This summer in a book I was reading, I came across a passage from the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges; it goes like this, “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”  I realized we are drawing the lines of our face on the surface of our planet and now we can all see it.

If you’re reading this post you have access to our collective portrait. The free version of Goggle Earth makes it possible to see us from orbit and possible to move in close to take a better look at places of interest. It helps us remember where we’ve been and see who we are and who we are becoming.

I use the view screen options to show me place names, national borders, roads, rivers and railways. In the lower left corner of the screen there is a running readout of the latitude and longitude coordinates for the surface below; in the upper right corner there is a compass; and in the lower right is a display showing my altitude. With these instruments I navigate to an area I want to investigate; after a bit of searching at 10 - 100 miles up I find what I’m looking for and zoom in to see what I can see.

My brother Andy is a master sergeant in the National Guard and he recently finished a year of duty in Iraq with the 42^nd Infantry Division. If you go to latitude 34° 36’ 15” N and longitude 43° 41’ 22” E you can see where he served. There is a bridge that crosses the Tigris River there and a Sadam Hussein palace sits next to the bridge on the banks of the river; this is where he was – FOB Danger (forward operating base Danger).

During summers in Chicago where I live I like to get up early on weekend mornings and go to a place nearby on the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s called Lighthouse Beach; named after an old lighthouse that still stands there looking out over a stretch of trees, dunes, beach and lake; the lighthouse is at 42° 3’ 50” N and 87° 40’ 34” W. Just inland from the beach is a small park on the grounds of an estate now converted to a community arts center; I’ve watched many sun rises on that beach and wandered often among the trees and dunes on the grounds of that estate.

As I was growing up my father worked in the oil business and when I was in the third and fourth grades we lived in Tripoli, Libya. I found the neighborhood in Tripoli where we lived; it’s a lot more built up now than it was then but I recognize the tall, square, concrete water tower and traffic circle at the end of the block; that’s still there. My house was at 32° 52’ 32” N and 13° 7’ 33” E. Dad woke us up on school-days by flipping on the light in our bedroom and singing the reveille song, “I can’t get’em up; I can’t get’em; I can’t get’em up in the morning…” Those mornings Andy and I walked to school and then back home again in the afternoons. We went to the Oil Companies School which is also still there at 32° 52’ 10” N and 13° 7’ 33” E.

I hear about clear cutting of the Amazon rainforests. At latitude 4° 15’ 3” S and longitude 49° 56’ 57” W there is a town called Novo Repartimento at the beginning of a road that runs for a thousand miles west through the rainforest to another town called Itaituba at 4° 16’ 20” S and 55° 59’ 8” W. Running in perpendicular bands along the entire length of that road are thick swaths of cleared land extending some 50 miles north and south of the road; brown and grey squares cut into the green forest. Drift along to the south and west of where that road ends; at 250 miles or so above the earth you see more of this pattern of land clearing; the look of cleared land becomes familiar; you see it all around the southern parts of the Amazon.

There is a top security airbase on an island called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean south of India where strategic bombers are based. From there they can reach spots in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Go to latitude 7° 18’ 48” S and longitude 72° 24’ 57” E and you can see B-52 bombers sitting on the runway; some are in the sunshine; some are in the shadows cast by passing clouds.

Now head north across many miles of ocean to a little group of islands in the middle of nowhere. They circle around a wide lagoon; there is no sign of human habitation except the crumbling remains of a pier at 5° 26’ 52” S and 71° 45’ 32” E. I see green islands edged with white sand beaches; the water is shades of deep blue, aquamarine and turquoise; there are waves breaking on coral reefs; and palm trees cast shadows on the sand offering cool places out of the sun where I could sit and drink pina colladas and listen to the sound of the surf.

These pictures are updated every two to four years and soon they could stream to us in real-time. This technology seems amazing but it’s just the beginning. The consequences of it are both hopeful and scary. I hope it brings us to a realization of our collective inheritance and enables better cooperation for sustainable use of our world’s resources. The scary part is that we can also employ this technology to simply use up the world faster and fight over the dwindling pieces that remain.

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