Industry Interview

In Memoriam

Ian McHarg Reflects on the Past,
Present and Future of GIS

At the GIS '95 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,
conference organizers established a new, lifetime achievement
award. Professor Ian McHarg was the first recipient. Given the
conference's strong environmental emphasis, he was a particularly
apt selection, as he focused on the relationship between humanity
and the environment throughout much of his career.
He was an early, avid champion of the polygon overlay. His was the
key notion that each "layer" was causal to the one above it--all of the
layers linked chronologically. McHarg's method of multidisciplinary-
based suitability analysis proved to be the foundation of many of the complex analyses and
reports performed with GIS today.
Perhaps most important is his legacy of students and colleagues scattered
around the globe, particularly in the United States, Canada, England and
Australia. More than 1,500 graduate students have benefited from
McHarg's tutelage, many of whom now are deans and department heads
in academia as well as highly placed people in private practice and
government.
Fortunately, for those who were unable to sit in on his classes, he put many of his key
thoughts down on paper in book form some 25 years ago. His book, Design with Nature,
was republished in the early 1990s in hardback and paperback. At only 196 pages, Design
with Nature is a slim volume, but the contents are what count. The book outlines much of
what's possible for GIS, a potential as yet unrealized, according to the author.
Although McHarg passed away March 5, 2001 (see "Geography Community Loses Two
Distinguished Members," page 16), his thoughts will continue to influence GIS professionals
for many years to come. The following interview was conducted in Vancouver on March 27,
1995, during GIS '95. It was originally published in GIS WORLD, GEOWorld's former title, in
October 1995. At the age of 74, the Scottish-born McHarg reflected back on his 40-year
career.
GW: Many people in GIS see your book Design with Nature as a major touchstone.
That's where a lot of them got an interest in performing spatial analysis. It's been
quite a success for you, hasn't it?
McHarg: Yes, and God bless it. Written in 1968 and 1969, it's now sold about 350,000
copies. The paperback just came out a month ago. The Japanese government had it
translated into Japanese, and the ministry of construction purchased 20,000 copies at $88
a bang. Very, very gratifying. It has exceeded everybody's expectations. And moreover it
introduced ecological planning, but of course it doesn't mention GIS. But at the time I was
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engaged in it in a rudimentary way.
GW: How did you go about doing analyses before you had computers?
McHarg: We started with magic markers of course. There was a time in which I was very
interested in buying magic markers. I wanted colors to be incremental like a step ladder.
That was true of magic markers. There were artists who discovered colors and gave them
wonderful names like puce and viridian and lilac and all sorts of things. But I wanted colors
to be numerical, the gray tones to be numerical, so every value we gave was actually
meaningful. I could see then by the color what was meant by the portrayal. And, of course,
when the first Intergraph package came out, it gave us a wonderful choice of colors. Then
we could use color numerically. But the first computer programs were really quite terrible.
As a matter of fact, we first used typewriter keys over printing, where you color by using
color ribbons.
GW: Xs and Os--that sort of thing?
McHarg: Absolutely terrible. I mean there wasn't a left-handed, barbarous, mentally
deficient technician who couldn't do better than the best computer. Terrifying. It has come a
long way.
GW: The analytical process was rather crude, even with early computers, wasn't it?
McHarg: Primitive beyond description: grids, rasters--the output was typewriter
overprinting. An enormous amount of intelligence in a barbarous product. I was introduced
to it by Lou Hopkins, a young man who was a student of mine and now is the chairman of
planning at the University of Illinois, who said, "Mr. McHarg, what you are doing is quite
rational," something I've never been accused of before. He asked, "Do you mind if I try it?" I
said, "Go ahead, but nobody can help you." He told me that Britton Harris had received a
$7 million grant and he has a big mainframe IBM, so he began to assist. My contribution
certainly was to make layers that are causal and chronological.
GW: And that pancake stack of layers is one of the things you see in many GIS
papers.
McHarg: Right, united by time. And this is certainly something that ESRI's graphics don't
show. They simply show layers. But I think my contribution was to make sure the layers
were extensive, first of all, and united by time. The oldest evidence first, and every layer
only comprehensible with reference to the underlying layers. I think that really was a
contribution. And it was a really valuable one, because up to that point all of the sciences
were fragmented, and all of the proponents were certainly representing their own
disciplines. It was important to get them all together and agree that the contributions would
be complementary and additive so that the result would be comprehensible and a complete
representation of the ecology of a region, which was done simply by insisting upon
chronology. People were allowed to speak based on the age of their evidence. That
worked.
GW: So the relationship between the layers is causal?
McHarg: Absolutely causal, but of course chronological. Every ecological study was a
recapitulation in which time was the essence. You started with the older samples first to
come to an understanding of what the place is, how it came to be, where it was and where
it was going. This turned out to be very, very successful. I still think it is. I will say that most
GIS, of course, is a misnomer. It's not GIS at all. Most of the stuff I see is simply remotely
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sensed imagery and I think very, very far from complete. GIS has a long way to go.
GW: Would you say your vision for what GIS can be is still unfulfilled?
McHarg: Very much so. I don't know any agency in the United States that has what I would
call a comprehensive GIS. My favorite example of a complete GIS involves Mount Desert
Island off the coast of Maine that first was studied in 1894 by a remarkable man named
Charles Elliott. So I use this for a comparative study of what has happened to it from then
until now. I don't think there is any other place in the United States where you can get a
century of records.
GW: Do you see the mode that GIS is used in today, or even if it's not truly a GIS as
you define it, as reductionist?
McHarg: Well the thing I'm doing is the very opposite. That is by starting with bedrock
geology and then surficial geology, and then reinterpreting these to reveal groundwater
hydrology, you explain physiography and also surficial hydrology. This then leads you
inevitably to soils, which leads you to plants, which leads you to animals, which can lead
you to land use. This isn't reductionist at all. As a matter of fact, every one of these steps is
in fact either correcting or reinforcing.
That is a great benefit of this accumulation of information. It is either reinforcing or makes
information comprehensible. It adds meaning to the dataset, and I think that is what it is all
about; to be able to understand the way it works and to be able to apply that understanding
to manage it with intelligence and hopefully compassion. That's what I think GIS can do.
Very little ecological planning is done as part of this great new capability.
GW: Now part of that, being able to manage and understand those various layers,
you have to work with quite a variety of experts in different fields, right?
McHarg: Yes, you certainly do. The instruction I offered at the University of Pennsylvania
was based upon having a competent faculty, so we had geologists, meteorologists,
certainly hydrologists, always a soil scientist, ecologists, limnologists, plus ethnographers,
anthropologists and of course computer scientists. Certainly it required not only the
presence of these people, but it required them to learn to work together, and that is very,
very difficult.
I have yet to find a physical scientist who is very well informed about biological science. I
have yet to find a biological scientist who's even familiar with physical science. I have yet to
find either of them who knew very much about social science. I've yet to meet any scientists
who know very much about planning. And if you talk about design, they run away
screaming. So it took a long time to build a cadre of people who actually knew their own
disciplines, but were perfectly willing to associate with other people toward the end of fuller
understanding. This has not been helped by education, because all of the sciences are
fragmented and departmentalized, both in government and in universities.
GW: But do you see GIS as providing a good framework to perhaps build this
integrated system of experts?
McHarg: It is an absolutely wonderful opportunity. As a matter of fact, it is the one single
catalyst that can help everybody. But there is an enormous need to solve the problem of the
departments. It is very difficult to have a hybrid. I tried this for years with great difficulty. I
was given the opportunity of selecting, for instance, the ecologists at the department of
biology at Penn with the one reservation that we would have to have from such a person his
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or her agreement to teach applied students. In such a case, even though the determination
of the professional skill was vested in the department, it was difficult for us to ensure the
promotion of these people. That is, their perfor - mance in GIS was not seen as an
embellishment to the professional competence of, say, a geologist or a soil scientist. But
this is going to change. And it can.
The capability of the computer to contribute to such integrations is unequaled. It seems to
me that as our problems have increased, with world population and so on, our capability of
resolution increases as a function of GIS, as a function of the computer. We suddenly have
a capability of dealing with very complex problems. Will it be used? I don't know. The
problems are getting more intractable. The capabilities are increasing. Is the performance
increasing? I don't think so. Let's hope so.
GW: With your 40 years of teaching, you must have a great legacy of students; any
idea about how many that would be?
McHarg: Oh yes. About 1,500 master's students--a remarkable bunch of people. I think
there are about 14 deans. There may be as many chairmen. There are probably 150
professors who have started maybe 20 new programs worldwide. I can feel quite content
about their success.
GW: Looking back over your career, what do you think are your most important
accomplishments?
McHarg: Longevity. I never thought I'd live to be 74. I was in the army for seven years. I
was a parachute saboteur--where the survival rate was small.
GW: And you had tuberculosis?
McHarg: I had TB, that's right. What else? First of all, I got to be a university professor--a
man who never finished high school, never went to college, got his way into graduate
school at Harvard University. That was a remarkable accomplishment I think. Then I
became a professor, which surprises me to this day. I'm still frightened that someone is
going to ask me to go back and finish high school and perhaps even get a college degree.
And even beyond that somebody might ask me to get a Ph.D., because I've been teaching
all this time without one.
I think for me the most remarkable thing is when I started thinking about the environment in
1936, the global environment really was a conception nobody had. And the word
"environment" was not used as we use it today. It really wasn't a subject. Nature really was
the noun you used if you were really concerned; it's hard to find an alternative word now.
The discovery of the environment, and the fact that it went from oblivion, when I began to
look at it first, to a situation in which it is assuming primacy in the global agenda, I have to
say that is most gratifying.
But of course, as I said before, whereas the appreciation has increased millions upon
million fold, the problems also have increased in their intractability as with the increase in
numbers. However, for me the great basis for optimism, as I said, is the availability now of
sensors, and the availability of prosthetic devices, among which of course the computer is
primary. That is the best basis for optimism and my personal gratification in having been a
small part of the increased awareness of the environment.
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