicate something, in an evocative way, to search and find allies to help us. Then, perhaps, we need not obsess over trying to speak languages of power, but only to communicate that we are in a place, that we value a place, and the energy project may erase it, you can't erase it from our memory.
During the call, we discussed audio as documentation. of Frogs, who only call at night, for example. I feel that sonic impacts are often overlooked because our (post)modern media are so visually oriented, to the point of obsession.
--On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 6:44 PM, Scott Eustis <eust...@gmail.com> wrote:--On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Stevie Lewis <ste...@publiclab.org> wrote:Don't forget OpenHour tonight! Join us online at 8pm est on the OpenHour page!
--
-Stevie
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Scott Eustis
504 484 9599
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504 484 9599
Public Lab mailing lists are great for discussions, but to get attribution, open source your work, and make it easy for others to find and cite your contributions, register for the website, and describe your work in a research note.
-- Post to this group at plots-or...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe, email plots-organize...@googlegroups.com. Options at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/plots-organizers
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Chris Fastie
Scott,
That’s a really good point that aerial photos don’t have to be made into maps in order to be useful to environmental activists. Any aerial photo can provide a fresh look at a landscape and enlighten people about their surroundings. Oblique photos are usually easier for us to relate to than vertical shots because that’s the way we would look at things if we were up in the air. Most of us enjoy the view from the top of a tower, but many of us get dizzy if we look straight down.
Many of the important aerial maps made by grassroots mappers had an impact not because they were maps but because they were aerial views that offered a unique perspective. Oblique photos of the same scene might have had even more impact. Two of the most cited examples of actionable Public Lab grassroots mapping are your photos of the United Bulk Terminal and the photos of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, both of which are oblique shots.
Ann is worried that the communities she is working with are uncomfortable with new maps being made because they might be intrusively revelatory, and because oil companies made new maps to facilitate planned extraction. I hope this does not discourage Ann from using aerial photography as a documentary tool. The wilderness territory where the Northern Gateway Pipeline is planned is so huge that few of its secrets will be revealed by even a dedicated program of kite or balloon mapping. Aerial photos of a shared landscape can help bring a community together around the goal of conserving, preserving, or protecting that landscape. They can also show the rest of the world something that is worth protecting as well as what it might look like without protection. These photos don’t have to be maps, and everybody will probably get more out of them if they are not maps.
Ann, the camera tray of your Redstone Rig tilts to any angle.
Chris
On Monday, January 5, 2015 10:38:49 PM UTC-5, Scott Eustis wrote:
This kite photo was discussed on the Open Hour Energy Call.
Ann Chen wanted to discuss how to document things other than energy infrastructure. Ann raised concerns that explicitly mapping natural resource could speed up destruction of those resources. In this case, the government, perhaps, has already, politically, answered the question "is the destruction caused by the energy project worth it?" and scientific documentation will not aid the decision making process.
This picture is not a map, but a photo of a brand new river. I find that it helps explain the thing that will be lost if the oil and gas company has its way.
Here, the Mississippi River threw off its shackles and created a new distributary. With it's large, muddy fist, it broke through a road. This road is maintained by an oil and gas company. The company wants to build their road back, but doing so will dam this river. I think this picture helps communicate the power of the river, the scale of the river versus the road and that sentiment without giving an explicit location. At the time, this new river was unmapped, and not recorded by US government photography (the USGS surveys that google earth uses). So, perhaps it would be difficult to find. I wasn't concerned with that as much as explaining the contradictory plans that the oil company and the river and river advocates had for this place.
Look how muddy the water in the new river channel is, compared with the water (top right) not in the new channel.