Healthy Planet, the geocharity where you can adopt a national park globally (much like you can adopt a highway in the US) has now gone into a live beta, writes Mark Mulligan of King’s College London:
The Healthy Planet guardian scheme is now online and ready for donors to adopt plots as we work on the next phase of development (projects, voting, feedback, one hectare plots, mapping and communities). A publicity drive will be carried out over the coming months building up towards a major launch at Christmas
The KML for choosing a plot in Google Earth is quite a piece of work, circumventing the lack of an API via the judicious use of network links with radio buttons and view-based refreshes, albeit at the cost of lengthy instructions. It strikes me that the Google Earth browser plugin’s API, due to be fully cross-platform by August, is just the ticket for giving this kind of project the user interface it deserves for broader adoption by non-neogeogeeks.
But… what is this?!?!? Become a remote-sensing land guardian… paying??? Let’s sign to a real environmental protection association instead!! Let’s do waste-recycling! Let’s travel less with our cars! This seems to me like selling “environmental induglences”… Bah!