Volume 2, Issue 2, Fall 2005
Dennis Skocz
Pages 53-60
Wilderness Management and Geospatial Technology
A View from the Black Forest
The paper uses Heideggerian concepts of world to contrast the lived environment of the animal in the wild to nature as [re]constructed through Geographical Information Systems (GIS). With the animal Umwelt and GIS Weltbilt/Ge-stell side by side, we can see the “contradiction” between the animal’s lived space and the techno-human space of GIS, appreciate the risk of the GIS-constructed world to animals in the wild, and seek a way to address the risk. The paper suggests that humans, as beings which properly have a world, can stand as fiduciaries for nonhuman animals in relation to the peculiar risk of geospatial environmental management technology.