Keynote Address presented by Jonathan Z. Cannon at the Computing in Environmental Management conference, Raleigh, NC November 30, 1994
I considered whether I should open by tossing around some technical jargon like TCP/IP, ATM, and X Windows. But wisdom prevailed, I hope, and I decided to begin with the parable of the boiled frog told so well by Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
Learning to see slow, gradual processes requires slowing down our frenetic pace and paying attention to the subtle as well as the dramatic. If you sit and look into a tidepool, initially you won't see much of anything going on. However, if you watch long enough, after about ten minutes the tidepool will suddenly come to life. The world of beautiful creatures is always there, but moving a bit too slowly to be seen at first. The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it's as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we can't see anything at 33 1/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.
(From Senge, Peter M., The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1994, 324 pp.; pp. 22-23.)
Now, I don't know whether the frog parable is supported by actual data, and I certainly wouldn't want to try boiling frogs to find out. But Senge's parable is instructive. Perhaps in our human context the boiling force is the lack of compelling, widespread information -- information that forces us to perceive what is happening and take action. Otherwise, it is all too easy to see no evil.
Senge used the parable in the context of corporations' response to change, but we can find all too many boiling frogs in the environment. Consider the story of the ozone hole. Although levels of CFCs had been steadily building in the stratosphere, as predicted by scientists, the ozone hole over the Antarctic was discovered by accident. For some period of time, the ozone levels measured by satellite instrument were so low they were edited out automatically by software as presumed instrument errors. Eventually, researchers found the data were real, and the hole was "discovered." In effect, though, by that time the water was already boiling hot.
Consider the Pacific Northwest. The forests were "gradually" logged until one day the Nation woke up to find that the old growth trees were almost gone, the fish were gone, and many of the jobs were gone. Again, we woke up to find we were in boiling water. We've seen the same pattern with many other fisheries and ecosystems -- Georges Bank, Florida Bay, Chesapeake Bay...
I realize that the growth rate is likely to slow down at some point, and that we may never see an era when literally all Americans are connected to Internet (or its successor). Nevertheless, I believe the day when the great majority of Americans have network access is only several years away.
To offer just one more statistic to suggest the staggering growth of networking: the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the people who brought as the Mosaic software for browsing the Worldwide Web, say that accesses to their webserver home page have been growing by 11% a week! Someone said that the Internet phenomenon is without parallel in history. I think he or she is right.
We know the information superhighway will deliver vast quantities of information about the financial markets, sports, and weather. We'll be bathed in entertainment information and able to shop at home beyond our wildest dreams today.
The condition of the environment fundamentally affects our future, and we directly affect the environment by our actions. Yet how much useful information about the environment will we receive, and how compellingly presented? And will we want to be "told" what the environmental situation is, or will we want to be given facts and enabled to draw our own conclusions?
And yet, polling continues to show that 75 to 80 percent of the American public call themselves environmentalists and express strong support for the environment. It's hard to find anyone who is against a clean environment, just as it's hard to find people opposed to a prosperous economy or good health. So we seem to have broad agreement that we want a healthy environment, but disagreement over the means of achieving that end.
I believe that the public is sending a loud message that they -- us -- we -- want to be treated with respect. Underneath the polarization and propaganda, I think the implicit message is: "Don't tell us what to do. Don't tell us what to think. Respect us; help us; let us draw our own conclusions."
Tropical biologist Dan Janzen tells a story about San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica. Costa Rica has made a national commitment to sustainable development. As part of its commitment, the country is moving towards exclusive use of renewable energy sources for electric power. Recently, however, reduced water flows were affecting hydroelectric power generation, and power demand in San Jose was outstripping supply. The government announced it would impose a system of scheduled, rolling blackouts on the city to match demand to supply. However, before the blackouts were started, power consumption took such a steep drop that the need for the blackouts was obviated. Without even being asked, the people were conserving power so effectively that the supply was able to meet the reduced demand.
This little story suggests a new generation approach to environmental protection: Provide factual information about the problem, and help the public visualize an overall context, perceive indicators, and anticipate and understand consequences.
How greatly the situation had changed by 1980. In that year, Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, preserving almost 100 million acres of land. A key difference across 113 years was that Americans could now visualize "Alaska" and perceive it as a valuable place, with wildlife and natural features worthy of preservation. Of course, Americans also valued Alaska's exploitable natural resources. Thanks to widespread exposure to literature, photographs, movies, and television coverage, Alaska no longer seemed an unknown, worthless place.
Today, for many humans, our biodiversity and ecosystems are like the Seward's folly of the last century -- undeserving of investment or protection. We just don't know very much about the places out there and what they do for us and could do for us.
Once in a while, you may be able to upgrade the station to increase its capacity and permit real growth. But always you must balance demand to available capacity; if you don't, the entire crew could die. The greatest danger of all is the crew member who seeks to destroy part of the life support system, under the delusion that he can profit from such a development activity. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the space station cannot long endure if its crew takes it apart.
A little over twenty years ago came the first references to "Spaceship Earth." The space program, and our first views of a blue earth in black space, provided the insight that our planet truly is a closed system. Astronauts in their spaceships helped us visualize the context of our planetary spaceship. Except for the energy we receive from the Sun, all our other resources are limited to what's on the planet now -- air, water, soil, fossil fuels, ore.
The planet also has finite waste treatment and climate control services. When we look at forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems, today we tend to think of them as places to be "developed" or as places to be preserved. Instead, we need to learn to think of them as industrial plants that provide essential products and services. Consider what happens when 100 acres of farmland and forest is converted into yet another shopping mall -- buildings and paved parking lots -- what support services do we lose? Perhaps we need indicators.
In the financial context, the markets rely on indicators for key parameters such as inflation, employment, ordering and inventory levels, and so forth. The markets rise and fall in reaction to new indicator values, and many of the indicators react to the markets in a complex system of reciprocal feedbacks.
EPA is moving to a "place-based," ecosystem management approach, in which we work in partnership with many others to protect, restore, and manage ecosystems. For this approach to work, we badly need simple, common-sense, usable indicators of the health and status and trends of our ecosystems and places. For example, we need to know past and present land cover and land use, and how they are changing over time. It will be useful to have aggregate statistics about rates of land use change. But it is also important to have the information broken down to local places as well.
Indicators should work to invoke positive feedback processes, so that behavior is affected, hopefully in positive ways. If one observes from the speedometer indicator that one is driving too fast, perhaps one slows down. If our indicators show us we are losing biodiversity and eliminating vital ecosystem services provided by wildlands, perhaps we will modify our activities.
However, today, the biodiversity in our backyards, farms, and forests is much like Alaska in 1867 -- hard to visualize; hard to value. There may be many thousands of species of microorganisms in one handful of dirt from your yard, most of them never described by scientists. Some of those organisms may have vast potential economic value if they are exploited. Dr. Tom Lovejoy of the Smithsonian likes to use the example of Thermus aguaticus, a heat-loving bacterium discovered in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. An enzyme found in the bacterium became the basis of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which is used to amplify and analyze bits of DNA. PCR is already a billion- dollar industry; it even figures in the O.J. Simpson case. A Japanese chemical company uses other bacteria to synthesize acrylamide in a high-yield, low-polluting, highly profitable process. We simply don't know the potential of the vast numbers of organisms that haven't yet been studied.
Today, many of our children are engrossed in video games with titles like "Mortal Kombat" and "Maximum Carnage." Information technology is being used to fuel the obsession with violence. We seem to lack the positive, shared vision to make information about the environment more compelling and pervasive than the violence on television and video games that bombards our children; as "worthwhile" as the weather and finance information smorgasbord; and more involving than the vicarious pleasures of sports coverage that absorb so many millions. We know that biodiversity and ecosystems are inherently of superlative interest, and that our ability to thrive is inextricably bound up in their fate. We need a new level of vision and boldness in using information to help us see when our water's temperature is rising, consider what to do about it, and take action.
In his charming autobiography, Naturalist, recently published, Edward O. Wilson says: "Most children have their bug period. I never grew out of mine." We should take advantage of information technology to help children value nature during their "bug periods." With appropriate software and network connections we can present three- dimensional, moving, interacting organisms that teach lessons about nature but also captivate. In place of "Maximum Carnage," we could have interactive simulations based on real interactions between predator and prey that instruct and involve. We could simulate the rich life of a healthy backyard and the sterility of a yard subjected to excessive chemical treatments. The more we can visualize what we have, and the consequences of losing it, the more we will value it.
Isn't this what we would like to see in our ecosystems? Rather than relying exclusively on command-and-control regulation, penalties for non-compliance, and expensive, after-the-fact mitigation and restoration programs, shouldn't we also seek to empower people to self-regulate and operate sustainably?
Visualization is key to such a strategy for self-regulation for ecosystem protection -- what one might term: "eco- feedback." And many of the techniques, technologies, and tools for data visualization can be applied to eco-feedback. Let me review some ideas about priority areas for using visualization for ecosystems.
Using the coming National Information Infrastructure, I would like to see all Americans, and eventually all citizens of the globe, presented with rich capabilities to visualize ecosystems of interest. Combining remotely-sensed and ground-based monitoring data with spatial, demographic, and biological information, citizens should be able to do "fly- overs, -throughs, and -unders;" zoom in and out; select layers for display and filter data; run animations of time- series data such as land-use change; and so forth. Citizens should be given simple, yet powerful and flexible interfaces that allow them to visualize and interact with information about ecosystems and run simulations of alternative scenarios.
What will the landscape look like under alternative futures, based on different management schemes? What will happen to the biodiversity and ecosystem service levels? Let's use the technology to help us see and to consider what outcomes we want, what consequences we can accept.
Citizens should be empowered to define their own ecosystems, rather than being presented with arbitrary boundaries and instructed that those are the "correct" ecosystems. We all need to know where the political boundaries are and the land-ownerships, the watersheds and the ecoregions according to various authorities, but we should not impose them as the only ways to think about ecosystems. And just as a citizen can follow his own favored stock portfolio, he should be able to follow his own portfolio of ecosystems.
Citizens must also be empowered to visualize the components of ecosystems and the processes associated with ecosystems. This means innovative use of multimedia technologies and virtual reality tools to help citizens explore, learn, and understand. Let a citizen see the inventory of known biota of her place. Let her see what each looks like, how it moves, what it sounds like, what it eats, what eats it, what is its habitat, and so forth.
We'll be enabled to make tremendous progress if we make it possible to foster friendly competitions among towns, counties, states, and nations to gauge who's doing the best jobs of managing their places.
I have spoken elsewhere about the vision for an "Environmental Channel" on the information superhighway -- a two-way, interactive capability to empower citizens to do more to protect the environment. During the short period of time remaining while the fiber cables and wires are being laid, we have a special opportunity to seek to create a vision of using the network to help the environment and bolster our options for ecologically sustainable development.
GLOBE will take advantage of the global network to mobilize thousand of teachers and students in dozens of nations to gather meaningful scientific data about the environment, enter the data, ship it over Internet to a processing center, and receive back processed information products that use their data to tell us something about the environment. Potentially, GLOBE will be a winner for everyone -- the students will learn more about science, scientists will receive more data, and all of us will learn more about our environment.
Researchers like EPA's Mary Kentula and the State of Washington Gap Analysis Project's Karen Dvornich have already demonstrated the power of using local teachers and students to gather ecological monitoring data. With careful preparation, high-quality data can be gathered. The students learn much more about their environment. And the local landowners also learn more about their land, in a context that doesn't threaten them. It is scary when outsiders, pointy-headed bureaucrats, come wanting to study your land. It's different when it's your own sons and daughters.
I think the answer is that we have many different destinations; there is no obvious, unifying point toward which we're all headed. Yet there is much common ground. So let's look for the "Rules of the Road" that will help us drive safely.
We all want a good environment. We all want to be able to get quality, objective, useful information when we need it. We all want reasonable costs and fairness. And we want to avoid getting boiled. If the water begins to heat up, we want to be able to sense it, turn off the heat, and hop back into our pond.
In these waning years before the next millennium, while networking progresses at a pace beyond anything humans have experienced, we have a special opportunity to put information and information technology to use to help us find safe ways to where we're going. Through wise use of the technology, we can achieve ecological sustainability and global prosperity. We can even have fun on our way there. But we need to engage with the environmental information challenge as one even more important than the financial, weather, sports, and entertainment challenges. We need the most brilliant and creative minds on our planet working to devise software that will help us nurture our planet and ourselves.
Let's have some "Maximum Ecology" software packages capturing kids' minds, instead of more "Maximum Carnage."
We have an exciting journey ahead of us, one that our computers and networks can help immensely. It's a complex world out there, with marvelous landscape mosaics and technological tools like Mosaic or Mosaic Netscape. And there's something fundamentally American about wanting to discover, to explore, to know what's there. Let me close with a passage from the end of Edward O. Wilson's autobiography that suggests just how much wonder awaits us:
The great majority of species of organisms -- possibly in excess of 90 percent -- remain unknown to science. They live out there somewhere, still untouched, lacking even a name... The greatest numbers are in remote parts of the tropics, but many also exist close to the cities of industrialized countries. Earth, in the dazzling variety of its life, is still a little-known planet.
The key to taking the measure of biodiversity lies in a downward adjustment of scale. The smaller the organism, the broader the frontier and the deeper the unmapped terrain. Conventional wildernesses of the overland trek may indeed be gone. Most of the Earth's largest species -- mammals, birds, and trees -- have been seen and documented. But microwildernesses exist in a handful of soil or aqueous silt collected almost anywhere in the world. They at least are close to a pristine state and still unvisited. Bacteria, protistans, nematodes, mites, and other minute creatures swarm around us, an animate matrix that binds Earth's surface. They are objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm's length away. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building....
(From Wilson, Edward O., Naturalist, Island Press/Shearwater Books, Washington, D.C. 1994, 380 pp.; pp. 363-4.)
Wilson is talking about the magic of places, like the one just outside us here. Thank you very much for your attention.