Gov. Walz tells Redlands-based Esri it’s driven by data – Daily News

A month before becoming Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presumptive presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke in Southern California, arguing that a geographer’s love of data and analysis is key to effective government.

“What you’re doing here is hard,” Walz told attendees at the Esri 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 a whole cottage industry (devoted to) dividing people and cynicism. The union is much harder. Bringing people together is much harder. The GIS tools and the science behind it and the ability to communicate make a huge difference.”

Esri – short for “Environmental Systems Research Institute” – is a Redlands software company specializing in geographic information software. GIS software merges maps with other data sets, helping users visualize connections that are otherwise hard to identify. Esri says its ArcGIS software is used by companies and governments around the world.

Walz, a former geography teacher, was announced as Vice President Harris’ choice for running mate on Tuesday, August 6. Three weeks before this 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.

The week before, Walz had been at the annual conference of the National Governors Association in Salt Lake City.

But “my colleagues are in this room,” Walz said in his 35-minute keynote presentation in San Diego. “I’m trained as a geographer and have spent over two decades teaching in public schools – teaching geography.”

Walz grew up in a really small town in Nebraska, with 24 people in his high school graduating class — 12 of them cousins, he said.

He enlisted in the Army two days after turning 17 and spent the next 24 years in the Army and Army National Guard.

“Two things you need to know as a gunner: exactly where you are on the surface of the Earth and exactly where everyone else on the surface of the Earth is,” 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 into the classroom, where he had students overlay different data sets on a world map.

“My students could tell you when the Holocaust happened, but to them, it was a historical anomaly in time, and they could chalk it up 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, at potential drought, just like the UN was doing around early warning of famine. … The capstone project was — this is 1993, for my seniors — was to come and publish (a report) on a world map of the world with all the layers that they would put in GIS: Where do you think it goes next genocide to be? And they came up with Rwanda. Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda.”