I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, at the ESRI/UC in San Diego. Raven gave a rousing speech focused on the importance of biodiversity, and our one-on-one conversation fills in some of Raven’s background and his strong feelings about the power of GIS.

“Once you can store your information in a database or in a multi-layer system of any kind, then you don’t need to lose the information. You can make whatever generalization you want whenever you want to make them, but you can also know precisely why you made them the way you did. So, if you skim through a tropical forest taking nothing but DNA sequences of individual organisms, it becomes, relatively speaking, unimportant how you classify them, because you can deal with the data directly.

That really is a revolution greater than the printed word, because the printed word is an extension of a human mind, but the use of databases is a very complex extension of the human mind, which takes it to a new level. GIS is a practical spatially-oriented system that allows you to extrapolate to those levels, to keep all the information and to form generalities and to make predictions based on far more than your mind can comprehend or hold.

In a world where everything is going away so rapidly, this becomes very important as a way of deciding what to do, exploring what to do, and using it and applying it, rather immediately for various purposes rather than needing to crystallize it, over classify it, and then work with very clumsy generalities. That’s why GIS is so interesting.”

Read the full interview here.

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