Comment Cool purpose for a national brownfield register (Score 1) 183
I remember putting forward a thesis in an old GIS class that was a bit too grand for the time I was able to spend flwshing out the particulars, but it was essentially to start creating a map layer for the North America (yes Canada and Mexico too, cuz pollution travels no?) that we could then query for whole categories of pollutants and land use restrictions. One purpose was to make the data saleable to insurance industry for rate adjustments (yes they screw people over for where they live, but they pay good money for the data too), and have publicly available data to show what kinds of pollution was airborne vs ground-situated...accounting for such things as subsurface hydrogeology etc, etc...lots of fun to be had!
But seriously, these days, with PlaceBase being bought up by Apple, wouldn't it be nice to have a single large repository of data that federal/state/provincial/Municipal agencies could use to scope out where the next location would be for that great Green project that keeps running into NIMBY restraints?
I find that that data is well guarded when it makes no sense to do anything but open it up, let the public know what's in the ground and in the air...and to move on to either fixing it up or using the areas for other projects.
Twould be nice.