Google Earth, With BrightEarth Project, Puts Darfur In Close Detail

Google has put together a set of new layers for its Earth utility, a group that everyone should familiarize themselves with. The collection is called Crisis in Darfur. The title alone aptly explains what it’s about.

I’ll give you a brief synopsis anyhow. Essentially, Google’s Crisis in Darfur project, created in partnership with BrightEarth, is an assembly of “high-res satellite images of Darfur…[and text of] first-hand accounts of the genocide currently underway in the region.”

The inhumanity of what is being done to the people Darfur is extraordinary in the worst possible sense of the term, but it’s something those informed of the circumstances - the existing man-made devastation to population and place, and the clear forecast of further destruction - simply cannot ignore without displaying deep immoral ambivalence, and anything any individual or collective can do to bring the statistics “closer to home” in order to influence more and more parties to work to put a stop to the havoc should in fact be done. Now.

Available for viewing in Google’s Crisis in Darfur download are detailed layouts of villages in the western region of Sudan, many of which show to be heavily burned, as well as an array of aerial photographs taken of a number of “massive refugee camps in Eastern Chad.”

According to an article on the project published at Wired.com, Google (and BrightEarth) did not start Crisis in Darfur from the first one and the first zero. Rather, the folks in the Google Earth division worked to consolidate a great wealth of information from different places on the Internet into concise form. Some of the bases of the data now found in layers of Crisis in Darfur are: “the US State Department, Amnesty International, and photographers and journalists working in the region.”