Category:Virtual Reality

SJS / Siterunner:

Back in the early days of what is often seen as the beginnings of the modern environmental movement, Don Perry was one of the very first scientists to invent techniques that enabled him to explore the rainforest canopy. Don's initial canopy web is now described as one of the very first 'zip lines', although in the early days when I collaborated with Don we simply called it "the web", as in the "canopy web". It brought Don up into what we wrote about as the "the real jungle", and the real jungle wasn't a Victorian era picture of English explorers hacking their way through dense African jungles. The jungle was 'up above' most often, a rich tapestry of diversity now described as the richest biospheres on earth.

In the days when Don first ascended into the canopy forests, he was photographing, recording, studying many species that had never before glimpsed by humans as their whole life cycles were in the canopies of the world.

The stories, reports, scientific data and images Don brought together in the course of his work we shared with some of the top media in countries on every continent.

In the 1980s, the work opened eyes and at time Don was compared to Jacques Cousteau in that Cousteau's work made real and vivid life under the ocean and Don Perry's work made life above the jungle/rainforest floor real and vivid.

During those days, we came to realize that in order to protect the forests and biospheres, as part of a larger call to protect connected earth systems of life, we should bring people into the canopy. It came to be that we were one of a first generation who believed in and created new ways of seeing, not the old world vacationing, but "adventure expeditions".

Welcome to the canopy, go up, ride the web, see and feel, hear and experience yourself what it's like to be alive in the trees.

"Ecotourism" some called it, others called it going back to our human roots in an evolutionary tree. The richness and living diversity of the canopy, essential in an "integral ecology" that seeks to protect our home planet even as the forests fulfill their roles in the carbon cycle, is made much more evident when one has fully experienced what one is protecting. That's how we saw it, that's how we wrote about it.

As a result of their experience, many have experienced "life up above" in the years since and many have returned home to their communities wanting to preserve and save the richest biosphere on earth.

The potential of VR can bring the richness of the canopy environment, and the unique perspective of the wildlife, to the human species

and as a result assist in creating an empathy that changes life as we see

-- SJS / January 2016

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Rainforest_Canopy_Don_Perry

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Ecotourism

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http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Ecotourism