That afternoon I was thinking about Datu's question, and reading about how people had been buying virtual land in the 'metaverse' and I thought how it would be much more useful if they would do something useful with the money instead - like helping to save irreplaceable tribal lands in the real world!
There needed to be a way to 'virtually' divide the tribal lands up into small squares - so people could donate a small, affordable amount of money very easily and know that it's going to do some good - and go and look at it on Google Earth in the future if they want. At the time, I'd been building a trading system to help boost local economies in Africa and was (and still am) very keen on a service called What3Words, which has divided the whole planet up into 3x3 metre squares, and each square has a three word name - perfect!
I got in touch with the kind people at What3Words and they were, and are, very happy to help by allowing us to use their web tools to build a system with. The only problem was that, these days my brain is better at working out how to get clean water to barren land in Africa and turn it into farmland to grow food, and projects to capture and keep lots of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, rather than coding and building websites so we definitely needed some help with the tricky parts - like mapping..
Thankfully, I wasn't the first person to have such an idea and What3Words sent me a few names of people who have done similar things. Enter the fantastic people at Wild Mosaic, who are working on restoring wildness & biodiversity in a lovely little bit of Wales, and who have agreed to take on the complicated business of handling the mapping and payments side of things. Which is Absolutely Marvellous and a Massive Relief!
We're beginning with a small area - just half a hectare to start with (There's over a hundred hectares of Sacred Forest that needs protecting). I asked Datu for a map of the most precious and most important 5000 square metres of the Sacred Forest and he sent a map of the Ancient Burial Grounds, which have been of great importance to the Higaonon Tribe for many hundreds of years. When that area has got enough donations, more areas will follow until the Sacred Forest is safe.
We hope from our hearts that we can all help the Higaonon People to keep their lands safe from being destroyed by mining and logging, and that enough money will be raised to provide a school and a clinic, with a teacher for the kids and a nurse to heal people, and clean pure drinking water that's not polluted by mining.
We all share the same planet, and it holds all our futures.
Thank You.
Tony Crooks
Group Head of Research & Development
Aotea Global
There needed to be a way to 'virtually' divide the tribal lands up into small squares - so people could donate a small, affordable amount of money very easily and know that it's going to do some good - and go and look at it on Google Earth in the future if they want. At the time, I'd been building a trading system to help boost local economies in Africa and was (and still am) very keen on a service called What3Words, which has divided the whole planet up into 3x3 metre squares, and each square has a three word name - perfect!
I got in touch with the kind people at What3Words and they were, and are, very happy to help by allowing us to use their web tools to build a system with. The only problem was that, these days my brain is better at working out how to get clean water to barren land in Africa and turn it into farmland to grow food, and projects to capture and keep lots of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, rather than coding and building websites so we definitely needed some help with the tricky parts - like mapping..
Thankfully, I wasn't the first person to have such an idea and What3Words sent me a few names of people who have done similar things. Enter the fantastic people at Wild Mosaic, who are working on restoring wildness & biodiversity in a lovely little bit of Wales, and who have agreed to take on the complicated business of handling the mapping and payments side of things. Which is Absolutely Marvellous and a Massive Relief!
We're beginning with a small area - just half a hectare to start with (There's over a hundred hectares of Sacred Forest that needs protecting). I asked Datu for a map of the most precious and most important 5000 square metres of the Sacred Forest and he sent a map of the Ancient Burial Grounds, which have been of great importance to the Higaonon Tribe for many hundreds of years. When that area has got enough donations, more areas will follow until the Sacred Forest is safe.
We hope from our hearts that we can all help the Higaonon People to keep their lands safe from being destroyed by mining and logging, and that enough money will be raised to provide a school and a clinic, with a teacher for the kids and a nurse to heal people, and clean pure drinking water that's not polluted by mining.
We all share the same planet, and it holds all our futures.
Thank You.
Tony Crooks
Group Head of Research & Development
Aotea Global