I have been able to attend and present at the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth at the University of California Berkeley.
For those of you not familiar with Digital Earth, it's a concept, popularized by former US Vice President Al Gore , for the virtual 3-D representation of the Earth that links in the archives of scientific, natural, and cultural information and whose aim is to leverage this data to describe and model the Earth, its natural and human systems. Digital Earth is a global partnership of NGOs, educators, business, and government leaders building a virtual global commons with the objective of promoting a sustainable future. A fundamental premise of Digital Earth is that anyone with Internet access should be able to freely access these information and knowledge resources.
The first day included an impressive list of presenters
- Xu Guanhua, Minister of Environment of China
- John Garamendi, Lt Governor of the State of California
- Tim Foresman, Secretary General of the ISDE
- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot
- John McDonald, Founder of Global Water and motivating force behind the creation of UNEP and UNFPA
- Doug Engelbart, Inventor of the mouse among many other things
- James H Kunstler, Author of the The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency
- Elisabet Sahtouris, Evolutionary biologist
- Michael T Jones, CTO of Google Earth
The most important message from this outstanding list is that some very influential people are taking the issue of a sustainable economy seriously and that geospatial is a key technology enabling a solution.
China is adding about a gigawatt of coal fired power capacity every week. 80% of US power generation is non-renewable. But interestingly China was one of the first supporters of the the ISDE. Xu Guanhua was Minister of the Environment of China for more than ten years and has been and continues to be, in his current role as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a major supporter of the ISDE. He reported that China plans to increase its budgetary commitment to the environment from 1.3% to 2.5% of GDP by 2020.
John Garamendi, who is the Lieutenant Governor of California and used to be Deputy Secretary of the Interior, focused on climate change and repeated many of Al Gore's messages about the current challenge of global warming. California, at least as represented by the Republican governor and Democratic Lt Governor, appears to be very serious about building a sustainable future. For example, Schwarzenegger's plan is to reduce tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent from 2004 levels, starting in 2009. After Schwarzenegger's recent visit to Canada, the Premier of British Columbia has promised to adopt the same standards in the same time frame.
This was the first time I have been in the same room with someone like Ed Mitchell who has been on the
Moon and you can't help but feel just how remarkable the 20th century was that made this possible. A number of speakers mentioned that this period was an extraordinary period not only because of what humanity managed to achieve, but also because it was part of a 10,000 year period of relatively constant temperature on Earth. The concern now is that so many of the key parameters that we are able to measure over a relatively extended period such as atmospheric carbon dioxide, atmospheric mean temperature, mean sea temperature, and others seem to be changing relatively rapidly. Ed Mitchell called the challenge that of a "spaceship with a mutinous crew.":
Ambassador John McDonald outlined ways in which governments can be encouraged to make things happen. His examples, in which he was personally involved, include the UN family planning agency UNFPA, which now has about $6B to encourage family planning worldwide, the UN environmental organization UNEP, which is based in Nairobi and Ambassador McDonald related a fascinating story of how the UNEP Secretariat ended up in Kenya rather than in India, and how he managed to create the International Drinking Water Decade, 1981-1990 that resulted in clean water for over 1.2 billion people and sanitation to almost 770 million. The message from all of these speakers was that we need to change things, but that there are ways to change things. As Elisabet Sahtouris pointed out there is an evolutionary process moving from conflict to cooperation that is enabling this to happen.
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