> Last year there was a discussion of a "world CP distribution map", to be
> distributed over the internet. The intent seemed to be to allow anyone to
> click on a CP species and learn exactly where plants can be found in the
> wild. I'm opposed to such a distribution map.
It's fun to see these issues come up again. I'm afraid they'll likely
come up over and over until we get some closure.
Just a few points about the CP map proposal.
Part of that specific proposal was a mechanism whereby the public
information would be "blurred" using coarse coordinates, so that no
particular stand could be raided based on the map.
I think this feature of the proposal effectively addresses most of your
fears.
Even with plant locations accurate to the level of counties, the
resulting distributions would be quite useful to researchers striving to
see the "big picture", and looking desperately for hard data to present
to both the public and to lawmakers.
There also is a fear that the coordinating agency itself (eg: ICPS or ?)
would misuse the information. There are ways that we could allow the
the raw data to be "owned" by the researcher who did the field work.
The data kept by the agency would be a low resolution transcript of the
original data along with a tag to the original contributor. In this
way, the "big picture" can be shown to the world, but any particular
site would be disclosed only at the discretion of the original surveyor.
If such a system, or a variation thereof, were acceptable to the group,
then it would be an easy matter to implement it.
What we need to do is find a workable compromise that will allow the
world to see what the global situation is, how it is changing, and allow
informed decisions to be made - without creating a situation that could
be unreasonably exploited.
Here again, we come back to the issue of trust. No positive progress
can ever be made without a reasonable balance of trust.
We should certainly structure our proposal so that it is as safe as
possible. However, if we want to make progress towards saving these
plants, then there will always be a minimum level of trust that we must
put in the intentions of our fellow workers.
-- Rick