Saw a fascinating article in The CT Mirror today:
http://ctmirror.org/2016/05/06/young-woman-sees-mapping-catholic-lands-as-an-environmental-blessing/
Though she considered herself a “conservative Catholic,” the great activist Dorothy Day would chide her church on occasion. More than once, from her Catholic Worker mission in Manhattan's Bowery, she urged the church
to use its landholdings in the Hudson Valley to grow food and provide housing for the poor.
The notion of how the church should use its lands didn’t remain long in the public eye after Day raised it many decades ago. But it could see life again, in ways Dorothy Day couldn’t have imagined.
A young Hartford resident, Molly Burhans, 26, has formed a nonprofit called the
GoodLand Project, which, she hopes, will help the church map its lands using modern, multi-dimensional geographic information systems (GIS) technology, and then use the information for better stewardship
of the land.
She’s trying to, if not change the world, nudge a good bit of it in the right direction. The Catholic Church is one of — if not the — largest nongovernmental landowners on the planet, with holdings in virtually every country.
By one published estimate, from The New Statesman in 2011, the church and its affiliate institutions own 177 million acres of the planet. (No one knows for sure because it’s never been measured; that is part of the reason Burhans undertook the project.)
If these lands can be managed in environmentally sustainable ways, she thinks the planet and its inhabitants will benefit from a cleaner, healthier and more just global environment. “Maps are incredibly powerful tools, and have
been throughout history,” she said.
With the introduction of GIS technology, maps got more powerful. Most of us think of a map as a flat, two-dimensional representation of land. GIS maps make that notion almost quaint….
Meg McGaffin
GIS Analyst
203-783-3232