Green Map World News

April features Earth Day, of course, and hopeful signs of spring. At these stressful times, work grounded in one’s own community can be a balm for your outlook - mapping is a power tool for uncertain times. Giving voice that shapes our common future, it’s now the season for digging in, spurring growth for all.  

Last year, we started to envision a digital archive that would be made in collaboration with the Green Mapmakers that would chart the outcomes, maps and media of each Green Map project. We’ve since come to understand the complexity of that grand vision and decided to start by focusing on the most important element: the impacts, as shared by the Mapmakers.  

Hello to Green Map friends!As 2024 reaches the Winter Solstice, we’re all seeking the light. We know it will be brighter ahead. We also know our work with community mapping is more important than ever, as it helps to ground people to home places and together, reach our full potential in this age of change. Thank you for all you do for our world, and for your support. 

We know that to lead a successful Green Map project, it’s crucial to engage effectively with your audience and community. At the same time, publishing websites and managing digital content can be challenging and costly for small, community-based map projects. That’s why we have launched a set of features that allow you to create a custom Green Map website without needing to code. Using these tools, you can build your website from scratch, on a tight budget, and share your project with your community simply and effectively.

Climate Week 2024 was a great learning experience. The learning started with the Harbor School Marine Affair’s two-week Green Map project - mapping Governors Island’s climate vulnerabilities, its eco-system services and the SDGs.

The SCAPE Water Quality App project is led by Professor Dan Collins and was developed with the help educators, scientists, designers, and programmers at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, the Luminosity Lab at ASU, the Telluride Institute in Telluride, Colorado, the GIS Collective in Berlin, Germany, and the Green Map System in New York.

During the year, New Yorkers are producing vegetables, herbs and fruit all over the city - yes, there could eggs, honey and more!Much of this local produce is grown in community gardens, verdant spots of life that provide abundant social and eco benefits alongside delicious tomatoes, colorful rainbow chard and spicy peppers.

We received two articles from the wonderful team at Society of Wilderness! Mika Shen shares her experience and a team leader, Boylin provides background (and some of the cool products created in Taiwan to support this effort)! We encourage you to download the each of the PDFs and view how images and languages were arranged together in the articles. 

Dundee is a city known for scientific discoveries and design, but thanks to the dedicated team at the Maxwell Centre and the Green Map Platform team, Dundee is also a city where you can discover brilliant opportunities to grow food and improve local biodiversity with ease.

It’s been inspiring to learn more about the Local Place Plan programme in Scotland.  I started hearing about it back in 2021, when I met with Enid Trevett of the Coalfields Regeneration Trust during COP26. Now the law of the land, Local Place Plans are community led and produced. As described in their slideshow, once the Local Place Plan is completed and registered with the local planning authority, these plans have to be taken into account by the local government when reviewing and updating their local development plan. It also has to be taken into consideration when any developer submits a planning application.

As Spring settles in, good news! Our new set of Local Food Icons is ready to use. Just in time for the growing season (in the northern hemisphere), there are 60 icons for Growing, Eating, Enterprise and Specialty local food.

As Spring arrives, we are happy to share that our new set of Local Food Icons is complete and ready to use! Just in time for the growing season (in the northern hemisphere), there are 60 icons for local Growing, Eating, Enterprise and Specialty food sites. 

Recently, a social media post from Jahu Brazil caught our eye.

Above, Wendy Brawer and Neil Howe harvesting lettuce at Salish Coast Elementary Food Production Garden, which goes toward three schools, serving 720 fresh food meals a day!Reflecting on a great week in Victoria BC and Port Townsend WA in October 2023, with thanks to all the people who opened up local circles of learning so that we all benefited. Terrific to see some of places I’ve only known from the map and to meet more of the remarkable people behind these powerful expressions of place. This work has longevity, spanning back 20 years as well as laying the groundwork for the future.

Local Focus: Working on diverse projects around New York City has always been an exciting part of our work at Green Map. Being able to connect with Green Map Board members at the same time makes it especially valuable!

Green Map System has a new outpost in rural Scotland! Dunoon’s POP shop will host a dedicated Green Map desk at their shared workspace starting in May 2023. The desk at this design and social innovation space will be available to Green Mapmakers from the Dunoon region and to visitors with Green Map projects in their own communities.

Green Map takes it to the Wall, with Connections! This great example was created by Mary Hunt, Port Townsend, Washington state - she's the mapmaker at JCCWP.org, a terrific communicator, gardener and plant-based cook. Her story is compelling and we are delighted to share it here!

In March, our director was heading to Mexico. After exciting days and meetings in Mexico City, Wendy connected with a historic anthropology museum in San Cristobal de las Casas (which is in the state of Chiapas) to hold a Green Map workshop. Museo Na Bolom had just opened a terrific exhibition entitled ‘The Map Is Not The Territory’, covering the early years of exploration by outsiders of the Lacandon Jungle and its riches of Mayan Ruins.

We has a terrific workshop on mapping farms and food security on March 24th, 2023. It's the first on this topic. We're planning more since so many communities are working to establish local foodways and production, like the South West Fife Community Food Map being created in 2023 by the Scottish Coalfields Regeneration Trust.

At Green Map we love this time of year, even when it's being wild outside, it's inspring to be out there mapping!  All the images above are from March!

2020, what a year! Despite it all, new mapping projects keep popping up, thanks to your help! Please pitch in on Giving Tuesday and Global Giving will incentivize our work. 

Golden days of autumn! Crisp and cool days energize the team at Green Map and our colleagues around the world. 

In a few weeks, COP27 will be taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Will the people of that country gain as much as the people of Scotland did from hosting the 26th UN conference on Climate Change? So many local efforts were amplified and galvanized that climate has stayed in the forefront. Indeed, the Climate Fringe, which supported the NGOs and side events all around Glasgow in 2021, had the momentum to coordinate the 2022 Climate Fringe Festival in September, and we took part.

World Environment Day 2009 was when the City of Cape Town officially launched their terrific Green Map project – the same day that we launched the Open Green Map website.  The Cape Town Green Map grew out of Green Goal 2010, the award-winning environmental programme of the FIFA World Cup and continues as a legacy project. It was established as a City and private partnership, with Arne Purves being the Project Manager, working with Philip Todres of A&C Maps, whose focus is special interest map guides.