Green Map World News

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.

We're envisioning a digital archive, made in collaboration with the Green Mapmakers that will share the outcomes, artifacts, media and story of each Green Map project.This Green Map of the Green Map Projects (aka the Map of Maps) will be built on our versatile mapping platform.  Our plan is to open it to the public in summer 2025.  Here's our initial concept sketch of the Map of Maps and two examples of how Green Map projects might appear. There are so reasons and ways to use this archive and share its stories and Green Maps in other formats, too. It will be a tremendous resource, and will complement our print map archives. Please share our backgrounder at bit.ly/GMarchive724     - we welcome your ideas and  support, too!    - if you are new to Green Map, check this out.We have a survey for Green Mapmakers and the first dozen to respond come from Canada, Cuba, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel,  Taiwan, Uganda, UK and US!  100% said they'd consider relicensing their copyrighted work to share.   A few comments: 

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.

As springtime returns to our homebase and hemisphere, our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine, and to all others around the world who are caught up in conflicts that are rooted in fossil foolishness. We have known our continued dependencies generate so many ills, layering injustice and war on top of environmental and public health degradation. Between that and the crushing reality that our planet’s climate is destabilized, our energy choices must be made with our common future in mind.We don't have to drive ourselves to extinction 

Being in Scotland was so important to our organization and network!  Although we wished for better outcomes from the United Nations COP26, we valued being able to meet with a wide range of current and future Green Mapmakers.

It's Climate Month at Green Map, and we're in Scotland! Invited to this bright green country to take part in the TED Countdown conference, our director found that immersion into climate health, climate justice and what’s at stake (everything) quite moving and energizing - get a taste on 30 October, noon - 2 ET.

Depending on local decisions and audiences, Green Maps are often printed on paper. Of course, this impacts trees, and leads to the question, how can we give back? 

This year, our Autumn events are in parallel with the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference known as COP26, to be held in Glasgow Scotland starting 1 November. We'll be in Scotland starting 12 October at the TED Countdown - here is our updated press release! We have added photos to our first report from Cornwall and Scotland

 A unique collaboration between the ICT Department of the Ministry of Education in the Haifa District in Israel throughout the Municipal Education Department of Hadera Israel has resulted in a memorable program involving many of the 4th grade students during spring 2021 with terrific outcomes! It’s been exciting to see Dr. Lea Atzmon, the city's ICT counselor, envision the Hadera Green Map project and bring this place-based education program to life in teamwork with Shelly Harush, director of the elementary school department during the city's 130th anniversary celebration. See the map and video below!