Land Management the Holistic Way
By Jennifer Sutton

At long last, there is a tool that helps land managers look at their land in a traditional holistic way while incorporating the numbers, data and details of specific sciences. The tool is called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and can be used on most computers through several kinds of software. To run GIS you need a few things: the computer hardware; the program software; and accurate DATA. Data may be existing printed maps, new maps from local surveys, and lists of information about sites. A GIS links the information about WHERE something is to WHAT it is. Most people gather data and make exceptionally pretty and useful maps with their GIS. But that's not land management ? That's mapmaking. The real gift of a GIS is to help people find answers about places.

For example, many communities in rural Alaska are currently planning to build new landfills because the old ones are getting full or need to be relocated. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to locate your landfill on well drained deep soil, at least 1.5 miles from town, not in areas used heavily for subsistence activities, not along a stream or in a swamp or lake, within the community's political boundaries, on an existing road, etc. etc.? But how do we find a spot that meets these conditions? With a GIS you can enter the maps of soils, political boundaries, subsistence use, streams, swamps, lakes and roads. Then you can tell the computer your rules: locate all places with well drained soil outside of 1.5 miles from the town on a road system. The computer will give you a visual display of all of all the potential landfill sites. You start with the most important characteristics then add the others one by one. There may be some conflict, so you, the land manager, need to decide what is most important and where you can compromise. Say you found the perfect spot according to all the characteristics except it's 1.25 miles from town. Are you willing to compromise? What can you accept? GIS is an analysis tool, but it does not make land use decisions!

Also, a GIS could be used would be to identify environmental justice/equity issues in rural Alaska. A far reaching project could be to identify the historical subsistence use areas, overlay them with current use areas, add toxic sites data, with military sites data, and with disease rates data. Relationships between the data sets may be found and may be useful in helping communities find funding for clean-ups as well as prevent further environmental damages. Sounds like a great tool, right? Well it is, but it does have limitations. First, if you don't have a computer and necessary software and a trained GIS person on staff, you will have a difficult time with GIS analysis. This issue is being addressed by agencies and conservation groups offering training and by GIS manufacturers offering hardware and software for conservation uses. Another extremely important issue is DATA. Decisions based on GIS analysis are only as good as the data that was entered. In many cases in rural Alaska, data is either incorrect or missing entirely. To remedy this situation, many organizations are gathering their own data and sharing it or setting up their own GIS.

One organization working on the data issue is Rural CAP. With funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Justice Program, Rural CAP teamed up with Greenpeace Alaska, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the Association of Village Council Presidents, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to respond to the need for accessible data for community and regional planners. Specifically, Rural CAP is transforming 50 subsistence data maps (based on the 1985-1987 Fish and Game studies) into computer format for communities to use with ArcView and ArcInfo. The communities that may benefit from this project include Chuathbaluk, Hooper Bay, Kwigillingok, Nunapitchuk, Plati-num, Russian Mission, Sleetmute, and Stony River.

Rural CAP's primary goal for this project is to build community capacity to identify local environmental justice issues by making critical data more accessible to communities. To this end, Rural CAP has chosen to make the final computerized (digital) copies of the 50 maps readily available at a variety of locations: AVCP; Greenpeace; Alaska Community Action on Toxics; Rural CAP; and the Department of Fish and Game (Bethel and Anchorage). Jennifer Sutton, the Rural CAP Subsistence Data Transformation Project Coordinator, is available for questions about this project and general GIS questions. There are lots of resources available to rural Alaskan land managers and community activists, so don't hesitate to call and ask!

Jennifer can be reached at Alaska Community Action on Toxics
907-222-7714 until March 10th and at 907-272-8026 thereafter.