Interviews Adding Design Capability to GIS
Written by Matt Ball Sunday, 18 May 2008 10:28
The geographic information system software vendor ESRI is the vision and life’s work of Jack Dangermond. V1 editor Matt Ball sat down with Dangermond at the American Planning Association meeting in Las Vegas, where he gave a keynote address on, “Creating Our Future: The Geographic Perspective.” This first segment of a two-part interview deals with the current status of our planet and the role that geographic knowledge and tools play in righting the course.
V1: To start, I’d like to talk about the business environment when you started ESRI. You began the company in 1969, in a time when there was great environmental awareness, particularly with the launch of the Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970. We seem to be in another period of great environmental awareness right now. Will we see greater action on this round?
Dangermond: I guess I’d characterize what happened in the 60s and 70s as an early message of environmental doom and gloom. Smart people could see what was coming, but the evidence of the impact of the human footprint was not easily perceived and communicated. A lot has changed.
Our current awareness of the environment is real, because these trends are starting to be evidenced. While we understood the message of people like Paul Ehrlich, with his book Population Bomb and others, we had trouble understanding what was going to happen. The green revolution in agriculture took away the urgency of world starvation. China kept growing in population, but the technology of fertilizer and insecticide made population less an issue due to agriculture production.
There are two big issues today. With the physical world, the problem is probably best expressed by Al Gore and others as global warming. The other problem that’s probably of greater importance is the collapse of biological systems. It’s affected by global warming, but it’s more closely aligned with human existence, because we’re a part of it.
We see it in our forests with forest dieback and in our oceans with coral dieback. We also see it in our arid areas where fragile species live on the edge. When it gets warmer these species simply blink out. We also see the loss of biological infrastructure.
I think we’re on the edge of a very significant crisis, and at the same time I believe there is hope. People are beginning to become conscious of it, but then they go back to what they were doing before. It’s simply not sustainable.
V1: Is population growth the greatest factor?
Dangermond: Human population is one of the big drivers. Paul Ehrlich tried to get everyone aware of the population explosion and some countries have stabilized and actually gotten better. But the most significant driver for me is human consumption of resources. The issues of resource consumption and carbon emissions have not gotten better. They’re both fundamental issues on how we behave and how we are programmed to behave.
When I was young I had the opportunity to go to China and experienced some of the communications and propaganda that was put out by the Mao Tse-tung government. The message was very directed in small pamphlets that were meant to socialize and train Chinese young people. A lot of those propaganda documents that I looked at rather carefully suggested that good social behavior meant being very conservation oriented.
In one example there was a story of a small boy working in a metal lathe factory. His job was to clean up the metal lathe filings that fell on the floor every night. To be able to do metal lathing they needed oil so that the metal stayed lubricated and didn’t get too hot. The boy took the metal filings and disposed of them.
Of course petroleum oil was a precious commodity in China at the time, so he took those filings and dropped them in a can of water. All the oil came to the top and he put the oil back in the large drum that was the source for the whole factory, but he didn’t tell anyone about it.
When people came to deliver the oil they found that the can was not so empty, it was actually quite full. They became very upset and thought some form of corruption was going on. They came down heavy on the lathe factory operators who then conducted an investigation. During the investigation they discovered what the boy was doing and they made him into a hero for understanding the value of this oil that they had been throwing away.
On my way back to the United States I started thinking in amazement that there was a central government that was working to program society. I had two distinct reactions, first a bad reaction that this behavioral modification was scary, but I also saw that it was a good means of dealing with scarce resources because it changed how people thought and acted.
My thought was that in western civilizations we don’t have this kind of programming, but maybe we do. The message isn’t in little books, it’s in advertising. The advertising engines of Madison Avenue, run largely by global corporations, program us to consume. They program us to behave according to certain patterns.
I realized that everyone has bought into this. People want large corporations to be successful because their retirement funds are invested in them. If company presidents and management don’t do well, they fire them. On the other hand, this pace of quarterly growth, which means we have to program society to buy more and consume more, is integral to our economic fabric. So, we’ve all bought into an economic ecosystem that suggest that we consume more than the counter-societal force to conserve.
It is such a powerful force as we watch television and see messages all the time. We invest and work to consume – bigger houses, bigger cars, more elaborate possessions. The end affect of that is squeezing out the planet’s renewable natural resources. These natural resources are the foundation for what we call capital, they’re nature’s capital.
We’re now spending nature’s capital in a way that isn’t sustainable. Ed Wilson and the Academy of Sciences suggest that we’re now consuming about 1.2 renewable Earths and it’s accelerating. So as we grow population we grow consumption patterns. As India and China become economically capable of consuming more, they will.
We need to fundamentally change the programming of human behavior. How we do that is contrary to the economic programming forces that underlie what Americans and the rest of the world do. This is the heart of the problem and the true crisis.
While we’re becoming more aware of the results of our footprint, we’re not becoming more aware of the fundamental systems that are driving us into oblivion.
V1: Does GIS have a role to play in righting our course?
Dangermond: Behind GIS is geographic science, and the application of geographic science to problem solving is something that I’m calling the geographic approach. It approaches problem solving holistically using all the geographic factors – cultural geography, physical geography – that should be considered when making decisions about the future. With this approach we can answer questions like, what areas should we conserve, what areas can we develop in a sustainable way?
GIS has two big things that it can offer. On the one hand it can offer a greater awareness through understanding what’s going on. At the global and local level, we can see through maps and visual communication the processes of change that are emerging. GIS also has the opportunity to do something about it, to integrate geographic knowledge into the way that we behave, guiding our footprints in such a way that we avoid doing wrong and reinforce the right things.
If we look globally, what are the right things? Especially now, we need to protect those natural areas that are rich in biodiversity that remain in natural parks or conservation areas. Some people have estimated that these biological hot spots represent three to five percent of the land that aren’t yet protected. In order to buy this land and put it in reserves, Ed Wilson suggests that to do this may require us to commit about one percent of GDP.
Another high priority need is to stop ruining the ecosystems in the ocean. Sylvia Earle has made the suggestion that huge draglines are harvesting fish, but also destroying entire ecosystems. It’s important to stop that activity and set up ocean reserves where there’s no harvesting of food so that natural systems can regenerate.
The Nature Conservancy is using GIS to design and discover the top 10% of the special areas that need conservation on a global scale. We need to find the funding in order to set aside these conservation areas. On the local scale, the same conservation by design practices have to occur to apply the same methods to sustain those natural life supporting areas in our communities.
We also need to learn how to conserve energy and use a lot less energy per capita. The price of fuel is one way that this will occur. But we also need to stop emitting carbon, and explore renewable energy solutions. There are vast potentials for solar collectors and harnessing wind to be able to offset our emissions.
We have to figure out through a variety of means how to live differently. From an urban planning perspective, we need to design cities with clustered and higher density development, leaving natural areas alone. We need people to live near where they work in new arrangements of urban lifestyles.
Geographic knowledge and geographic systems can provide a framework for planners to design things more efficiently. GIS has many roles to play at the planning scale to avoid natural areas and create more efficient lifestyles. I’m very interested in this personally, because I think we need to expand GIS to include geographic design capabilities.
This means providing tools for land use planners so that they can leverage geographic information into their workflows. It means providing tools to engineers so that they can bring in geographic knowledge as part of their workflow when they’re doing engineering design. It means bringing geographic knowledge into forest and agricultural planning, into natural resource extraction planning, into transportation planning, into how we select locations for manufacturing and businesses, and into the real-estate development cycle.
This will mean adding design capability to the fundamental toolset so that we actually leverage geographic knowledge – models, processes, data – into the workflows of how people design things.
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