I long thought the killer app for conservation was going to be GIS. And now maybe drones.
It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
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Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time.
It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up.
I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.
IIRC GIS exists in its current form because of the benefit in using it for land management. It's definitely a powerful tool to show climate change etc but unfortunately I think we are past that phase. Most people have made up their mind on the issue - typically along partisan lines. All the maps on the world can't change political belief if people are saturated with media about how it's all a hoax etc.
Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.
> It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
The problem is that data needs to be transformed into a story, in order to communicate anything meaningful.
But as soon as you turn data into a story, you introduce some degree of bias, which inevitably becomes politicized.
The only way around this is there's no way around this. We have to accept the reality that the agenda hawks (on both sides) will continue to polarize issues. Continue to use the tools and data available to us to tell the best stories we can, while understanding that no one story is the truth. All the while, we have to avoid succumbing to the deep polarization being used against us to divide and conquer. We are all in this together.
It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers.
---
Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time.
It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up.
I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.