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.