Globalizing local thinking to support earth stewardship

Background/Question/Methods: A major obstacle in engaging both citizens and scientists in Earth stewardship is overcoming the apparent disconnect between the local environments we live in, work in, understand, and care most about, and the global environments we are increasingly interacting with and changing.  While human interactions with the Earth system are more globalized every day, human thinking remains mostly local.  Remote sensing and global climate modeling have revolutionized our ability to observe and understand the global patterns and dynamics of Earth systems, yet these enhanced capabilities have yet to catalyze a similar revolution in the ability of human systems to respond to, avoid, and mitigate the negative consequences of anthropogenic global changes in Earth systems.  Unlike the daily weather, the comings and goings of local flora and fauna, and local developments in general, global environmental change is hard for us to visualize, understand and engage with strongly on a daily basis.  As a result, local thinking, the strong perceptual attachment we humans feel towards our local environments, may be a major barrier to the global thinking and action needed to make progress in Earth stewardship. A basic question is whether local thinking can be reshaped to better incorporate and support Earth stewardship. 

Results/Conclusions: Global data relevant to understanding the global context and local consequences of global environmental change are widely available for free, many of them in real time.  This presentation explores the development and application of new conceptual, methodological, computational, and social networking tools designed to bring these global environmental data together within local environmental contexts in an effort to globalize local thinking by both citizens and scientists.  At the core of this effort is a set of interactive online systems enabling real-time visualization, social networking, data sharing, and knowledge synthesis across globally similar local environments.  These new geo-sociocomputational tools enable ecologists working in site-based field research environments to collaborate more easily across sites and environments in synthesizing globally relevant scientific knowledge and to find and fill global gaps in their observations and understanding of biospheric pattern, process and change.  For citizens, these tools enable globally relevant social networking and collaboration with their local and global neighbors, towards both understanding and engaging in Earth stewardship based on globally relevant local thinking and the sharing of knowledge, expertise, and social commitments.  Using these tools, local thinking may be shifted from a potential impediment to a driving force in Earth stewardship.