When a firm or government agency uses a geographic information system to locate a facility that generates, stores, buries, or burns hazardous waste, local residents concerned about health and property values feel doubly threatened when they cannot readily interrogate the data or evaluate alternative sites. Despite public hearings and environmental regulations intended to address residents' concerns, lack of sophisticated tools and specialized knowledge would appear to place them at a distinct disadvantage. For this reason, social scientists promoting empowerment and fairness recommend giving project opponents access to a comparable GIS. Not surprisingly, GIS vendors and GIS educators endorse this strategy.

While logical and laudable, this approach is also short-sighted, if not condescending, in its assumption that the success of a grass-roots challenge depends upon access to techno-scientific weaponry. Strategies that view GIS access as the primary means of empowerment overlook the power of ridicule as a persuasive weapon that works well even when project opponents have a weak argument. Moreover, in the same way that ridicule can undermine an incomplete or otherwise flawed siting study, project opponents armed with a GIS but lacking the savvy to use the system appropriately become vulnerable to sarcastic attacks from site advocates and skeptical journalists. For opponents with access to a GIS, the most effective strategy might be to search for flaws rather than prepare a complex, time-consuming GIS-based rebuttal, which project supporters can cross-examine and ridicule.

Two Case Studies

Two case studies from New York State illustrate the power and importance of ridicule as a grass-roots defense.

A chapter in DRAWING THE LINE: TALES OF MAPS AND CARTOCONTROVERSY focuses on the first example, in which a well-funded five-member commission used a GIS to locate a statewide low-level radioactive disposal facility (Monmonier 1995). Acting on vague advice from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the siting commission adopted an allegedly objective multi-stage top-down siting process, in which GIS was the principal analytical tool in the early stages of exclusionary screening, candidate-area selection, and potential-site identification. Because of public furor over the chosen candidate areas and potential sites, the siting process never advanced to its later stages. Opponents used ridicule to win statewide media coverage, enlist the support of an influential senator, and publicly embarrass the siting commission on several occasions, most notably by publicizing a U.S. General Accounting Office report titled "Nuclear Waste: New York's Adherence to Site Selection Procedures Is Unclear" (U.S. GAO 1992).

The siting commission's wounds, ultimately fatal, were partly self-inflicted. Lacking expertise in GIS, the commission accepted an out-of-state contractor's recommendation of a complex screening process based on nested grids of square-mile and 40-acre cells and a scoring and weighting scheme involving several dozen "exclusionary" and "preference" factors, a number of which proved counterintuitive or irrelevant. When county officials and citizens groups challenged the siting commission in newsletters and press releases as well as at public hearings, the commission's maps (electronic and paper) became an important target. After a near riot in one of the two counties with potential sites, the governor halted the siting process, and the state legislature not only imposed numerous restrictions, including guaranteed public access to the commission's GIS, but also called for an unbiased external review. In 1993, the National Academy of Sciences initiated a three-year review of the siting process, and in 1995, embarrassed again by issues resurrected during the NAS hearings, the legislature shut down the commission altogether.

My second example concerns the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency's application to open a solid-waste landfill for ash from its new trash-burning electric power plant. Ridicule played a comparatively subtle role in this controversy. Local opponents of the landfill raised doubts about the accuracy of measurements based on soil survey data and won an adjudicatory proceeding that delayed the siting process an additional year. I participated in the permit hearing as an expert witness hired by OCRRA to defend its consultants' measurement of the proportion of prime agricultural soils on the site. This measurement was important because OCRRA, a public agency, exercised its right of eminent domain when one of several property owners refused to sell. The reluctant seller's farm was in a special tax district that conferred a lower rate on agricultural land, and state law prohibits the use of eminent domain in an agricultural district when "group one and group two soils," as defined by the state's land classification system, predominate on the site. Various measurements by OCRRA's consultants as well as by staff of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation indicated that prime farmland occupied between 38 and 44 percent of the site, considerably and consistently less than 50 percent limit set by the "Agricultural Exclusion." Nonetheless, the Town of Van Buren and PURE (People United for a Rural Environment), the "intervenors" in the permit application, made a valiant attempt to discredit the techniques used for measuring area, the use of a CAD/CAM system to integrate the soils map with a property survey, and the soil survey's treatment of inclusions and use of unrectified aerial photography as a base map. In eight days of hearings, spread over three months, the intervenors repeatedly asserted that the "margin of error inherent in the soil survey" was too great to permit a reliable determination of predominance. That the administrative law judge assigned to the hearings allowed such a lengthy and costly proceeding reflects New York's commitment to open government and fairness as well as environmental regulations that are silent or imprecise about the use and quality of spatial data.

In the sense that a CAD/CAM system with multiple layers of geographic data is a GIS, the intervenors had their own GIS (PURE's representative, a registered architect, was a CAD/CAM instructor at a local community college). Early in the hearings, during a discovery phase in which parties were asked to present any measurements they might later introduce, PURE circulated a crude sensitivity analysis that assumed the true boundaries of polygons around agricultural soils were on the outside of cartographic lines printed in the soil survey report. But PURE wisely chose not to introduce its conceptually frail representation in formal testimony: this overreachingly favorable interpretation of the soils maps could not raise the proportion of better agricultural soils above 50.3 percent, and the crude digitized polygons were themselves vulnerable to ridicule.

Research Goals and Research Questions

Several factors account for the effectiveness of ridicule in a counter-offensive against GIS: bureaucrats fear embarrassment almost as much as indictments and budget cuts; citizens enjoy seeing public officials humbled if not humiliated; the news media eagerly confuse uncertainty with ignorance; and the data employed in geographic analysis are seldom completely suitable for the questions GIS users ask. The process of siting an objectionable facility is long and complicated, and public hearings at various stages as well as the option of judicial appeal offer numerous opportunities for counter-attack. And because options to purchase expire and political support erodes easily, a string of delays can be as successful as the denial of a permit.

Study of locational conflict involving disadvantaged populations must address the vulnerability of GIS analyses to sarcastic and scornful humor. Fuller understanding of this vulnerability should lead to a fairer, demonstrably more accurate and ethical use of GIS as tool of compromise, not conquest. To develop this understanding, social scientists must rely largely on case studies that include interviews with the people involved as well as an examination of raw data, permit applications, relevant legislation and administrative regulations, transcripts of hearings, media accounts, and press releases and other representations by supporters and opponents. Informed by work on GIS standards and data quality as well as by insightful writings on humor and sarcasm, these case studies might address five sets of research questions:

1. Why and how are the results of GIS-based siting analyses vulnerable to ridicule? How does lack of public understanding make advanced technology vulnerable to misuse and ridicule? When might an appropriate use of GIS be vulnerable to ridicule? What relevant insights exist in philosophical examinations of humor and ridicule?

2. In what ways can ridicule empower project opponents? And in what ways might overuse of ridicule diminish their effectiveness? What particular advantages does ridicule enjoy at public hearings and in the media? In what ways are project opponents themselves vulnerable to ridicule?

3. How do legal and administrative requirements (which can vary from state to state as well as with type of facility) enhance or reduce the power of ridicule?

4. How can advocates for disadvantaged populations most effectively alert potential victims to the vulnerability of GIS? How might knowledgeable advocates most effectively advise them on detecting flaws and cross-examining GIS personnel?

5. How can project supporters using GIS protect themselves and their constituencies from ridicule? Can an expedient analysis based on temporally and geometrically incompatible data be successfully defended?

Plans for Continued Research

Aside from work in progress on cartographic risk communication and the use of environmental modeling, my plans for continued research on issues of GIS and society are admittedly vague. Because close study of GIS in land-use and other controversies has been highly informative, I remain attuned to local and regional conflicts, including the current National Academy of Sciences review of New York State's low-level radioactive waste siting work. (The NAS study is under the auspices of the nuclear safety arm of the NAS/NRC; no members of the panel are experts in either GIS or spatial analysis, and most members have employment or consulting ties to the nuclear industry. ) I am also interested in the use of GIS in emergency management, and have been informally exploring disparities among New York counties in the use of spatial modeling tools. A possible future project is a citizen's guide to GIS and spatial data in environmental analysis.

This strategy, which at times might pass for "participant observation," depends on access to participants, documents, and public events such as hearings, trials, and legislative sessions. Although news reports contain useful information (some facts and opinions as well as the biases of news gathering organizations) and many public hearings are now videotaped, local access provides valuable opportunities for interviewing participants; for observing their use of maps, graphics, and other visual materials; and for collecting literature and insights not found in the public record. For this reason, what happens where I live or nearby will strongly affect my research and writing.

References

Monmonier, Mark, 1995, DRAWING THE LINE: TALES OF MAPS AND CARTOCONTROVERSY, New York: Henry Holt, pp. 220-255.

U.S. General Accounting Office, 1992, NUCLEAR WASTE: NEW YORK'S ADHERENCE TO SITE SELECTION PROCEDURES IS UNCLEAR, report no. RCED-92-172.

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