#ESRIUC Keynoters Provide Extraordinary Leadership Despite Personal Dangers
The keynote presentations today at the ESRI UC were extraordinary. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist and author of "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" provided attendees with an fantastic dissertation on free market capitalism which begins and ends with the distribution and recording of land records. "The solution to poverty is making dead capital (no property ownership), ‘live capital,’" said de Soto. De Soto confers with leaders from nations who are just beginning the process of land record management. He works with them to begin the process of establishing formal land ownership policies that is supported with the legal authority to sustain it. "What incentivises a politician to make the change? If he is in a democracy it’s votes. If not, it is still public support… The genesis of capitalism is property," said de Soto. De Soto both congratulated and castigated the U.S. for the decision in the 19th century to establish land ownership reform but forgetting what is necessary to build a democratic society while intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan. His capitalist vision has sometimes led to personal danger as he has been the victim of assassination attempts.
The second keynote presentation was by Dr. Willie Smits, a Dutch forester and chairman of the Masarang Foundation as well as the founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) that took on the deforestation of Borneo. His initial work centered on preserving Orangutan habitat and soon employed GIS to understand why the habitat was disappearing. The habitat was being replaced by palm oil plants because of the demand for vegetable oil and fuel, as well as myriad other uses for palm. Now, he is advocating the substitution of palm oil plants with sugar palm plants which, as he explained, are “carbon positive” used in the production of sugar and ethanol. His use of geospatial technology is helping to convince corporations to limit the deforestation, change to sugar palms and thus reduce impact to the land and natural habitats.
