Turning global consciousness into global conscience

Michael Graham is leveraging a virtual globe to change the real world.

He is at the forefront of collaborative efforts to build a worldwide community of conscience that speaks and acts against genocide and other atrocities. The goal: stop genocide now, and forever prevent its recurrence.

A 2006 Lewis & Clark graduate and international affairs major, Graham now coordinates the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative (GPMI). He is also a founding member of BrightEarth, a volunteer project dedicated to harnessing robust content and Internet mapping tools in ways that mobilize people and governments to solve humanitarian problems. Both the work he does now from his base in Washington, D.C., and the projects he led as a student at Lewis & Clark reflect his deep commitment to purposeful activism rooted in knowledge.

Take Crisis in Darfur, GPMI’s first project. Spearheaded by Graham and launched in April 2007 by the museum and Google Earth, the multimedia project combines high-resolution satellite imagery with firsthand accounts to present in vivid and undeniable detail the charred ruins of villages in Darfur, the burnt-out mosques and schools, and the hundreds of thousands of tents forming refugee camps. The experience gives visual and personal witness to otherwise overwhelming and indecipherable numbers: more than 300,000 people in Darfur killed and some 2.5 million driven from their homes since 2003, all targeted because of their racial or ethnic identity.

“This initiative tells stories in new ways in the context of place. It invests people with knowledge and specifics, so that Darfur is no longer a nebulous, nonexistent place,” says Graham. “As genocide prevention scholar Matt Levinger says, it helps force leaders out of the twilight of indecision. This is another tool in the arsenal for educators, activists, and decision makers to use when marshalling public voice and political will.”

Witness Crisis in Darfur at http://www.ushmm. org/googleearth. There’s nothing virtual about this reality.