"What you're doing here is hard," Walz told attendees at Esri's User Conference, held July 15-19 in San Diego. It was one of the last times he spoke publicly before becoming a campaign surrogate and then running mate for Harris. "There is an entire cottage industry (devoted to) dividing people and cynicism. Uniting is much harder. Bringing people together is much harder. The tools of GIS and the science behind this and the ability to communicate make a huge difference."
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Esri — short for "Environmental Systems Research Institute" — is a Redlands-based software company specializing in geographic information software. GIS software merges maps with other data sets, helping users visualize otherwise difficult-to-spot connections. Esri says its ArcGIS software is used by businesses and governments worldwide.
Walz, a former geography teacher, was announced as Vice President Harris's choice for running mate on Tuesday, Aug. 6. Three weeks before that happened, Walz addressed his "fellow geographers" in San Diego.
Esri co-founder and President Jack Dangermond referred to Walz as an "amazing person" in his introduction.
A week before, Walz had been at the National Governors Association's annual conference in Salt Lake City.
But "my peers are in this room," Walz said in his 35-minute keynote presentation in San Diego. "I'm trained as a geographer and spent over two decades teaching in the public schools — teaching geography."
Walz grew up in truly small-town Nebraska, with 24 people in his high school graduating class — 12 of them cousins, he said.
He enlisted in the Army two days after his 17th birthday and spent the next 24 years in the Army and the Army National Guard.
"Two things you have to know as an artilleryman: Exactly where you're at on the Earth's surface and exactly where everybody else is at on the Earth's surface," Walz told the audience.
As a geography teacher in the early 1990s, he encountered Esri's ArcGIS software at a conference and brought it back to his classroom, where he had students overlay various data sets to a world map.
"My students could tell you when the Holocaust happened, but for them, it was a historical anomaly in time, and they could write it off to monstrous people," Walz said.
So he pushed his students to look at the world, through data, and find potential future crises.
"They started looking at food insecurity, potential drought, just like the UN was doing around famine early warning. ... The capstone project was — this is 1993, for my seniors — was to come up and publish (a report) looking at a global world map with all the layers they'd put in GIS: Where do you think the next genocide is going to be? And they came up with Rwanda. Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda."
Walz was elected to Congress in 2006 — "flushing (his teaching career) down the toilet," he joked — and took his love of geography and data-driven decision-making with him to Washington, D.C.
"If anybody tells you they're going to run for Congress or governor and they prepared their life to do that, run from those people," he said. "They are scary."
But his career in the Army and the classroom turned out to be good preparation for the work of governing, he said.
"I remember sitting in an Armed Services Committee hearing. And this was during the Afghan conflicts, and I was talking about the movement of the Pashtun minority in the region. And I said that damn Durand Line (which forms the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan) is causing all kinds of problems and needs to be taken into consideration.
"Blank stares from my colleagues," Walz said. "All the things that you have to worry about, that keep you up at night, let me add one to that: A geographically illiterate member of the United States Congress is a very scary proposition."
In 2018, Walz was elected governor of Minnesota, where he found his data skills crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as he ran up against cultural forces pushing back against a top-down approach to defeating it.
"We named our daughter 'Hope' for a reason. It's the most powerful word in the universe," he said. "But my wife often reminds me of this: It's not a damn plan. You can't hope we stop global warming. You can't hope we bring equity in how we're doing power and economic justice and environmental justice. You have to have a plan."
Walz credited the GIS industry with helping make a difference in Minnesota.
"We had this great idea to reduce childhood poverty," he said.
Minnesota legislators passed the "most aggressive" tax credit in the country for families with children up to age 18. But the challenge was finding people too poor to need to file taxes who could benefit from the credit.
By using GIS maps showing how many people in each community weren't required to file a tax return the previous year, the Minnesota government knew which areas to target by speaking at local churches, setting up pop-up tax filing stations outside local grocery stores, and going "almost door to door," Walz said.
Historically, after about five years, about 70% to 75% of those eligible for the tax credit are getting it, Walz added.
"In our first six months of this, we had an 82% uptake," and reducing childhood poverty by one-third in Minnesota as a result, he said.
He connected the use of good data to more effective deployment of school meals, protecting Minnesota's peat bogs and rivers, getting high broadband internet to rural Minnesotans and replacing lead pipes.
"Given the right set of tools, to the right people ... you can start to make true differences, true ways to unite our world, true ability to bring things together," Walz concluded.
© 2024 The Whittier Daily News, Calif. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
