a1494: getting a sense of place in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Stuart M Leiderman <leidermn@cisunix.unh.edu>


dear Group:

I'm really pleased to see a good number of posts inquiring about
environmental and agricultural conditions in Haiti.  first, this
indicates that there is a need for such information in the public domain.
second, it signals to me that environmental concerns are rising in
priority among people who care about Haiti.  certainly, the restoration
of fertility, forests and the countryside in general need much more
attention and should be a high priority of the Government of Haiti, of
citizens' groups and outside NGO's and agencies.

I think Haiti is small enough so that there could be an annual
accounting of conditions across the country and a way to track
improvements in conditions or deterioration over time.  this could be
done, for example, according to the well-known "Local Agenda 21" procedure
that many places in the world are already using to track their progress
toward sustainability.

nationwide, there also ought to be a way to rank the severity of problems
village by village, and then reach a common resolve to bring all of them
up to a certain standard within a period of time.  I wonder if there
are Haitians within the executive and legislative branches who share
this priority; if so, and if they shouted loudly enough, a lot of us
would answer their call.

it is just logical to me that you can't have a sense of place unless you
also really know the place.  that problem is holding Haiti back; in fact,
it may be that there is more information about Haiti's condition held by
people outside the country than by Haitian nationals themselves.  by
experience, when strangers know more about your community or country than
you do, you are at a definite disadvantage when it comes to making
resource and development decisions.  this happens all the time in small
New England towns, and that's why so much water and other resources are
stolen right out from under people's noses; things are gone before anyone
realizes they had them...trees, soil, wildlife, and so on.

wouldn't you agree that the people of  Haiti need to know more about their
country than anybody else does?  if I sound like I'm running for office,
it's just that I think it's time for Haitians themselves to start
thinking about this platform, especially when it comes to environmental
quality and ecological restoration and the necessary educational system
that underpins those goals.

I wonder if Haitian universities have the interest and capability to
carry out this sort of plan?  if not, I think pretty much any state
university in the U.S. could begin the process for Haiti and provide the
necessary training...and agree to bank the information within Haiti,
not just take it back to their campuses.  for a while, I thought that
the University of Florida and a couple of other southern universities
were taking the lead in that, but now I don't know.

lacking that kind of institutional coordination, the task of knowing the
place and then having a sense of place becomes a complicated and diffuse
grassroots effort for volunteers who may have a lot of information
about very specific locations but not a nationwide picture.  a way to
remedy this is to create a composite picture, for example, create a
website for compiling a "Whole Haiti Catalog" where basic environmental,
agriculture and energy information is accumulated and organized as it can
be culled from other sources or gotten first-hand from field research who
come to Haiti from time to time.  this would result in a very useful
environmental registry in the public domain.

to organize the information, there are time-tested and affordable,
computer-based geographical information systems (GIS), such as ArcView.
again, I wonder if Haiti uses any kind of GIS for planning and
monitoring.  who knows?  I know of one system that works really well out
of Cornell University for Cuyahoga County, and there is another one out
of the University of New Hampshire, called GRANIT, for our part of New
England.  also, several regional planning departments across the U.S. do
it for their towns on a watershed and riverbasin basis.  I would think
that, say, the planning department of Dade County, Florida uses it and if
someone in the Florida Haitian community decided to stroll over there and
lobby for a project for Haiti, they might be surprisingly successful
and something usable could be up and running for Haiti's bicentennial.

thank you,

Stuart Leiderman
Environmental Response
leidermn@christa.unh.edu

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