Google for Change in Darfur

April 10, 2007 — -- Can you Google your way to a more compassionate planet?

Google Earth hopes its highly detailed, 3-D satellite images will aid the process in a new effort to utilize the full social and educational potential of its images, which have mostly been used by individuals for personal enjoyment, such as checking out their houses, birth places, or national and international landmarks.

The company is now pairing with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to highlight the crisis in Darfur in graphic detail online, by using Google Earth maps to allow users to zoom in on 1,600 villages destroyed in this conflict, and see the devastation up close.

"The mission of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is to honor the memory of the Holocaust by responding to genocide around the world today," said John Heffernan, director of Genocide Prevention at the USHMM, in an interview with ABC News. "What we are trying to do with this initiative is create a community of the conscious. Our hope is to ignite change, to make people aware as we are faced with this deteriorating situation in Darfur."

In a news conference held in Washington, D.C. this morning, the two groups unveiled this unprecedented online mapping initiative which combines the maps with data and eyewitness testimony about the crisis. The project, titled Crisis in Darfur, is available on both the museum and Google Earth's Web sites, and will enable more than 200 million Google Earth map users worldwide to visualize and better comprehend the genocide currently unfolding in Sudan and eastern Chad.

Users can click on photos that reveal destroyed villages -- highlighting the reality behind daily life in refugee camps, and individuals' struggle to simply survive. There are maps and graphs to chart displaced persons, deaths and illness totals to give individuals a statistical understanding of the scope of this growing crisis. And testimonials, ranging in point of view from Amnesty International officials to eyewitness interviews with refugees, add a personal side to the crisis, bringing a faraway conflict closer to home.