{"id":775733,"date":"2026-11-01T18:59:52","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T02:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&#038;p=775733"},"modified":"2026-10-30T16:42:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T23:42:18","slug":"gis-and-the-coevolution-of-civilization","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/gis-and-the-coevolution-of-civilization","title":{"rendered":"GIS and the Coevolution of Civilization"},"author":5752,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[476882,472991,11022],"tags":[1631,493631,196042,1441,1461],"arcnews_issues":[493590],"class_list":["post-775733","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geographic-approach","category-gis","category-thought-leader","tag-collaboration","tag-collective-intelligence","tag-gis-professionals","tag-resilience","tag-sustainability","arcnews_issues-november-2026","arcnews_sections-esri-atlas"],"acf":{"short_description":"GIS professionals solve problems with data, science, and experience. They must create a collective intelligence for a sustainable future.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"When I first encountered computer mapping as a graduate student at Harvard University, I was inspired by a simple idea: When we better understand geographic relationships, we make better decisions about land, natural resources, communities, and the environment. This idea has guided my life."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"\u201cWe need a global intelligence that matches our global impact. We are too smart for our own good, but not yet wise enough for our own survival.\u201d","author_name":"Carl Sagan","author_profession_organization":"Astronomer and Planetary Scientist"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Introduction: Why Now<\/h2>\r\nFor nearly 60 years, I have watched GIS evolve from a little-known experimental technology into a global platform used by millions. I have had the privilege of working with early innovators and generations of geospatial professionals who have carried this field forward.\r\n\r\nWe can now observe the Earth with unprecedented clarity, integrate vast amounts of information, model complex systems, explore alternative futures, and share knowledge almost instantly.\r\n\r\nYet despite all this progress, I am more concerned about the future of our planet than at any other time in my life.\r\n\r\nWe have the knowledge and enabling capabilities to address many of our planet\u2019s most serious problems, but our collective response remains inadequate. The natural systems on which all life depends are rapidly deteriorating. Climate instability, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water scarcity, soil degradation, pollution, and resource depletion affect every part of the world. Some ecosystems are being damaged faster than they can recover. Others may soon be gone entirely. The cumulative human footprint has reached a scale that threatens the resilience of the planet itself."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775734,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"This is not an abstract concern for me. I have spent much of my life observing, studying, mapping, and experiencing the extraordinary beauty and complexity of nature. At the same time, I have seen forests, rivers, habitats, species, and entire landscapes damaged or destroyed.\r\n\r\nThese are not simply beautiful places being lost. They are living systems that support human health, security, prosperity, and ultimately our survival.\r\n\r\nWe are living through an extraordinary paradox. Our knowledge and technological capabilities have never been greater, yet our ability to apply them collectively to the most serious challenges facing the planet remains inadequate. We possess enormous amounts of information, but we often lack a shared understanding of what is happening. We have powerful tools, but we do not always have the cooperation, coordination, or willingness needed to act at the necessary scale.\r\n\r\nThat is why I am writing this paper now.\r\n\r\nI believe humanity has entered a critical period in its relationship with the Earth. The decisions we make in the coming years will influence the health of natural systems and the conditions of human life for generations. Addressing these challenges will require our best science, our most capable technologies, our creativity, and a much deeper commitment to collaboration."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"Geospatial professionals are uniquely positioned to help society see the whole. This is now one of our profession\u2019s great opportunities and responsibilities.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"I also believe the GIS and geospatial community has an essential role to play.\r\n\r\nThis paper is both a reflection and an invitation. It reflects on what I have learned from working in this field and witnessing the extraordinary contributions of the GIS community. It is also an invitation to geospatial professionals everywhere to see themselves as participants in something larger: the creation of a collective geospatial intelligence that can help humanity better understand, design, and steward its future.\r\n\r\nGIS alone will not solve the challenges before us. No single technology or profession can. But geography gives us a way of seeing the whole. GIS gives us a framework for integrating knowledge. The Geographic Approach gives us a practical methodology for transforming that knowledge into action.\r\n\r\nThat is where you come in.\r\n\r\nEvery day, geospatial professionals bring together data, science, technology, and human experience to address real-world problems. You help people see patterns, understand relationships, evaluate consequences, and coordinate action. Your work supports nearly every type of human endeavor, including sustainable development, conservation, climate resilience, emergency response, public health, infrastructure, land management, and natural resource stewardship.\r\n\r\nThis is vital work, but the scale and urgency of today\u2019s challenges call us to do more. We must connect our individual efforts, share what we know, strengthen our institutions, and build a more comprehensive understanding of what is happening to our world and what we can do about it.\r\n\r\nThis is what collective geospatial intelligence is all about."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"The decisions we make in the coming years will influence the health of natural systems and the conditions of human life for generations.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Civilization, Knowledge, and a Planet Under Pressure<\/h2>\r\nHuman civilization has advanced through successive revolutions in knowledge. Agriculture, science, industry, digital technology, and now artificial intelligence (AI) have steadily expanded humanity\u2019s ability to learn, innovate, and organize."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775735,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"These advances have improved life for billions of people. At the same time, they have intensified humanity\u2019s impact on the Earth. Human activities now influence almost every aspect of our planet, including its climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, water systems, and landscapes.\r\n\r\nAs a result, the future of civilization and the future of the planet have become deeply connected.\r\n\r\nIn many ways, our ability to generate knowledge has advanced more quickly than our ability to apply it collectively and wisely. The challenge of the 21st century is no longer simply how to advance human progress. It is how to advance while sustaining the natural systems upon which life depends.\r\n\r\nTo understand this challenge, we must better understand the evolving relationship between humanity and nature."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"The most important technology we are building may not be GIS or AI but our collective ability to understand and steward the Earth.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>The Coevolution of Humanity and Nature<\/h2>\r\nBiologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven helped popularize the concept of coevolution: the idea that living organisms evolve together through relationships of mutual influence. Plants and pollinators, predators and prey, forests and climate systems all shape one another through continuous interaction."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775736,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Today, humanity has become one of the most influential forces shaping life on Earth.\r\n\r\nHuman civilization, including our cities, economies, technologies, and population, is transforming global ecosystems, altering atmospheric conditions, reshaping landscapes, and influencing the future of countless species. At the same time, the health of natural systems profoundly affects our own prosperity, security, health, and resilience.\r\n\r\nDroughts, wildfires, floods, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather remind us that our future is inseparable from the condition of the world around us.\r\n\r\nThe relationship is reciprocal. As we shape the Earth, the Earth shapes us.\r\n\r\nLearning to understand and manage this relationship may be one of humanity\u2019s greatest intellectual and moral challenges. It invites us to move beyond the notion that human development and environmental stewardship are competing goals. Increasingly, they are inseparable.\r\n\r\nThis is fundamentally a geographic challenge because it involves understanding the relationships among natural and human systems across space and time."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"Geography gives us a way of seeing the whole.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Geography and GIS: A Framework for Understanding<\/h2>\r\nGeography is uniquely suited to this challenge. It studies the relationships among physical, biological, social, economic, and cultural systems and how they interact across space and time.\r\n\r\nAt its heart, geography asks enduring questions:\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Where are things located?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Why are they there?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>How are they connected?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What patterns emerge?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What consequences follow change?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\nGIS provides a digital framework for integrating, analyzing, sharing, and applying knowledge about our world. More than a technology, it is a means of understanding almost everything.\r\n\r\nBy bringing together many types of information, including data from governments, businesses, communities, sensors, scientific models, and imagery, GIS provides a common geographic context in which knowledge can be connected, explored, and shared.\r\n\r\nGIS enables people to understand not only what is happening, but also where it is occurring, why it matters, who is affected, and what can be done about it."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"As we shape the Earth, the Earth shapes us.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Maps are central to this process. They illuminate relationships, reveal trends, and communicate complexity across disciplines, organizations, and cultures. In an interconnected world, maps are more than tools for navigation. They are instruments for building mutual awareness, shared understanding, and collaboration.\r\n\r\nWhen geographic knowledge is connected and shared across many people and organizations, something larger begins to emerge."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775737,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Developing a Collective Geospatial Intelligence<\/h2>\r\nIncreasingly, GIS is being used as a platform for organizing and integrating many types of information and knowledge created by diverse networks of individuals, organizations, communities, and disciplines. This integration represents what I call collective geospatial intelligence.\r\n\r\nCollective geospatial intelligence emerges when diverse forms of knowledge can be connected, evaluated, visualized, and understood within a common framework.\r\n\r\nGeography provides the organizing science. GIS provides the infrastructure that makes this integration possible. Together, they help transform information into understanding and understanding into wiser action.\r\n\r\nBut collective geospatial intelligence is not created by technology alone. It emerges when people share knowledge, connect perspectives, work from trusted evidence, and collaborate across boundaries toward common goals.\r\n\r\nEvery organization, community, project, and individual can contribute to this shared understanding. Each adds information, experience, observations, models, maps, analysis, and ideas. When these contributions are connected, they become more valuable than they are in isolation.\r\n\r\nCollective geospatial intelligence may become one of humanity\u2019s most important assets for creating a sustainable future.\r\n\r\nThe next challenge is turning this shared knowledge into practical action."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Transforming Knowledge into Action: The Geographic Approach<\/h2>\r\nEarly in my career, I realized that geography\u2019s greatest value was not simply in describing the world. Its real power was in helping people understand the world and make better decisions.\r\n\r\nThis idea is expressed in what we now call the Geographic Approach, a practical method for transforming geographic knowledge into action.\r\n\r\nThe process follows a continuous and iterative cycle:\r\n\r\n<strong>Measure. Visualize. Analyze. Design. Evaluate. Act.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWe begin by observing our world. Satellites, drones, sensors, field surveys, community observations, and scientific research help us understand how natural and human systems are changing."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775738,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"But data alone does not create understanding.\r\n\r\nMaps and visualizations allow us to see patterns, relationships, and trends. Spatial analysis helps us understand how systems work, how they interact, and how they may change. We can study the movement of water through a watershed, model the effects of climate change, understand urban growth, assess ecosystem health, or identify communities at risk.\r\n\r\nUnderstanding the present condition\u2014what is\u2014is only the beginning. We must also consider what could be and what should be.\r\n\r\nBringing geographic analysis into planning and design allows people to create and compare alternative futures before decisions are made. This is the practice of Geodesign.\r\n\r\nGeodesign expands the questions we ask. We move from \u201cWhat is happening?\u201d to \u201cWhat should happen?\u201d and \u201cWhat are the consequences if we choose one path instead of another?\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"Collective geospatial intelligence may become one of humanity\u2019s most important assets for creating a sustainable future.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Communities are using Geodesign to address urban growth, transportation, conservation, housing, water management, climate resilience, and many other issues. Alternative plans can be evaluated for economic performance, environmental impact, social benefit, equity, resilience, and long-term sustainability.\r\n\r\nThese decisions should not be left to experts alone. Community members, scientists, planners, business leaders, and policymakers can use maps to explore alternatives together, understand trade-offs, and build shared solutions.\r\n\r\nThe next step is action. Plans become policies. Investments are made. Habitats are restored. Infrastructure is built. Communities adapt.\r\n\r\nThe results produce new information, and the cycle begins again.\r\n\r\nWe observe the world, understand its patterns, explore possible futures, evaluate their consequences, and act with greater awareness. Through this process, geographic knowledge becomes practical wisdom, helping communities make more informed decisions and create a more sustainable and resilient future."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>AI Can Enhance the Process<\/h2>\r\nWhile I recognize that significant challenges remain with AI, my sense is that it can strengthen every stage of the Geographic Approach.\r\n\r\nAI is already helping us extract information from imagery, lidar, sensors, and other data sources. It can identify patterns, automate analysis, support new forms of visualization, and make GIS more accessible through natural language and intelligent assistants.\r\n\r\nLooking ahead, AI may become an increasingly valuable design partner. It can help people explore alternatives, evaluate trade-offs, anticipate possible consequences, and recognize relationships that might otherwise be missed."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"The real power of GIS comes from the people who apply it.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"AI can also help us monitor results. By comparing actual outcomes with what was expected, it can support adaptation, learning, and continuous improvement.\r\n\r\nBut AI should not replace human judgment, responsibility, or creativity. Its greatest value will come from augmenting what people do and helping them explore possible solutions.\r\n\r\nGeography gives AI context. GIS connects it to places, relationships, and real-world conditions. Human values and judgment give it purpose and direction.\r\n\r\nTogether, geography, GIS, the Geographic Approach, and AI can help us better understand complexity and make more informed choices."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>An Emerging Human Capability<\/h2>\r\nWhile it is still early, decision-makers around the world are beginning to use the Geographic Approach to understand complex challenges that span environmental, social, and economic systems.\r\n\r\nUrban planners are balancing growth with sustainability. Emergency managers are coordinating responses to natural disasters. Scientists are monitoring ecosystems and climate change. Businesses are improving efficiency while reducing environmental impacts. Conservation organizations are protecting biodiversity and restoring critical habitats.\r\n\r\nThese efforts share a common pattern. They apply the Geographic Approach to transform information into shared understanding and shared understanding into coordinated action.\r\n\r\nWhat is emerging is not simply a more advanced collection of technologies. It is a growing human capability to collaborate through a common geographic understanding of our world.\r\n\r\nEach project matters. Each map, dataset, model, analysis, and application can contribute to a larger body of knowledge. When these efforts are connected across communities, institutions, and disciplines, they can strengthen our collective capacity to understand change and act more wisely.\r\n\r\nThis is the broader opportunity before our profession."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":775739,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>Conclusion: A Call to the Geospatial Community<\/h2>\r\nHumanity may be entering one of the most consequential periods in its history.\r\n\r\nFor centuries, progress has been measured largely through economic growth, scientific discovery, technological innovation, and improvements in human well-being. These achievements are real and important. But progress must now also be measured by our ability to sustain the natural systems that support life.\r\n\r\nThe question is whether we can learn to understand and manage our relationship with the Earth more wisely.\r\n\r\nThis is where the GIS and geospatial community has a unique opportunity and responsibility.\r\n\r\nWhen geographic knowledge is connected across organizations and disciplines, people can learn from one another. When that knowledge is visualized and made accessible, it enables broader participation. When alternative futures are modeled and evaluated, communities can better understand their choices and make more informed decisions.\r\n\r\nThis is how collective geospatial intelligence begins to emerge.\r\n\r\nGIS can provide an important infrastructure for creating a more sustainable future. But its real power comes from the people who apply it, helping others take a more holistic approach, consider the relevant facts, understand relationships, and create more sustainable solutions at every scale.\r\n\r\nNo single project will be sufficient. No single organization can succeed alone. But geospatial professionals, working within their communities and institutions, can contribute to a larger body of geographic knowledge and coordinated action.\r\n\r\nTogether, they can help create a more sustainable world."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"Collective geospatial intelligence connects knowledge, human judgment, and shared action.","author_name":"","author_profession_organization":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Those of us who possess the knowledge and tools to see what is happening have an obligation to make that understanding useful. We must communicate what we know, identify what we do not yet understand, invite others to participate, and apply our work with humility, creativity, and purpose.\r\n\r\nWhile I remain deeply concerned about the deterioration of our natural world, I also remain hopeful.\r\n\r\nMy hope comes from the GIS professionals, geographic scientists, conservationists, planners, educators, public servants, business leaders, and community members I see working every day to make a difference. Their efforts demonstrate that positive change is possible when knowledge is connected to action.\r\n\r\nMy invitation to the geospatial community is simple: Continue strengthening this culture of geographic understanding and collaboration. Bring together our best science, technology, creativity, and human judgment. Share what you know. Learn from one another. Help communities everywhere make more informed and sustainable choices.\r\n\r\nThe future will not be determined by technology alone. It will be shaped by what people choose to see, understand, value, and do together.\r\n\r\nI believe geography, GIS, and the people who practice them can help humanity tip the balance toward a more sustainable future.\r\n\r\nOur ability to grow this collective geospatial intelligence and translate it into positive action may be one of the greatest opportunities for our profession and one of the most important contributions our community can make."}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>GIS and the Coevolution of Civilization | November 2026 | ArcNews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"GIS professionals solve problems with data, science, and experience. 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