Green GPS Tracking — ROI You Hadn’t Thought Of
With the Help of GPS, Amazonian Tribes Reclaim the Rain Forest
A member of the Trio tribe, he’s leading me through the rain forest near his village in southern Suriname — a two-hour Cessna flight from the closest road. At the foot of a large tree that dangles a cascade of liana vines, Wuta points his GPS toward the sky: no signal. He fiddles with a button and a few minutes later gets a reading. He relays the coordinates to a fellow Trio cartographer beside him, who dutifully jots them down. Wuta then tramps on, demonstrating how he and other tribesmen have charted, by foot and canoe, some 20 million acres of land here at Amazonia’s northern fringe… read all the Wired story on Tribesmen Mapping Their Own Forests here:
It’s no secret that GPS was originally developed and fielded by the US Military as a tool to aid in all military activity, from search and rescuer to aiming precision weapons. There aren’t a lot of military, war-oriented systems that have worked so well and certainly none that I can think of that have evolved to serve the public good, in all nations, than GPS. It is today’s exemplar of of Isaiah 2:4: …”and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks …
Every day I see some new humanitarian, life-improving use of GPS. Let me be clear on the level of work going on in the article, because I have some cartographer and land surveyor readers. You can’t replace geographically traceable Cadastral Survey professional precision work with amateur, consumer-level GPS “walking tours” like the one described in the article. GPS isn’t magic … it only makes magic possible.
But there’s an old saying that’s so eminently true we often forget about it … in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king [In regione caecorum rex est luscus.], attributed to Erasmus back around 1500AD or there about. Just as the meaning of Erasmus’ observation is much more important that the actual date of first publication, the raw data collected by ordinary folks going about their daily tasks … those with knowledge of the area of interest … is extremely valuable when there is no data to begin with.
It doesn’t take an Al Gore to know that the depletion and desecration of rain forests. The ideal solution would be to allocate billions of dollars world-wide to precisely survey these resources and then build a comprehensive plan to preserve what we have remaining and perhaps reclaim some that is gone to waste. But with no data at all on that is there today, surveys of this level of accuracy and sophistication have tremendous value … not the least of which is that they are underway today without a knock-down, drag out battle to find those funds, decide which “beltway bandit” is going to win the contract … hmm, wonder why Dick Cheney hasn’t awarded this non-competively to one of his “blind trusts”?
There’s a lot more “goodness” to GPS that just tracking errant husbands and improving J. B. Hunt’s bottom line.