Resilience Science points to many efforts to use community mapping as a force for development and empowerment. Sometimes, in our cups, we dream of a set of globally connected maps devoted to agricultural biodiversity. Something really simple, like performance reports from specific crops, varieties and types of farm could be linked with geodata which in turn would allow it to be linked to all manner of environmental data. It would grow into the database that ate the world, but more to the point could help feed the world.
Of course, dreaming doesn’t make it so, but Green Maps seems to put all the tools at anyone’s disposal. Is anyone out there doing anything for agrobiodiversity? I searched, but couldn’t find anything except for urban outlets for the products of sustainable farms. Important, but not enough.
There will probably be a lot of country/region/department-based studies with useful data which are not readily available on the internet. A portal where these results/data/whatever can be uploaded would work fine for compilation and distribution purposes. Complementary outputs will be needed I suppose to justify a data gathering portal. But then the obviously acknowledgment issues would come…
In one of those freaky coincidences, after writing about mapping sustainability I happened to watch Jamais Cascio’s TedTalk on something he called Earth Witness, a massive global information network driven by users’ cellphones. Of course, he talked about pollution and environmental crimes, rather than agriculture, but we’re used to that. The point is, given the tools, this could be a citizen driven approach, and acknowledgement then would not be an issue. Or rather, it need not be.
I don’t think anything like this is going to happen any time soon though, because there just isn’t the interest.
Completely agree with that, Jeremy. People is not interested in being part of the solution although they may know they need such solutions. Most of the times they don’t get involved and don’t believe in these kind of tentatives; and most people seem to prefer being spied rather than sharing data. However, everything starts from zero, or in any point near to zero.
Our iconography covers issues from Sustainable Living, Nature to Culture and Society. This universal language (a set of 170 icons) includes sites and resources for “Eco-Agriculture/Permaculture”, “Organic/Local Food”, “Significant Habitat”, among others. More about the Green Map® Icons at GreenMap.org/icons
Also, we are developing a participatory mapmaking online tool: OpenGreenMap.org.
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