Latest Contributions by CharlesConvis

Conservation GIS Sub-Place in this location is transforming into a User Group.  URL to the new group will appear here after May 2. Permalink to the new group will be added to the main "Conservation" place as well.  NEW URL IS:  https://community.esri.com/t5/conservation-gis/gh-p/conservation_gis ... View more

Sean’s Query: GIS for Queers (this essay was written in 2020 by friend and colleague of many years,  Sean Dunnington, (he, him) storyteller, playwright and LGBTQ+ activist. Like many activists, Sean uses the reclaimed term "queer" in talking about his community. ) Why should GIS matter to Queer People? For the last two decades, cartographers, geographers, and scholars have been exploring the semantics of queer geography, an integrative approach to queer theory and spatial analytics that examines the social relationships of sexuality, place, and space. I employ queer as an elastic term that includes all dissident sexualities and peoples, but I like to think of it as a ‘zone of possibilities’ that rejects binary definition and deconstructs heteronormative identities, practices, and knowledge. [1] When applying geographic information systems to this zone, we are, as Jack Dangermond once put it, ‘limited only by the imagination of those who use it.’ So, what happens when Queers use GIS? Short answer: we queer space. Of course, ‘space is not naturally authentically “straight” but rather actively produced and (hetero)sexualized.’ [2] In queering space, we occupy and colonize (hetero)sexualized space, yielding both a resistance and a home for Queers. [3] Unlike many gay and queer spaces, which extend the normative within the borders of (hetero)sexualized space, queer space transgresses the normative and challenges (hetero)sexualized space. [4] Even when Queers no longer inhabit space, we can still mark it by its ‘battles fought over the social, political and cultural meanings attributed to the existence of [Queers],’ but in order to spatially historicize and archive queer space, we must place it on the map. [5] As Jacques Derrida denotes in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.’ [6] Much like our history books, maps are byproducts of power-knowledge. [7] So, when Queers challenge and appropriate the framework of GIS technology, we elevate marginalized narratives and use data to rethink, redraw, reclaim, and remap bodies, space and geography. [1] Through this process of spatial archiving, we reframe our relationship with placelessness, a phenomenon that LGBTQ people experience frequently. [2] With the decline of gay and queer bars, assimilation of queer spaces, and gentrification of LGBTQ neighborhoods, it’s no wonder we feel an absence of permanent place. [3] But when we utilize GIS to visually represent and narrativize just how much space we inhabit, we reframe our understanding of queer belonging and place. As the Gay and queer Atlas puts it, ‘we are everywhere.’ [4] When we queer geography and cartography, we redefine our place on the map. When we queer geographic information systems, we relearn space as intrinsically queer. Although, I must acknowledge that while queer space disrupts heterosexual space, it seldom disrupts racialized, gendered, and classed spaces. [5] Additionally, in terms of research and literature, queer space typically implies white and male space, or homomasculine space. [6] This is one of the limits that queer GIS has faced, but with the right users, it’s also one that can crack. Furthermore, queer GIS lays the groundwork for possibility beyond sexualized space, because like identity, space intersects with all aspects of itself simultaneously. Utilizing the integration of queer theory and spatial analytics, GIS users can address queer issues such as transnational labor flows, diaspora, racism, immigration, public health, globalization, domesticity, geopolitics and poverty. [1] We can document history, activism, violence, legislation, communities, and local LGBTQ+ businesses in order to not only understand progress, but challenge and better it. Using spatial narrative, we can even visualize and share stories of our people. As historian Joan Nestle poses it: ‘We need to know that we are not accidental, that our culture has grown and changed with the currents of time, that we, like others have a social history comprised of individual lives and community struggles.’ [2] We must use GIS to queer and complicate spatial narratives, as well as the pedagogy of heteronormative spatial thinking and understanding. We must queer GIS to include ourselves on the map, because if we don’t, who will?   [1] Edelman, L. (1994). Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. [2] Binnie, J. (1997). Coming out of geography: towards a Queer epistemology? Environment and Planning Society and Space, 15, 223. [3] Valentine, G. (2003). Sexual politics. In Agnew, J., Mitchell, K. and Toal, G., editors, A companion to political geography, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 417. [4] Browne, K. (2006). Challenging Queer geographies. Antipode 38, 885–93. [5] Nash, C.J. (2006). Toronto’s gay village (1969–1982): plotting the politics of gay identity. The Canadian Geographer, 50, 1–16. [6] Derrida, J., & Prenowitz, E. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [7] Crampton, J. W. (2001). Maps as social constructions: power, communication and visualization. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 235–252. [8] Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality? Neoliberalism, cultural politics and the attack on democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. [9] Knopp, L. (2004). Ontologies of Place, Placelessness, and Movement: Queer Quests for Identity and Their Impacts on Contemporary Geographic Thought. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11, no. 1, 121–134. [10] Mattson, G. (2019). Are Gay Bars Closing? Using Business Listings to Infer Rates of Gay Bar Closure in the United States, 1977–2019. Socius; Casey, M. (2004). De-dyking Queer Space(s): Heterosexual Female Visibility in Gay and Queer Spaces. Sexualities, 7(4), 446–461; and Doan, P. L., & Higgins, H. (2011). The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation of LGBT Neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 31(1), 6–25. [11] Knopp, L. (2005). The Gay and Queer Atlas. Annals of The Association of American Geographers. [12] Puar, J.K. (2002). A transnational feminist critique of Queer tourism. Antipode 34, 936. [13] Elder, G. (2004). Love for sale: marketing gay male p/leisure space in contemporary Cape Town, South Africa. In Nelson, L. and Seager, J., editors, A companion to feminist geography, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 585. [14]   Oswin, N. (2008). “Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space,” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 1. 89-103 [15] Nestle, Joan. (1983). Voices from Queer herstory. The Body Politic 96:35–36. ... View more

(part of the new Esri Conservation "Inclusive History of Conservation GIS" website project)     Like many commentators & historians I've listened to, I agree that 2020 will be an historic year, probably the most impactful in my 66 year life.  Many of the reasons are bad ones, though some of the most important reasons are good ones, such the widest national protests ever and the beginning of important yet difficult national conversations and institutional changes.   One of these conversations is about racial privilege, an assumed set of comfort and safety features for a dominant culture that they never talk about, but that are obvious and problematic for other cultures.  It's like getting on a plane where everyone is forced to stand there and memorize the entire safety card front to back before they can board, except privileged passengers, who enjoy the unspoken assumption that in the event of a water landing they'll be rescued first.     It's a difficult topic for privileged people to talk about, with plenty of negative shame labels like "guilt" or "snowflake" to keep the topic hidden.  It's also difficult to survive and feel safe in my country if you are not privileged, that's what day after day of peaceful protests are trying to tell us.  There is also an uncomfortable confusion between the idea of talking about one's "privileges" and boasting about oneself, something that people of good conscience try to avoid.   This same confusion has come up in relation to my 31 years at Esri.   Esri has led the GIS world in innovation and a thriving user community for over 40 years.  It has done this using a technical architecture first created and implemented by Scott Morehouse in the 1970's.  To my knowledge, there is no other technical architecture or product line which has been an effective industry standard for so many years.  Microsoft Word comes close, yet it's first release in 1990 was still 8 years after ArcINFO ver 1.  But development genius is only part of the story. There are many development geniuses in tech, what made Esri unique was a different kind of corporate culture.  The norm in tech culture is inspired leaders who express a vision for the future and work to motivate everyone to achieve that vision.  I once heard Jack Dangermond say that this was a perfectly acceptable way to run a company, It just wasn't his way.  What Jack told me next was what made Esri so different.  Jack described his notion of what true leadership was: the higher you rise in an institution, and the more authority you have, the more you must recognize that that authority arises from all of the people around you, at all levels, and the more you must place their needs above yours, dedicate yourself to working for them, in their service, on their behalf.   Jack's model is to be constantly building up the people around him so that they could be effective leaders.  One aspect of this culture was the reluctance by Jack or other Esri leadership to give interviews or talk about themselves.  This was more than simple modesty.  It was a deeply held belief that the real GIS stories weren't about them, they were about all of these other people, especially Esri's users, and the hard work they all did, the obstacles they overcame.  This tradition thrives even now as an important part of the annual conference plenary, where the story of GIS is told through a dozen or so slides of user stories.  By comparison, In 31 years of user conferences I have yet to see even a single slide about Jack Dangermond or any of the other Esri leaders.  Interviews began to be tolerated about 10 years ago in part because at a certain point, Esri's users themselves began to ask for them. Jack's concept of leadership also affected my ideas about starting a new international nonprofit devoted to serving the conservation user community.   In my case the decision was to never serve on the board of directors, but instead work within the committees, helping them to succeed and to help new leaders to emerge.  This was a complex task even for the most selfless of workers, which I was not.  My success in this "leading from underneath" has ranged from decent to at times awful.  Still, the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) has survived and grown for over 30 years, despite being 100% volunteer run. My greatest personal failure in all those years was my inability to include tribal & First Nations people in this Society.  My initial proposals & charters talked equally about supporting First Nations communities with conservation groups.  In my grant-making work at Esri  it was no problem to make the first grants of GIS technology to many hundreds of tribal organizations in the 90's, helping them begin on the road to GIS capability.  But I was never able to match that success when it came to the people and professionals who would want to be part of the Society.  That was a  lesson in racial privilege, hidden things about me that affected my relationships with communities of color, and that made it impossible for me to create a safe and welcoming societal environment for them. As noble as the goals of modesty & leading from behind may be at first sight, they are also outwardly similar to the same silence that keeps racial privilege hidden.  The motives are different to be sure, but the outward appearance is the same. I had much to learn about this.   The breakthrough began in 2018 when Janice Thompson, the head of GIS for Wilderness Society, began a new initiative within SCGIS called "Mapping for Advocacy".  Wilderness Society is like the Sierra Club in it's commitment to diversity, so for Janice the word "Advocacy" was as much about social justice as it was about conservation. Together with Sandra Coveny, a GIS consultant specializing in tribal resilience planning, the SCGIS Tribal & First Nations program began that same year, with invited speakers from several US tribal organizations.  I was honored to be part of that first panel. What I learned then was that there is a longstanding tradition among tribal & First Nations people that any gathering must begin with heartfelt introductions.  These are not typical western introductions of name & employer or job.  Instead, each person must tell who your ancestral people were, what landscape they are from and how you honor & represent them today.  As was explained to me, before anyone can understand the words you are about to say, they need to first understand who you are as a human being.   It was the first time I got to have a glimpse of what a world might look like where people of many cultures had empathy and understanding for one another.   I get it now why this is such an important tradition for helping a gathering of people feel respected and heard, no matter what their origins and life experiences may have been.   The fact that this cultural shift was finally beginning to happen in a Society devoted to the tools and practices of GIS made it all the more significant.  In the same way that GIS was able to change natural history from a narrative tradition into a quantitative, predictive ecological science, my hope is that GIS can also help communities of every kind work together to identify bias and privilege wherever it exists and support one another in innovative & sustainable solutions.  Towards that end, I hope to return with additional columns & essays in the coming weeks.  First however, is my introduction as I was taught to do it:   My name is Charles Convis. I am the 6th person of that name. I am responsible to my ancestors and I have studied my family genealogy since childhood. My ancestors were farmers, laborers & warriors in Europe until the late 1500's. Most of them came to America in the early 1600's, many were farmers and leaders in the Presbyterian church.  Others were leaders against injustice, creating the first written American anti-slavery protest in 1688, and fighting alongside Black Marines in the Pacific in WWII. I honor their values and try to live up to their traditions of service and justice. I now live near the mountains called Nilengli near the place called Yukaipat by the Yuhaviatam (Serrano) people, who were the first stewards of what is also called the Inland Empire of California.   My passion for conservation and my sense of self began as a child in another place, the High Sierra, first home of the Miwok & Yokuts.  This always was and still is the landscape I am in when I dream, and the place of my stewardship.   I am not neuro-typical, and this may be why I am better with machines and computers than I am with people.  I am fond of GIS and believe it offers great hope for humanity.  I am fond of photography, as it helps me to express my vision of how remarkable and beautiful are the many different people I see, even if I am afraid or unable to speak the words.  I am cisgender and a member of my country's dominant culture.   I am privileged by the society I live in, and I am just barely beginning to understand how to express myself in words that will make it safe for people different from me to hear what is in my heart and not what is in my skin.   (My deepest gratitude to my reviewers & advisors. Marsha Small (Tsistsistah (Northern Cheyenne)) advised against my many mentions of the words "white" and "black", saying that even naming skin colors reinforces colonialist divisions and barriers between people. Marsha also taught me how to properly introduce myself to others.  Ashley Du, head of the Esri ECOS Environmental initiative, helped me with editing and introduced me to the concept "intersectional environmentalism".  Sandra Coveny, tribal resilience consultant, encouraged the idea of an essay on this topic for conservation GIS readers.) xconservationhistory ... View more

Chapter 1 : Origins of Conservation: Indigenous Landscapes & Traditional Knowledge (part of the "Inclusive History of Conservation GIS")   (photo courtesy of Animesh Ghose, 2018 SCGIS scholar, Creative Conservation Alliance, Bangladesh, &  Scott Trageser of NatureStills photography)   Unlike the traditional view that conservation began in the writings of a few globally important figures, I consider it's true origins lie in the beliefs and practices of hundreds of thousands of human beings as they adapted, survived & expanded across increasingly diverse habitats that began to appear after the ice ages.  What early humans learned about the essential behaviors, social rules & living traditions of their landscapes has much to teach today to a dominant society flailing and failing to adapt and survive.   Fortunately this body of knowledge is finally beginning to be recognized and valued in modern conservation and landscape planning, in an area of the profession termed "Traditional Ecological Knowledge".   There is sometimes confusion in this term with the romantic notion that indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature.  Harmony is a concept from privileged society which is both biologically and  historically naive.  For example, indigenous cultures in my region (westernAmerica) often set fire to the landscape.  This was not normally a catastrophic practice, it was often done in small stages to help manage natural successional processes such as ensuring reproduction for native food plants which depend upon fire in order to reproduce.  Human beings were actors and agents of change in those landscapes, just like other physical processes.  However, only human beings were able to possess a sense of responsibility and stewardship about their activities in these dynamic landscapes. For those cultures who possessed this sense of stewardship, and the centuries of knowledge that accumulated because of it, Traditional Ecological Knowledge became an important body of resources management expertise.      Storymap : Great Basin Landscape Cooperative's Science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge Strategy Reference Project Profile of Animesh Ghose, Creative Conservation Alliance, Bangladesh    Following these early origins among traditional peoples around the world, Conservation as an idea in written history was part of early greek & arab "natural philosophers", attempting to understand & classify the natural world, as distinct from the world of human affairs.  Separating human affairs from the consideration of nature was a schism that would characterize western science from then on.  A notable exception was the integrative work of the 9th century Islamic genius Avicenna, (see chapter 2). Conservation as an activity upon western & European landscapes first began in the middle-ages, as monarchs set game preserves aside for their exclusive use, denying or controlling access to the indigenous farmers and hunters who might once have lived or hunted there.  The pattern of a higher power making conservation decisions unilaterally to meet their own needs, thereby denying subjects & residents representation or access, is an unfortunate aspect of much early conservation work, and one of many stains from Conservation's imperialist origins  As Annika Dahlberg said in her 2010 study: "In countries where national parks were initially created to preserve perceived 'wilderness', with decisions taken by powerful elites and central authorities, this historical legacy has prevented profound change in line with new policy directives" ( Comparing access rights and ideological legacies in three countries. ." (Dahlberg A, Rohde R, Sandell K. National parks and environmental justice: Conservat Soc [serial online] 2010 [cited 2020 Jul 7];8:209-24. Available from: https://bit.ly/3e92czd)    The conflict between the goals of exclusive & often privileged protection, versus the needs of landscape residents, remains a relevant topic of concern today.  Conservation policies are still often created at high levels of society, meant to address conservation concerns of national or global populations.  Yet they are often resisted by those who actually have to live in the affected landscapes, and who may not believe or share the global concerns meant to be addressed.  Sometimes the opposite is true, local populations may be first to feel the deadly impacts of a global environmental collapse, and begin the battle to address the crisis and save their homes.  But their own national governments may fail to acknowledge that a crisis even exists, and fail to support small constituencies well down the ladder of political power,.   This is especially true of the current advance of climate change and sea level rise, where oceanic islands and First Nation Arctic villages are seeing their homes and lands vanishing rapidly, sometimes under  governments who still deny that climate change is even real. Storymap  Climate Change And the Effect on the Inuit Peoples and the Arctic  by MEE-KYUNG LEGAULT Storymap: "Telling a Story (Map): Indigenous Peoples and the Arctic Council" by GRID-Arendal Storymap: "Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative Projects Map Series"  by the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative (Photo: Community Conservation Planning project in Pakistan, courtesy of Doost Ali Nawaz, SCGIS Pakistan) This important aspect of supporting locally-based conservation knowledge & education work in planning and managing a natural landscape is variously called "Stakeholders" or "Public Participation Planning" and takes in many different kinds of local stewardship.   It is an ongoing process of specifically including local residents of an area, as early as possible, and with as much ownership & authority as possible, in the discussion and creation of conservation plans or policies upon a local landscape.  Stakeholder relationships are similar in some ways to Traditional Ecological Knowledge, in that it is always important to acknowledge and involve many kinds of local residents, from the original ancestral stewards to the current occupants. .It is also an important professional practice that begins to address this aspect of institutionalized inequity.    Storymap : "Citizens Participation The aim of Geodesign is to adapt communities to their sustainable geography and not the other way around"   by GDS Latam     GIS tools are becoming ever more critical in the spread and success of Public Participation Planning.  GIS as a technology addresses several key obstacles and concerns about this kind of planning approach: the informal nature of much traditional knowledge, the need for local collaboration, and the need to build local planning & GIS capacity.  Traditional knowledge is often from oral narratives and therefore difficult to acquire, process, evaluate and apply to spatial analyses and visualizations.  The strong data model foundations of ArcGIS and its multi-media capabilities, with tools like full motion video,  allow recordings to be captured, spatially defined, classified and formalized in ways that permit wider use in planning and analysis.   The collaborative nature of cloud GIS and citizen science applications like Survey123 make it easy to put local experts in charge of important organizing and management tasks at the lead of any local planning effort.  Finally, the ease with which cloud and mobile GIS apps can be learned and taught makes it possible to build essential GIS capacity among local communities quickly, allowing them to decide for themselves how to carry out the incorporation of their own local traditions and knowledge into the planning effort.  One of the best examples of rapid deployment of community-led GIS capacity, created & led by GIS novices, is the free Community Response Hubs set up by thousands of local governments to help in response to the 2020 covid-19 pandemic. Storymap : " Transcending Boundaries in Conservation "  by African People & Wildlife     Helping build local capacity, and letting the local & indigenous people lead, and speak, and be respected, is always the right first step.  As the official indigenous delegates to the 5th World Parks Congress said "The declaration of protected areas on indigenous territories without our consent and engagement has resulted in our dispossession and resettlement, the violation of our rights, the displacement of our peoples, the loss of our sacred sites and the slow but continuous loss of our cultures, as well as impoverishment. It is thus difficult to talk about benefits for Indigenous Peoples when protected areas are being declared on our territories unilaterally. First we were dispossessed in the name of kings and emperors, later in the name of State development and now in the name of conservation."   (photo: Ranthambore National Park)   Even within the imperial history of conservation areas there are interesting stories.  Protecting nature was not originally a western idea. Bogd Khan Mountain in Mongolia has the first written record of formal protection, when it was set aside in the 1200's by the ruler Tooril (Toghrul) Khan.  It was later officially gazetted by the local civil government of the Qing Dynasty "for it's beauty" in 1783.    Rajastan, India  is better known as one of the last refuges for wild tigers, and when the forests around Fort Ranthambore were first closed off in the 1600's by the Maharajas of Jaipur, they nevertheless allowed local residents access for hunting and harvesting in exchange for an annual fee.  Perhaps Ranthambore deserves credit for the origin of the idea of park admission fees. Worth noting, this period is sometimes acknowledged as the birth of the "Conservation Officer" profession, called Game Wardens or Gamekeepers at the time.  These were Individuals whose profession was the monitoring & protection of game species within the reserve from illegal poaching.   Perhaps the most famous exemplar of this profession was the Sheriff of Nottingham, arch-foe of Robin Hood, another fact which has not helped Conservation move beyond an image of elitism and exclusivity.  In the 1800's, formal national parks as we know them today began forming all over the world.  Below is a selected list of important & historical firsts, illustrating the diversity of nations, cultures and ethnicities involved. (Thomas Hill, Yosemite Valley, late 1800's) 1872   Yellowstone National Park USA  first American national park.  (These were lands previously occupied by Shoshone, Bannock, Crow & Nez Perce tribes, for whom an 1868 treaty had guaranteed the rights of continued access and use for hunting, subsistence, medicinal plants and religious ceremonies.  The University of British Colombia has a detailed open case study on the current issues of indigenous rights in Yellowstone National Park and actions needed ) see also:   "AMERICAN INDIANS AND NATIONAL PARKS" by June Starr "The Story We've Been Told About America's National Parks Is Incomplete" by DINA GILIO-WHITAKER  Storymap "Violence is Daily Life: Yosemite, The National Park Service, and the Ahwaneechee" by Gabriel Michael 1876   Puerto Rico’s Caribbean National Park  One of the oldest, if not the oldest in all of Latin America. 1887    Tongariro National Park New Zealand's first national park originated as a tuku (act of customary lore) from the Ngati Tuwharetoa people of Aotearoa (New Zealand), making this also the first national park in the world to be gifted by it's indigenous people, and the first national park to be listed as protecting cultural landscapes.  It has since grown from 2,640 hectares to 25,000 hectares 1890's   First Russian Zapovednik reserves  set up by V. V. Dokuchaev  in Russia, Aldo Leopold was inspired by Dokuchaev to begin establishing an American wildlife reserve system in the 1940's. 1895   Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, is the oldest proclaimed nature reserve in Africa.  The area was initially set aside by the Zulu kings Dingiswayo and Shaka in the early 1800's, then formally gazetted as a national park in 1895. This was the decade when the British Empire took over the area, and it's assumed that the prior indigenous inhabitants were excluded from the new park  1909 Sarek National Park and Stora Sjöfallet National Park: First national parks in the world to specifically protect & honor access rights & subsistence practices for its Indigenous population, Saami people, who had lived in the area for 4000-5000 years and had first obtained legal protection in 1886. 1984 Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Park, one of the first tribal parks established in Canada   2011   Frog Bay Tribal National Park,  first tribal national park in United States created by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa   Further Reading on protected areas  &  indigenous people National parks are beautiful—but the way they were created isn’t  by Hanne Elisabeth Tidnam Canada working towards new future for Indigenous-led conservation by James Dinneen ,  2020 The People of the Glacier Lands Taken to Create US National Parks  by Peter Deneen , 2019 The Blackfeet Nation is opening its own national park, 2019  by  Samantha Weber Storymap "The Voices of Grand Canyon"  Native peoples Jim Enote (Zuni), Nikki Cooley (Navajo), Leigh Kuwanwisiwma (Hopi), Coleen Kaska, (Havasupai), and Loretta Jackson-Kelly (Hualapai) share what the Grand Canyon means to them. Wyss Campaign for Nature a $1 billion investment to "help communities, indigenous peoples, and nations conserve 30% of the planet in its natural state by 2030" .  They are also lead partners with the National Geographic Society in the "Campain for Nature"  a program to "approach biodiversity conservation in a way that fully integrates and respects indigenous leadership and indigenous rights. Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and Protected Areas,  IUCN 2000    A comprehensive statement of rights, policies and case studies for Indigenous Peoples Protected Areas. The “Map of Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Natural Ecosystems in Central America”  2016, by IUCN .  In partnership with the National Geographic Society, IUCN  collected the knowledge of 3,500 indigenous people in 130 mapping workshops throughout the central America region and documented their central role in conservation.  When presented at a 2016 UN meeting, one of the traditional leaders in attendance commented ‘Thank you for making us visible"     After the success of this map, IUCN established an ArcGIS online digital cartography center to permit wider access to digital mapping resources for indigenous people.   xconservationhistory (Gratitude to Scgis Scholars Aaria Dobson-Waitere,  Animesh Ghose,  Doost Ali-Nawaz, and SCGIS leaders Janice Thomson and Sandra Coveny for the conversations, advice, mentorship and ideas  that helped create this essay) ... View more

(part of the "Inclusive History of Conservation GIS"    project) I define Conservation as the struggle for human survival on earth.  If you are not in that fight,  you are either busy dying out as a dominant species, or you are hoping to get to Mars and live in a plastic bubble. Back on my planet, Conservation is the activity of protecting earth's fundamental life processes, whose health is critical for humanity's future survival.  Those processes evolved in and depend upon intact lands & seas, and a huge  variety of other resident species who carry out ecological functions at microscopic to global scales.  Conservation is an activity, but it is inextricably bound to and empowered by the social, earth & life sciences.     Conservation is therefore a science of understanding, with the work of protecting, natural landscapes and their species from harm or extinction. Conservation includes the activities of planning, managing and restoring damaged landscapes and rare species to improve their health & survival.   Conservation equally includes the human presence upon the landscape, human rights, environmental justice, diversity & inclusion, and societal behavior to ensure that activities and policies are equitable, biologically sound and sustainable over time. We became human beings through interaction with those same landscapes, and those same other species.   Our consciousness, our knowledge and our social structures first evolved from surviving in those natural environments, and discovering that survival depended upon joining together & helping one another.   Human values are already well populated with respect, affection and reverence for other humans, ancestors, parents, children, teachers  and leaders.   We might consider a parallel aspect of Conservation to be the normal outcome of the reverence and respect that humans may feel when surrounded by intact landscapes, or in companionship with dogs & other animals.   By this argument, the origins of a Conservation ethic and the passion to protect are as old as any other defining aspect of humanity.   Conservation as a sense of reverence, and a connection to earth, is therefore innate in all humans regardless of race, religion, nation, gender, culture or identity.   It happens with every touch upon the plants in my garden, with every smell of oncoming rain or wet fur, with every sound of cattle lowing or coyotes barking.  Equally present in human history is the pattern of conflict, as groups grew larger and sought to possess other landscapes by war, and other peoples by slavery.  Empires were formed as groups became ever more powerful.  Much of traditional western history was written by the privileged beneficiaries of those empires, and Conservation history is no exception.  In the same way, Conservation practice & policy is often rooted in patterns of empire and colonialism, tainting it with racial inequities both overt and subvert.   We live in a time when global biological crises and environmental disasters are spreading at the same time as dominant governments continue to prey upon bigotry to divide and weaken civil society.  Narratives about ecology & conservation need to address this tainted history to help end  the division and alienation, no matter how unintentional,  and work to begin rebuilding the unity, trust and common vision that will be needed to address these global crises. I write this with hope, because I've been lucky enough to work in the GIS industry, which I sincerely believe to be the most integrative and powerful of all technologies  for resolving conflicts and building common, actionable visions about earth's future.   There are many technical reasons why this is so.   There are also social and historical reasons which I hope to address in this series.   for further reading: Intersectional environmentalism: an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. It identifies the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected. "Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness".   by Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo    Environmental History (2001) 6:541-560 "Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History". by Carolyn Merchant. Environmental History (2003) 8:380-394   "The Green Movement Is Talking About Racism? It's About Time" by Brentin Mock "The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with Its Racist History"  by Julian Brave NoiseCat "The Problem of 'Colonial Science'"  by Asha De Vos  (My deepest gratitude to my father Charles Convis Sr for first teaching me how conservation and social justice were deeply linked, and to my Mother Mary Anne (Crawley) Convis for constantly speaking out and teaching about the role of women in my nation's history, . Marsha Small (Tsistsistah (Northern Cheyenne)) constantly helps me correct & avoid the many words and expressions that arise from colonialist perspectives,  and  Jhon Goes in Center (Oglala Lakota) whose 2000 essay established  the framework that helped me understand the importance of Native People's perspective in any discussion of Geography & GIS   xconservationhistory ... View more