In an effort to catch environmental violators with their pants down, a deep-pocketed environmentalist armed with a digital camera and a helicopter is snapping photos of every inch of California’s 1,100-mile coast and posting them on the Internet. The two-week-old website will eventually contain about 13,000 images, all taken in 2002 by Ken Adelman with the help of his wife, Gabrielle, a helicopter pilot. Since the website went live, the Sierra Club’s Mark Massara has been on the phone daily with state officials, pointing out property owners’ abuses of state law. Environmental author and California resident Paul Hawken says Adelman’s project is a harbinger of a new kind of high-tech environmental activism. Property-rights defenders, on the other hand, worry that the photos will encourage desktop “bounty hunting” for land-use violators.
