Looking Forward to 2017

Seasons Greetings,

As we look forward to 2017, I hope we will all embrace the magis of caring for the earth. Magis is a term often associated with the Society of Jesus, and it refers to the Jesuit motto, ad majorem Dei gloriam, or, “for the greater glory of God.” Understanding the magis of the earth requires discerning what our land can do for us and for our world. This includes utilizing land to address pressing social and environmental justice issues that are central to the papal encyclical Laudato Si’. GoodLands recently addressed this issue by developing a broader understanding of where Catholic landscapes can do more in the United States. We assessed the green infrastructure value for tens of thousands of Catholic-affiliate properties in the U.S. to help Catholic leadership and communities with environmental planning. This included an analysis of conservation/connectivity values and climate change risks. Goodlands collaborated on this project with a team from Esri, the world’s largest developer of geographic information systems (GIS). This team recently completed the EPA/Esri Nation-Wide Green Infrastructure mapping project. This collaboration is one of a number of truly ground-breaking projects we have recently completed. The information we developed will help communities of faith to better understand and manage their landholdings in the spirit of Laudato Si’s call to care for creation.

Our collaboration with Esri has enabled us to create the largest geodatabase of Catholic information in the world, including the first digital maps of ecclesiastical jurisdictions in history. We have connected these maps to narratives about climate change, health, age, electricity access, language, and poverty. Any other attributes that can be associated with locations on a map can be integrated into the maps we have developed.

In the coming year, we hope to significantly increase funding for our next phase of development, which includes building out a Catholic Enterprise GIS, the Catholic Geographic System, so that the tools and maps we have created can reach the Catholic communities who will benefit from them. The GIS will enable organizations to customize our tools and maps to meet their needs, and will enable data sharing among users if desired in a manner that is respectful of privacy and security needs. Catholic NGOs, religious orders, and dioceses will have access to the resources they need to effectively manage their landholdings, enabling them to carry out their mission-critical work, to better care for the earth, and to potentially realize significant cost savings in the process. If you are interested in donating, learning more, or talking about our work I would be happy and grateful for your support and/or interest. Donations are tax-deductible and will help us to reach the next phase – developing the data infrastructure that will put our tools to work in Catholic communities around the world.

All that we accomplished in our first year was done with an operating budget of $35,000 in direct donations; enormously generous in-kind donations of world-class technology, staff, housing, office space, and the consulting and development services of global leaders in GIS technology; and the volunteer services of a large network of supporters. A significant increase in resources is required to create a permanent infrastructure for Catholic mapping to move forward and to support our mapping and planning work with a communications team from the Vatican. We also need to hire a small, dedicated staff to create and manage these resources. I am confident that we can make any donation go further than you could imagine. GoodLands is not just about making maps – it’s about land that’s verdant and giving for generations to come, it’s about doing everything we can in our power every day to tend the magnificent planet that is our common home.

Understanding precedes action. There are vacant churches and schools on street corners in cities around the world.  We have the largest refugee crisis in history unfolding and millions without homes. There are crumbling monasteries on mountainsides and vast landholdings supporting delicate ecosystems and endangered species, in many cases unknown to those on-site. Critical habitats may be lost to development when religious communities vanish unless thoughtful planning is undertaken in the next few years. Maps allow us to see the connections among communities, resources, peoples, the environment, buildings, and the context in which all of these exist together. Maps are a tool that enables us to scale our planning efforts from the smallest project to worldwide yet locally relevant action. Maps allow us to make a measurable impact. Maps provide us with the understanding required for effective action.

Professionals in environmental conservation, large-scale real estate development, and planning know that maps are invaluable tools for coherent, sustainable, planning of any sort, and we are the only organization focused on using GIS technology to help Catholic communities plan for a better future. There is no way to bring about the vision of Laudato Si’ without maps.

We all have a responsibility to be better stewards of our properties and to plan for a better future with the resources we have. I hope you can support us as we help communities meet their stewardship goals in a way that benefits all of humanity.


Kindly yours,
Molly Burhans

burhansm@goodlandproject.org
Executive Director, Founder
GoodLands

goodlandproject.org
catholicgeo.org

A Mission to Map, Part II

GoodLands executive director, Molly Burhans accounts a recent tip to the Vatican City and Rome where she participated in the Vatican Youth Symposium to discuss solutions to addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the REIL Network, to focus on sustainable strategies for following the calling of Laudato Si’ and addressing deforestation, and day with Esri Italia to talk about maps see how their work is helping earthquake response teams in Italy. Along the way she had the surprise and honor of meeting the His Holiness, Pope Francis!

GoodLands from Redlands, the Mappiest Place on Earth

It is Friday evening and I am sitting in the Applications Prototype Lab (APL) at ESRI’s headquarters right now, approximately 80km west of the Pacific Ocean, 25km south of a roaring brush fire, a brief bike ride to the San Andreas fault, and a few minute walk to the apartment I am staying in on the  good will of others.

I arrived in Redlands just over a week ago, late Thursday around 1:00am after a number of detours due to the Detla Airlines’ systems failure. I settled in the office that day and prepared materials for an all-day planning meeting the next about how we could best use my time here and prepare for our upcoming presentation in Rome. Some of the people who joined in the meeting included team members from this lab, individuals who have helped implement Enterprise GIS’s for various international projects and organizations, and some truly inspiring cartogrphers/app developers who's maps have already changed the world for the better (a good example would be their work mapping the Ebola epidemic with the WHO that helped to contain the disease by targeting resources).

During my two months in Redlands I am working with the Applications Prototype Lab and various professional services to develop apps to demo and share, create a presentation we will share in Rome in December, maps that will be hanging on display during the presentation period in Rome, and additional details about how we can help the Catholic community roll out a GIS hub, and build sustainable internal capacity in the Church and various diocese to leverage mapping for enormous good. We are not only interested in making maps, we are developing the data infrastructure to work with other organizations interested in Catholic mapping in a cohesive and cost-effective enterprise GIS system, and the organization structure to enable #movementbuildingwithmaps through partnership based initiatives and API platforms. I have a decent amount to do, but it is all enjoyable and I am continuing to learn an immense amount each day from my colleagues. Receiving a broad view of these specialized niches in GIS, data governance, and security with the team here who has laid the foundation for various multinational data infrastructures and GIS services is an invaluable experience.

Between May and July I had two months of almost constant travel, and this was my typical rough travel -- bus trips, couchsurfing, moving between relatively unknown places, people, and social strata on faith, a prayer, and intuition; all with a rapidly deteriorating computer (which has been replaced, not a moment too soon, thank God). During that time I forged partnerships and found where to get the data we needed to move forward -- enduring through that quite exhausting phase is now paying off in major ways. This week almost all of the people and organizations I had been running around to and building relationships and partnerships with for the Advocacy and Build Capacity and Inventory levels of the CCSDI have shared their data and our intern, Sasha, completed mapping the entire Western Hemisphere of diocese before I arrived. Sasha is working with the team here to finish up the rest of the world at the moment. We are making basemaps of things that have not been seen or re-examined geographically in hundreds of years, some never - for example, there was no map (that we know of) of Episcopal Conferences, which came into existence after Vatican II, until GoodLands finished ours over a month ago. In an almost fortuitous twist of fate, an Archdiocese backed out of a project at the last minute, which has ended up working for better. The timing is perfect to be here, we are working with pretty much every large Catholic data source out there and it’s coming together; any sooner and it would have been embarrassingly small amount to work with, and any later and with GoodLands limited capacity might have made this all too rushed by December.

Preview, works in process

Just this past week we worked with CARA's  data to make maps showing the ratios of Catholic priests and deacons to Catholics across the United States at the resolution of diocese, measured standard deviations of sister density, and mapped which diocese had the most and least priests in formation in relation to the size of the Catholic population, to name just a few maps. We will attempt to join our maps with a recent Nation-Wide Green Infrastructure mapping project to identify how we relate to a comprehensive green infrastructure system – this map alone could potentially help thousands of Catholic communities across the United States plan for a greener future. I will spare you with the details of all the organizations GoodLands has been working with, but there have been very interesting things learned through this process – one being that lots of of global information about the Catholic Church from the Annuario Pontifico that is in digital from is managed and run by a very devout hobbyist, David Cheney. His entire site is dedicated to the Church and Pope Francis. He has been working on it for 20+ years. It is truly a labor of love and I really hope that our work can help him get the support to maintain and support his operations and perhaps move them to a more sustainable db.

Catholic Geographic Information Systems Center
logo ©GoodLands 2016

I am working with Professional Services on developing a Catholic Geographic Information Systems Center's Hub for geographic services - this organization is just emerging, and it is focused on bringing Catholic Communities together, reducing data collection redundancy, and promoting a collaboration and communication. I am looking more at Caritas Internationalis’ model for humanitarian aid work and thinking about how GoodLands could rework their land-use model to be similar for environmental work - building internal GIS capacity in Diocese and connecting with grassroots efforts already in place. Or maybe even considering that GoodLands is just an environmental mapping initiative / partnership between Catholic organizations already operating successfully all over the world. A few people, including myself, are working on getting all of the major players in Catholic sustainability together to think about this. Where is the GoodLands in this picture? Where do I fit into these two separate, but interconnected and important enterprises that are emerging? The technology side is fascinating and where my most experience and capabilities are, it is a also a tool to help guide urgently needed stewardship and environmental work on a potentially unprecedented global-scale that the Catholic Church can engage in. These enterprises necessitate each other. If the CGISC goes full force ahead I will focus on fitting into some role with the GeoHub HR Model. This whole journey I have been wondering “Are we the Catholic environmental land people or the Catholic map people?” -- these things are mutualistic, I think only time (with some strategy) will tell which side of this I end up more involved with. For the time being, both ideas are important, both are moving forward, the maps showing the path along the way.


Molly Burhans
http://www.goodlandproject.org/

A Mission to Map: Updates from Nairobi and Rome

GoodLands’ executive director, Molly Burhans accounts recent travels to Nairobi, Kenya to speak at the ICT4D conference and Rome, Italy for discussions about the GoodLand Projects’s work with Vatican Leadership. Read more to learn details of these travels.

To learn more visit: http://goodlandproject.org/

Mercy and the 4th Industrial Revolution

When I was a teenager my use of computers revolved around AIM conversations, graphic design and animation, and questioning the curious dominion that felines had over the internet. I grew up around computers. I was the child of a computer scientist, and I am a child of the digital revolution. I am also a Catholic. From this vantage point, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution draws us all further into its midst, topics that appear to need the most illumination not only concern the environment, economics, and technology, but also spirituality. Specifically, mercy seems to be a necessary element of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that ultimately succeeds at lifting up humanity, rather than bogging it down.

I have spent time working with “big data” sets, though I would not consider myself a data analyst, rather, a data artist. I remember the first time I mapped potential conditions within parcel boundaries for over 30K properties and realized that I could export my findings and print envelopes with the names of the parcels’ owners and send them materials. This sort of capability is not the result of exceptional personal intelligence, but rather more efficient and effective database structures, and more open data and information at higher resolutions.

The information we use is packaged as bits, but represents sound bites of real stories from people’s lives—something that is quite easy to forget. With big data it is possible to aggregate and generalize more than ever before. Data allows us jump to helpful assumptions about local conditions, and where to intervene with social services more effectively. We can locate blocks in cities where there have been higher rates of overdoses or domestic violence incidents in the past year, for example. As we act informed by data we must listen to the people behind the data and find solidarity for their conditions, understanding that terms like “overdose” and “domestic violence” are much more than part of a query - they are stories about families being ripped apart and people becoming homeless and hurt that are all too often swept up in our large, fascinating data narratives without respect for the underlying humanity.

Social data and media are creating maps of the emotional, social, medical, and
economic landscapes of all our lives. The news occasionally contains stories about the experiences of today’s teenagers growing up with the internet. What we can learn from these stories is that there are unprecedented opportunities for growth and learning alongside vulnerability to predators and exposure of humiliating error and pain that are only recently possible with more powerful social media networks.

Technology can be used to reach a kid in dire situation and help them learn how to actualize his or her capacity for creativity, innovation and/or leadership through technology outlets that were once never available. However, we encounter the negative side-effects of the “panacea” of technology through stories, such as those about cyberbullying, conspiracy, and sexting. These things are becoming an unfortunate but almost inevitable part of the fabric of technologically immersed youth’s lives. This rough fabric is something those of us hiring people from this forthcoming generation must contend with as we profile potential employees, it is also something that those of us analyzing marketing schemes and social services must contend with, and the only way we can contend with it is mercy, and mercy is also the only way that everyone who has carved errors into the internet and datasets will be capable of moving forward and growing.

The use of any technology that enables a level of deep information collection and profiling must be connected with a population capable of reflecting and understanding information with equal mercy. Pope Francis eloquently spoke of Mercy in his homily on March 17, 2013:

“It is not easy to entrust oneself to God’s mercy, because it is an abyss beyond our comprehension. But we must! … ‘Oh, I am a great sinner!’ ‘All the better! Go to Jesus: He likes you to tell him these things!’ He forgets, He has a very special capacity for forgetting. He forgets, He kisses you, He embraces you and He simply says to you: ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more’” (Jn 8:11).

The Pope says Jesus may forget, but the internet and our datasets do not. I cannot help but think that during this Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy Pope Francis brings a message desperately needed for all of us, regardless of belief, our big data, and a generation that has grown up in a world with regular personal life news coverage streaming to a technology tabloid of social media - broadcasting personal idiosyncrasies, errors and angst. We must embrace the use of technology with our humanity, and with that bring the call to be merciful to the messiness of the new digital realms we are exploring. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has, and is, changing our world forever. One only needs to read the comments section of any article to know that mercy is more necessary than ever.


Molly Burhans has a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.S. in Ecological Design. She grew up in a house full of robots and was taught by Jesuits.
Learn more at: http://goodlandproject.org/

From Fresco to GIS Pro

In this stop-motion .gif GoodLander Molly Burhans evolves friar and geographer Ignazio Danti's fresco map, created in the 1580s in the Vatican's Galleria della Carte Geografiche, into a 3D digital version created in ArcGIS Pro, and then floods it with increased sea level. Cartography practices spanning centuries are merged into one short .gif.

The Catholic Community Spatial Data Infrastructure would benefit many Catholic organizations working in areas beyond environmental protection and community development. For example, it could create the infrastructure needed to digitize and correlate various maps from the Vatican’s museums and archives with maps we make of the modern Church.

For more information visit: goodlandproject.org

Corridors, Highways, and Habitat (Oh My!)

(Right) Wildlife movement around a corridor - in this illustration birds fly along the interior of the corridor, deer munch on plants found on the corridor edge, and a bear meanders across the corridor. (Left) The illustration on the left shows more than one type of corridor. This image illustrates a portion of a network of forest corridors. It also shows a network of a human transportation corridors, or roads. Often times natural corridors are more curvy, while human-built corridors are composed of rigid geometries. These corridors cross each other on the right side of the illustration - below, I touch on how that crossing can work well and how it cannot work well.

“Highways, new plantations, the fencing-off of certain areas, the damming of water sources, and similar developments, crowd out natural habitats and, at times, break them up in such a way that animal populations can no longer migrate or roam freely. As a result, some species face extinction. Alternatives exist which at least lessen the impact of these projects, like the creation of biological corridors, but few countries demonstrate such concern and foresight."

-Pope Francis I, Laudato Si', par. 35

The biological corridor Pope Francis is discussing is simply a linear strip of habitat that differs from the land on either side of it. An animal's habitat is an area with the necessary conditions to support its survival. My habitat is where I live, and it can be described by what and who enters and leaves that space regularly and provides something necessary for me to function in that space. I have a daily range of motion that is included in that habitat, and, on occasion, I go beyond that daily range. However, there are places on this earth I simply cannot, nature willing, go to and thrive—like the bottom of the Mariana Trench or the inside of Mt. St. Helens. I tend to avoid those places. Animals in the wild are much the same - they live in areas defined by the habitat requirements of their species, and each species has a certain set of requirements for an area to be considered suitable habitat. Some species are more sensitive than others and they can rarely exist outside their habitat without pressing mortal danger, like some arboreal bird species. Some species are "multihabitat," and they are fine meandering through the landscape, whether in a field or a forest.

 

Wildlife corridor movement

Land bridge in NJ, USA. wikipedia.org, user: Doug Kerr

Corridors serve three primary functions. They provide a conduit for organisms and other non-living things (such as soil particles), they provide habitat for creatures and other life forms that live within them and along their edges, and they create a barrier or filter for anything in an area that is moving towards the corridor at an oblique or perpendicular angle, like the bear to the right. A corridor of high-quality habitat that is contiguous is ideal for the connection, dispersal, and migration of species populations, and it is vital for those species that are not "multihabitat." The continuity of corridors is often broken up by “Highways, new plantations, the fencing-off of certain areas, the damming of water sources…” to quote the Pope. In the United States, every day, 1,000,000 vertebrates traversing across the landscape are hit by cars (Forman). This incredibly large number is indicative of a serious problem of habitat fragmentation. Vulnerable animal populations attempting to obtain resources missing from their current habitat, to migrate, or to reach other populations of the same species in a fragmented landscape are more likely to meet a fatal end. It is not realistic to propose getting rid of all roads and vehicular transportation, but design solutions, such as wildlife underpasses and bridges, can make a significant difference in the survival of these creatures.

Church lands could be assessed for their spatial relationship to various corridors using mapping analysis. Where there is a lack of continuity, perhaps the land could serve as an auxiliary patch. This is why a major focus of the Good Land Project is to create a map of church properties, which will reveal ways that the land could do much more for the environment - and it may also reveal where land is already playing a critical role in the landscape and may be, at the least, helps increase the connectivity of a vital corridor by providing a habitat patch. Existing Church lands could be serving as crucial pieces of corridors and should be carefully approached with regard to land-use planning if they are. However, without a comprehensive map of the Church’s properties, we cannot know if this is the case.

Molly Burhans
goodlandproject.org

Sources:

[1] Pope Francis I. “Laudato Si’ - Encyclical Letter, On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Franci I.” Vatican: the Holy See. Vatican Website. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015. Web. July. 2015.

This whole post is heavily influenced by:

[2] Forman, Richard T. T. Land Mosaics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.