OGC’s
column for the June, 1997 issue of GIS World
Geoprocessing, Government Sustain Civilization
by Lance McKee
Vice president, corporate communications
OpenGIS Consortium, Inc.
Geodata and geoprocessing are the information infrastructure of physical
infrastructure. Planning, building and maintaining water, sewer and trash
removal systems, roads, airports, dams, harbors, facilities for communication
and energy distribution, soil conservation, forestry management, mineral
exploration, etc. – the physical supports of civilization – depend
increasingly on GIS, remote sensing, automated mapping/facilities management
and Global Positioning System technology.
I was puzzled and disturbed the first time I saw Renaissance paintings depicting
medieval peasants among the overgrown ruins of once-magnificent Roman aqueducts.
How does progress reverse? In The Future of Capitalism, a recent book by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester Thurow,
the author notes, "In the Dark Ages, the public was squeezed out by
the private," and that U.S. public infrastructure spending has been
cut in half in the last two decades. He makes the point that "government
must represent the interests of the future to the present," because
that's not inherently the responsibility or tendency of capitalism.
Two years ago I heard former Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson say, "Business
is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." He might have added "and
of civilization." Economist Thurow writes, "Free markets require
a supportive physical, social, mental, educational and organizational infrastructure." Adam
Smith believed this, too.
One of the beauties of GIS is its facility for analysis and display in the
temporal domain. Never have humans had such a powerful tool for predicting
and planning. This unique capability will help our industry, because a long-range
view militates for investment in physical infrastructure and environmental
protection, key markets for GIS. This will happen on desktops and projection
screens in planning rooms, but it also could happen on TV. Thurow again: "Values
are not, and will not be, inculcated by the family, the Church or other social
institutions .... They are, and will be, inculcated by the electronic and
visual media."
Everyone should be disturbed by this. TV is part of the problem, notorious
for inculcating short attention spans and overconsumption. But electronic
media could be used to popularize dramatic environmental and economic geographic "what-if" animations.
Thurow: "In many cases to spread and accelerate economic development,
infrastructure (transportation, communication, electrification) has to be
built ahead of the market-but that means a long period of time before capitalistic
profits are earned. Capitalists won't, and shouldn't, wait for those profits
to appear. Capitalistic infrastructure can only be built behind, with, or
slightly ahead of the market." The Open GIS Consortium is developing,
with mostly private funds, a standards infrastructure for interoperable geoprocessing,
slightly ahead of the market. In contrast, most physical infrastructure needs
to be publicly funded.
Consider the following:
•
At the same time that large numbers of people are investing an unprecedented
amount of money in businesses, U.S. public infrastructure and infrastructure
investment are declining. The tax code should channel more of this capital
into municipal and other government bonds.
•
Tax systems that demotivate work and investment ought to be replaced with
tax systems that demotivate consumption of nonrenewable resources and pollution
of the environment (see Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce). Full implementation
will require international cooperation, so it's a long-range goal. But it's
essential. (It also will, of course, require geospatial analysis.)
•
Topsoil continues to thin and water tables continue to fall in the United
States and elsewhere. Rainforests are being destroyed by poor people and
cattle companies making good short-term economic optimizations. These and
other environmental tragedies can't be averted without government intervention
and geoprocessing.
•
People leave poor countries to live in rich countries. Part of the solution:
Support environmentally and socially informed infrastructure development
in developing countries.
•
People perceive governments to be inefficient in delivering services, so
they don't want to pay the taxes necessary for infrastructure. Part of the
solution: Improve government efficiency with better-spatially enabled-information
systems.
Geoprocessing and good government are keys to prosperity in the next century.
Sometimes it seems that information technology and a thriving private sector
are making government irrelevant. Indeed, government is in crisis and needs
to adapt to new realities, but if the governed give up on government, civilization's
infrastructure will decay and a bitter New Medievalism surely will settle
upon our children and grandchildren. Few technologies are so inherently civilizing
as geoprocessing, because geoprocessing supports civilization's physical
body as well as the deep historical and broad global perspective of civilized
people.
References
Thurow, L. 1996. The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Shape
Tomorrow's World. 1996. William Morrow & Co., New York.
Hawken, P. 1993. The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability.
HarperBusiness, New York.
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