How I Changed the World Think global, act loco -- Zerbina I was born as the Allies were mopping up the Axis powers, at the leading edge of the baby boom. My awareness of the world was kindled in the early 1950's, and some of my earliest memories include images of freezing GI's in Korea drifting across snowy television sets in quiet parlors. I can still hear my paternal grandfather lecturing us at the dinner table on the danger of reds in the State Department and the schools and the complicity of "one-world" liberals in the ongoing, insidious Soviet-orchestrated subversion of western civilization. Even then, I had a problem with the implicit assertion that my species occupied more than a single planet, or possibly might be sharing it with one or more alien races. What was so politically incorrect about acknowledging that we're all in this lifeboat together?

Woodstock and Vietnam happened when I was in my twenties, and I knew which was for me. At the same time as Nixon was socking it to us, the first snapshots of our planet blew me away, the Whole Earth Catalog forged a community of enviro-nerds, and Gaia emerged from the mists of myth. I read promiscuously -- geography texts, systems theory, science fiction, futurist speculation, Buckminster Fuller, Teilhard de Chardin -- and started writing a novel in which Nixon's enemies were forcibly dematerialized, teleported into a highly-connected electronic limbo which eventually came to be called the internet. So clear was it to me that we had and were abusing one world -- why wasn't it everywhere obvious? Why did our "leaders" identify the more compassionate and articulate social critics and communitarians as arch-enemies of civilization, saboteurs of progress? The fifties still had us by the throat, and thirty years later not much has changed except for the media and the spin.

Sometime during the seventies, while laboring in a lab at Harvard, I was seduced by a time-shared computer, and became a captive geek of computer cartography and spatial information technology. Fanning out from earlier studies with Warntz in macrogeography and spatial analysis, my interest was drawn to thematic mapping, and from there on to terrain modeling, which led to working on GIS data modeling in general, with coffee, Mandelbrot and a fractal practicum along the way. By the early 80's I was envisioning planetary data models for terrain, and had yet to seriously contemplate map generalization (although I had created algorithms for its inverse, enhancement). In that decade, a number of my Harvard colleagues went on to achieve commercial and academic success. Eventually I too came to be regarded as a high priest of GIS-esoterica. But, by failing to trumpet my limited knowledge as holy gospel, I committed the greatest possible American sin -- failing to cash in. In those days, I was motivated by the romantic concept that my (brilliant) ideas were what really mattered, not how much money I made. What a jerk I was.

When I started pursuing the line of inquiry reported in my recent dissertation, Ronald Reagan was just learning his lines as Acting President. Before long, I sensed I was about to be let go from Harvard, and was developing morning-in-America-sickness in a big way. Peering through the corrupt corporatist smog of the 1980s, I could see that some of the technologies that America, Inc. was drably deploying to dominate global affairs could also be instruments of world-wide liberation. It seemed logical to me that a global perspective was the best antidote to the societal poison of rampant self-interest, and I set out to implement this hope as a data model for all the world to see and use. Thus began a spatial obsession that generated about a dozen papers, most of which were written while I had other things to do during the day. Almost all those publications focused on minutia of handling global geospatial data in hierarchical fashion, solving one little problem at a time. Hardly anyone but me cared what the answers were.

But I did -- and do still -- care, and perhaps because I kept plugging away at it have seen others look into these concepts, taking their own slants and following their own preoccupations, carrying the ball, at least for a while. For example, at least one major software vendor has installed my model within the bowels of software that manages data for CD-ROM atlas titles. That is the sort of development I had hoped my ideas would lead to, along with credit of authorship and some royalties. But I guess you can't have everything.

Geoffrey Dutton
Belmont MA, USA
 
LAT: 42 N 22.948'  LON: 71 W 10.462'
QTM ID: 402230122320130032201 (+/- 10M)

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