Residents who oppose corporate development plans frequently find it difficult to understand complicated legal notifications and technical maps that unexpectedly arrive in the mail. When a group of landowners in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California got an official notification in 2005 detailing a proposal to chop a sizable area of forest above their homes, they found themselves in precisely that predicament. What transpired became one of the first instances of ordinary people using digital mapping technology to oppose a powerful organisation and alter the course of a local environmental battle.
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