ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe the process by which digital global maps of forests and climate were ‘glocalized’ by means of Google Earth Engine and the zoom tool. We perform a historical analysis of ‘zooming’ as a metaphor that imported optical, analog illusions of continuity into what is in fact a digital process of substituting static satellite images composed at different scales. We analyze the geopolitics of zooming as one of reading the local as merely a piece of the global, a rhetorical process that allows the importation of transnational, neoliberal processes of forest management to the management of forests, particularly tropical forests in the Global South.
