Growing up on a small farm at the edge of New York City, the firsthand view of economic development dominance over ecosystems inspired me to defend the underdog. I studied natural resources at Cornell University and helped save wetlands from becoming mini-mall “parking fields” at Langan Engineering. But with the growing understanding of challenges facing global well-being, I came to appreciate our socio-economic system as the tail wagging the [under]dog. To reconcile the value of ecology with economics I pursued big data science, helped improve a major global climate model (CESM) and subsequently realized academia and the “publish or perish” mentality was largely detached from real-world impact. By luck, I discovered a new paradigm of decision-relevant science that I named Evidence-based Tradeoff Mapping. I intend to freely share applications of this framework through ThenAtlas.org with the goal to engage diverse audiences and inspire community-aided, systems thinking approaches to intractable problems.