load-bearing knowledge...
stories without short cuts.
The upstream hard truths about climate science are easy to ignore. We live in the here and now and experience powerful images of polar bears drifting aimlessly on blocks of ice, forest fires burning, floods wiping away villages and towns…our insect populations dwindling, a true harbinger of environmental collapse.
Data visualizations zoom into our areas of interest and expertise — but rarely include the upstream contextual understanding.
I might also suggest that dialectical thinking isn’t exactly our super power. AI is the answer to everything and simultaneously a toxic drain on finite planetary resources. We are divided in the direction we are willing to look.
In the same vein, “yay capitalism” runs counter with wealth inequality, poverty and most recently geopolitics threatening the U.S. constitution and our relatively brief experience as a democracy.
Look away if you must but the fuel «ahem» fueling our unmitigated growth is also killing us.
Open datasets provide access to bigger stories. Looking upstream can build a more factually complete story. Data visualization is great but we are the ones selecting the frames and deciding what to include or exclude. In addition to the maps we create not being the territory, our graphics are more like a still life than a treatise on a specific topic.
Often, once we remember our role, we can zoom out a bit and add narrative or start to ask bigger questions.
I will admit it is quite compelling to focus on the symptoms of our crisis, like your brain contains the equivalence of a plastic spoon in microplastic toxicity, but the less sexy questions are often not included when we zoom in…
The Direct Drivers of Recent Global Anthropogenic Biodiversity Loss
It remains impossible to distill the implications of the U.S. and Israeli military offensive against Iran and how that will impact the wider planet without looking at oil and the Strait of Hormuz. This triangle contains more than half of the remaining oil in the world — buried under sand but still a crucial geopolitical flashpoint.
These are a few flashes of the complexity of the modern world and how we must learn to hold tension in narratives. Geospatial scientists are uniquely empowered to look beyond data and practice elevating spatial awareness and place into our stories.
This post is more like a photo dump but it was generated from the work I am pursuing for a few talks on my schedule. I guess a brain dump but I like to write a bit about thoughts to catalog for easy retrieval down the road…
Hopefully bits are interesting…
I will admit. I don’t build conversations with powerpoint or easy associations between climate science and dramatic evidence of the current era. I prefer to punch upstream and find out how and why we got where we were headed.
My afternoon began with selected readings from Thorstein Veblen to better understand "shareholder corporations as an apparatus for colonizing time” -- the scale of encumbering the future including not only fiscal pledges far into the future but also the finite planetary resources not tallied in anyone’s balance sheet.
Listen. I would like nothing better than to hold hands singing kumbaya and designing a picture of climate resilience that would answer all of our questions.
Unfortunately we are distracted by the messaging.