“Smart Earth” Digital Technologies and Environmental Futures | Karen Bakker

“Smart Earth” Digital Technologies and Environmental Futures | Karen Bakker

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hello welcome I'm Claudia richini I'm the executive director of the Rackley fellowship program at Harvard University before I introduce our speaker today I want to encourage everyone to submit their questions for the speaker using the slider link that is provided in the chat we encourage you to submit your questions at any time throughout the program we will address them after the speaker's remarks thank you today we're speaking with Karen backer this year's matina s honor distinguished visiting professor she's an environmental geographer with a particular interest in environmental governance Karen describes her work as often starting from the inside that environmental processes and social practices are mutually shaped by each other while her overarching research theme is best described as socioecological Justice she is a consummate interdisciplinary worker her Publications have included research findings from social sciences and Natural Sciences and her collaborations have led her to work with experts in an even wider array of fields well before her time a Radcliffe that is most extensive Publications to date have focused on the critical role of water and water governance in the life of communities most recently she has expanded her Focus to study the function and effectiveness of digital technology in the ecological field her book the sounds of Life published in 2022 assembles an array of research to examine how digital technology has been used to expand Collective knowledge of non-human sounds and communication in addition she discusses the potential of This research to shape Environmental Conservation for the better heraklif project explores how the tools of the digital age could be mobilized to address some of the most pressing socioeconical environmental challenges of our time including biodiversity loss climate change and water security with an insecurity okay now here's something fun to know about Karen she published French kids eat everything her Memoir inspired by year she spent living in France with her French husband and two daughters this book which was more widely read than all of her academic work combined led to a series of TV appearances where Karen greatly surprised her colleagues by appearing Under The Horizon name she reassured them by explaining that teaching children to love vegetables is more profoundly impactful for the environment than many academic Publications it is a great pleasure to give the virtual floor to karenbacker thank you so much Claudia and thank you to everyone at the Radcliffe for fostering an amazing interdisciplinary Community this year I'm very grateful to be here I'm going to share my screen I'm going to speak for about 35 minutes and at that point I'll really welcome the discussion and the questions so to begin the past decade has witnessed an intense debate over the impacts of digital transformation on Environmental Conservation you've heard a lot in recent weeks about the power of artificial intelligence to disrupt our economies our societies our democracies my project looks at the potential for AI and digital Technologies to disrupt the way that we relate to and regulate Monitor and govern the environment scientists and entrepreneurs including the biggest Tech firms have spent the past decade assembling an array of satellites and sensors robots Big Data virtual reality a whole digital apparatus that seeks to harvest environmental data and automate environmental monitoring and conservation proponents promise that these technologies will give rise to something like a digital Green New Deal which they promise will combat climate change prevent pollution and slow biodiversity loss but critics raise significant concerns about Eco surveillance capitalism and bias today I'll walk you through that debate which is the focus of my forthcoming book with MIT press to provide context I will briefly give a background on Gaia theory for those of you unfamiliar with the concept as a way of setting the stage for the focus of my research which is on the digital transformation of Gaia or wiring Gaia for shorthand and I'll conclude the presentation with some examples of how these Technologies are going to reshape the way we govern the environment in the future moreover how we relate to other species including expanded Notions of multi-species Justice so to begin with Gaia Theory not Chell Gaia Theory holds that living organisms and their environment exist in a mutual interplay of interactions at a planetary scale the most obvious way we can see this is with biological processes that interrelate with biogeochemical cycles a familiar example no doubt is the oxygen cycle whereby you and other animals are engaged in exchanging oxygen with the atmosphere carbon dioxide of course that we exhale absorbed by plants and this cycle of oxygen and the cycle of carbon a cycle of nitrogen there's a lot of interchange of various biochemicals between us and the so-called abiotic or non-living environment a well-known example I'm sure you're familiar with is the Keeling curve um of course emblematic of climate change and increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere but I wanted to show this graphic because I wanted to draw your attention to the smaller curve the blue curve in the upper left hand corner that's the annual variation of CO2 in the planet's atmosphere and you might be wondering why isn't it stable why does it move up and down every year Well the reason is that when vegetation trees plants shrubs um wakes up in the springtime instead of April May and starts to absorb carbon dioxide that's when we see from the peak of the curve The Descent to late fall and then we see the CO2 Rising again it's as if on an annual cycle our planet is inhaling and exhaling a carbon dioxide and that is the beauty of these interrelationships between the atmosphere and living things now we now know that our planet's atmosphere itself and our ability to exist on Earth as um oxygen breathing species is thanks to a simple bacteria cyanobacteria that long ago in deep time oxygenated our atmosphere there is a big debate about the evolution of those interrelationships from that long ago time to the present day to trees I won't dive into it except welcome questions about it in the question period but I did want to flag one scientist that I discuss in the book Lynn margulis who worked not far from here actually at Amherst who was in addition to um someone who crafted and popularized Gaia Theory um she was responsible for the theory of symbiogenesis or endosymbiotic Theory briefly symbiogenesis refers to the crucial role of symbiosis in major evolutionary Innovations you might remember from high school biology the fact that you have mitochondria in your cells and they are if like energetic if you like counterparts to chloroplasts in plant cells chloroplasts of course as plants drink sunlight and chloroplasts assemble the sugars that we then later break down in our mitochondria and one of the things that it perplexed scientists is that mitochondria do not share our DNA mitochondria in your cells are inherited from the maternal line they do not share your DNA they're like little aliens living in your bodies to put it in non-scientific terms and Lynn margulis solved this great scientific mystery through her theory of symbiogenesis controversial at the time now widely accepted to explain the origins of eukaryotes to explain how Once Upon a Time long ago our ancestors absorbed absorbed other cells and began to collaborate and cooperate with them the take home message is that Gaia you can think of Simply as symbiosis observed at a planetary scale a symbiosis seen from space and I'll return to this theory of symbiogenesis later in the presentation this symbiotic set of relationships is now being destabilized by human activity in the current ERA the anthropocene which is one in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet's climate and its ecosystems there are a number of if you like signatures of this um be they related to uh nuclear um explosions or the large amounts of litter which we strew on the planet but in brief the way scientists have documented the anthropocene is to track those biogeochemical cycles I mentioned earlier and note the hockey stick curve here the rapid increase in many of these variables all of which signal essentially a planetary system that's out of balance spurring a great debate about whether we are approaching tipping points we are exceeding planetary boundaries at a global scale if you were an alien approaching Earth from outer space one of the first things you would encounter is this this is um a graphic from the European space agency this plots all of the space junk we've put into the upper atmosphere and space surrounding Earth um so we like to think of ourselves as a tool making species I sometimes argue that humans are actually a tool littering species over the past Century as the anthropocene has gained Pace humanity is collectively produced about 50 kilograms of stuff for every square meter of the Earth's surface that's 30 trillion tons that technosphere now outweighs the biosphere and even within the biosphere we have colonized the land the oceans we've dramatically altered ecosystems to the point where we've exterminated or extirpated a large number of species and one example I like to give is this that the collective biomass of humans and their livestock now massively outweighs the remaining biomass of wild mammals so that gives you a sense of the degree to which Gaia and its long-standing biogeochemical interrelationships may be destabilized by human activity now one of the approaches that has been proposed to address this issue is the digital transformation of Environmental Management at a planetary scale this is the focus of my forthcoming book with MNT press it's the focus of the Radcliffe project and I've given that project the shorthand wiring Gaia so of course the rapid rise of the internet from a few early nodes including Harvard in 1970 through to today is remarkable for the fact that the internet is the largest machine that Humanity has ever built and it allows an unprecedented degree of collection and aggregation of data this is a just a map of tweets about Sunrise scrolling across earth with a beautiful sort of Sunburst of tweets as the Sunrise Scrolls across the Earth what what scientists and entrepreneurs have remarked is that we could be collecting an aggregating similar data about non-humans and indeed that is what they are now doing so sometime over the last 24 hours just to give you one example a flock of satellites has flown over your head that flock of satellites has flown over every single spot on Earth that group of satellites which is uh maintained by a private company called planet in San Francisco images the entire Earth's surface somewhat like a line scanner would image a 2d object but they're Imaging it in three dimensions essentially in real time and the next step is to create a search engine that doesn't Google text or images but a search engine that googles the surface of the Earth in real time so we have real time ubiquitous continuous environmental data that we can query that we can analyze that's just one example of the digital apparatus that's now being constructed to surveil the Earth that digital apparatus has three components um a high degree of instrumentation so sensors drones nanosatellite it's cell phone based interfaces in the in the oceans um and on land those devices are interconnected thanks to cloud-based Computing and that enables an exponential increase in data to be collected and shared and distributed of course the data Deluge creates an issue it reverses a prior constraint on 20th century environmental governance in which we usually had very scarce or patchy data now we have a hyperabundance of data and to analyze that data scientists are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence data science and computational techniques that essentially automate and accelerate data analysis and increasingly make the results available in real time now proponents argue that this is positive for many reasons there are many examples that they provide and I'll give some in a moment about how this accelerates sustainability it enhances Hazard mitigation and we could incorporate citizens in really new meaningful exciting ways in decision making a lot of that is due to the fact as this graphic demonstrates on the right that because we automate the data cycle collecting sharing analyzing and then real-time distribution we can overcome another constraint of 20th century environmental governance when we used to regulate the environment we were always playing catch-up the post talk regulation might impose fines or punishments but the damage was done you could find a polluter but the the river was polluted and the fish had died but now we can detect environmental harm or crime in real time or even predict it and prevent it and it's that real-time element that proponents argue is game changing for the environment Skeptics on the other hand raise concerns about privacy transparency and data colonialism they draw attention to the life cycle of these objects there's an enormous amount of E-Waste at either end of the life cycle and also human rights abuse is associated um with some of the elements needed to build these devices and of course all of this risks deepening the digital divide I don't have a lot of time in the presentation to go into depth about how the high stakes of this agenda but I'll give just one example a few years ago Microsoft appointed its first Chief environmental scientist several hundred million dollars were invested in AI for Earth um Google Earth IBM Cisco even DARPA the defense research agency this is a major initiative in the U.S it's also a major initiative in China which is arguably the leader in global Earth monitoring Technologies very apropos given the balloon incident that we recently had the Nexus between the militarization of conservation and environmental surveillance and environmental governance is thus very much at the heart of the ethics of this debate and I'll return to that at the end of the presentation but before I do that I want to give you some examples practical examples of what these smart Earth applications are actually like they're they're fairly uncanny they're a little bit like science fiction come to life each of these examples highlights a characteristic of smart Earth or digital Earth governance and the first is that these Innovations are ubiquitous this is Tanya bergerwolf she's at Ohio State she's a computer scientist she has invented a wild book which is like a Facebook for wildlife several years ago she invented a a essentially a computer vision algorithm analogous to a fingerprint reader or a barcode reader her first application her first use case was zebras it worked remarkably well and she has now scaled it up to an algorithm that can identify not only a species but any individual member of any species if they have any markings gradations Stripes spots scars whatsoever it's like facial recognition technology for the world's Wildlife so this allows unprecedented Wildlife monitoring at scale using drone imagery or satellite imagery her work has led to the stabilization and now recovery of one of Africa's most endangered species and she's now working on re-classifying and analyzing the entire iucn red list and that's the international Union of conservations list of the most endangered species about which remarkably we have very little data we have pretty incomplete censuses of most of the world's endangered wild animals so the ubiquity of this monitoring is sort of captured in this innovation a second characteristic of smart Earth is that it's automated this is FEI Fang she's a Carnegie Mellon also a computer scientist her work which was done in collaboration with milind tambe here at Harvard involved taking um an anti-terrorism algorithm first developed for Coast Guard applications and re-coding that algorithm to to predict the presence and the actual Pathways taken by poachers in national parks so the advantage of this is um patrols of gamekeepers or Wardens knowing where the poachers are likely to be can alter their Roots um thus increasing their safety because you have an element of surprise and also leading to a much greater efficiency at catching poachers on the very first up uh run trial of this um they caught uh poachers and elephant snares tiger snares this has been expanded to several hundred parks around the world and this application because it's automated essentially allows um a game-changing reset between the war between poachers and gamekeepers which poachers had been largely winning a third aspect of smart Earth applications they're mobile this is one of my favorite examples these are pop-up wetlands so let me explain Cornell University runs a very large uh crowdsourced digital bird monitoring database so bird monitoring has taken really forward with digital Tech we can use bio loggers on the actual Birds bodies we can monitor them from satellite we can monitor them even at night thanks to these Technologies and we can combine that with actual sightings from citizens of Citizen science and Ebert has millions of participants so we have an unprecedented ability to track bird migrations in real time why is that important it's important because with climate change those migration patterns are changing and what used to be predictable is now very unpredictable so the bird's movements are unpredictable but what is also unpredictable is the Environmental condition of the places where they make stopovers on their long migration routes a good example is California's Central Valley which is an important resting site for migratory birds with climate change the birds when they were arriving in the past decade were not finding the sort of wetland terrain and the food that they needed to continue their Journeys so what eBird what Cornell did is partner with the nature conservancy and come up with an idea of pop-up Wetlands the way it works is that a precise um analysis of the bird migrations is fed into an app that app uh has a network farmers and when the birds are coming the farmers get a text says something like the birds are coming and then ask them do you want to flood one of your fields or keep one of your Fields flooded longer for which they are paid and it's a reverse auction system the results has been in the Central Valley an increase a significant increase in diversity of Shorebirds and waterfowl and the genius of this idea is if the conditions keep changing the actual site and the timing of these pop-up Wetlands can also change it can follow the birds so instead of having one established Park we have these mobile parks that follow the endangered species a fourth application of smart Earth is immersive Tech so the arvrmr world of course uh has had a lot of application in gaming and we've seen a lot of debate about the metaverse so there are questions about efficacy but in experiments Jeremy balance and at Stanford is um has done some interesting experiments those who participate in these AR and VR worlds so for example um there's one VR where you can tour a factory farm there's another VR where you can actually cut down an old growth tree another one one of my favorites um puts you in the body of a dragonfly you're given a backpack with subwoofers and so when you beat your wings in the VR you can actually feel your shoulder blades vibrating so all of these are trying to project us into different relationships with the environment in a virtual fashion baylinson's research has shown that these applications work not only to cultivate empathy but also persistent environmental action well after the VR experience one of the most widespread applications of this has been of course climate flooding there are many apps now available where you can actually go to a particular site and look through your phone and the phone will show you what that site will look like once climate change 30 40 50 years has changed the flooding profile of that particular site a fifth characteristic of smart Earth applications is that they are bio-digital and this entails uh the merging of a few sort of cutting-edge scientific agendas um crispr and genome editing on the one hand and bioengineering on the other hand this is a slug bot so this particular creature um is a a sort of a hybrid of a 3D printed bioplastic and then cells that are cultivated from the uh the muscles uh and the neurons of the slug this um will inch forward and the idea this is actually worked on a Case Western University this uh creature biohybrid creature will inch forward underwater and could be mounted with environmental sensing devices and of course at the end of its lifetime it will simply Decay without leaving any e waste this is roachbot another approach to biobot technology this involves um essentially a fixing electronic sensors to live animals and insects this has been done with seals for subsurface sea temperature sensing in this case the electrodes are inserted um through the thorax and connect with the ganglia so this is a little shocking but a human operator at a distance can essentially control the movements of this insect it can actually tell the insect how to move its legs and wings um similar research has been done with moths mothbots so the potential applications here earthquake recovery cockroaches go can go into very small spaces where no other um uh sort of rescue device can be inserted and also environmental sensing so you can already see the sorts of ethical implications that are arising here with um these devices and this debate has intensified with the innovation of xenobots actually one of the key um uh authors of xenobot being Michael Levin right down the road at Tufts so xenobot is the world's first AI designed biobot what this team of researchers did is they selected the Genome of a frog the African clawed frog xenopus lavis they fed that genome to an AI they gave the AI instructions about using um the uh certain components of the genome to design an organism that would achieve certain tasks for example capable of locomotion capable of self-repair so after several thousand designs and I think it took a few months the AI came up with a design that was created with synthetic biology this is the world's first example of a living or an entirely biodegradable robot living I should say in scare quotes because there's some debate about whether it is actually alive whether it can self-reproduce so the applications here might include these are speculative and nanoscale intelligent drug delivery uh scraping plaque out in your arteries Gathering up microplastics in the oceans it's unclear what applications might be seen once we release this into the wild and I would add this is not released into the wild this is in carefully controlled lab conditions but my point is that we are at the frontier of biodigital transformation of environmental governance where a lot of the um silicon-based devices we used to use may be replaced by carbon based and that will of course accelerate once DNA storage is more widespread so this fundamentally changes the options we have for a toolkit for Environmental Conservation which requires a pretty I think fulsome discussion of the ethics you'll remember I mentioned Lynn margulis earlier in the book um I draw on various aspects of social theory to try to query the different approaches that are brought to bear on these Innovations Manuela veloso who's one of the leading roboticists and computer scientists argues in favor is something she calls symbiotic autonomy so in from this perspective we're facing a future where humans machines animals plants um enter into these Cooperative relationships that are mutually enhancing symbiotic autonomy Donna haraway the well-known social theorist argues for sympoisis a kind of um collaborative generative set of relationships but one in which the question of autonomy and power relations becomes very Central it's very simplistic she might argue to assert that we could have any kind of um collaborative relationship with nature given the sorts of structures of economic appropriation notably under capitalism through which we create these creatures so she would ask us to query the power dynamics that underlie these inventions Lynn margulis might offer a slightly different approach symbiogenesis remember this absorption of other beings to create organelles like mitochondria and chloroplasts she might argue that we're undergoing another phase of symbiogenesis but this time humans rather than simply creating tools and using them we are now absorbing our own tools and this is creating a fundamentally different path in evolution James Lovelock one of her collaborators has written his most recent book he sadly recently passed away is on what he calls the Nova scene in which he lays out some of these arguments for those of you interested in social theory feel free to ask questions and we can dive deeper in the question period but I want to move on to one more point about digital Earth which is I think the most transgressive and potentially the most interesting and that is the potential for smarter applications to extend participation in environmental governance to non-humans that is it would no longer be solely humans who who mystically assume that we are the ones who govern the planet and I've developed this argument initially in an earlier book that was just published in October the sounds of life and I'll just walk you briefly through the arguments as one example of this inter-species interrelationship so the sounds of Life focuses on one aspect of smart Earth Technology and that is digital bioacoustics and ecoacoustics these are digital bioacoustics recorders they're very simple devices they can record large data sets of sound often well beyond human hearing range and the high ultrasound or the low infrasound higher or lower than our hearing range that data can be encoded into spectrograms this is a spectrogram of a rainforest Bernie Krause some of his work led to the Insight that this spectrogram shows us sort of a principle in nature the acoustic Niche hypothesis which is that species share acoustic space but they don't compete it's a bit like Distributing radio stations on a radio dial you can see the different species here are essentially communicating at different frequencies at different times a trained Eco acoustician could look at this spectrogram and much like a trained radiologist could decode an x-ray or an MRI they could decode this spectrogram and tell you something about the biodiversity of this ecosystem we can also track the evolution of these spectrograms over time they are excellent and very low-cost automated ways to track species richness for vocally active species a darker blank spectrogram is actually one that indicates a less biodiverse environment and indeed these are more widely used now for Environmental Conservation monitoring purposes within the past another application scientists are developing seeks to build on this knowledge and engage in interspecies communication essentially The Proposal here is much like the Google Translate in your phone powered by Machine learning The Proposal is that we could begin to detect patterns in non-human communication and translate between human languages and the communicative regimes of other species so much like the Rosetta Stone this archaeological artifact that enabled translation between known languages and at the time unknown Egyptian hieroglyphics revealed a lot about ancient Egyptian civilization The Proposal is one could do the same with non-human communication and in fact the seti project the cetacean translation initiative spun out of the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study David Gruber a couple years ago they are working on decoding sperm whale communication the Earth species project is another initiative and a variety of other initiatives have sprung up for example the elephant dictionary initiative Joyce pool in East Africa so scientific agendas are attracting interest from entrepreneurs so raising a lot of ethical questions about whether we could indeed engage in interspecies communication and what the ethics might be of doing so this is very very complicated I'm just going to give you one example honeybee language honeybee communication which has been well known um for Millennia um was something that was intensively studied by Carl Von Frisch who won the Nobel Prize for his work in the mid 20th century he identified the now well-known waggle dance this figure of eight dense very complex which enables bees to communicate the distance and direction of a nectar source to their hive mates even if the nectar source is very far away over a lake behind a mountain it is pretty amazing communication skills we've deepened our knowledge of honeybee communication with digital Technologies using computer vision as well as Acoustics because honeybee language is vibrational positional spatial honeybees can sense the position of polarized light they Orient their bodies to the position in the sun they rotate their abdomens with six degrees of freedom you know amazing but try and imagine translating this in some meaningful way I just play one audio clip laughs foreign so there are researchers that are actually trying to do this um Tim landgraf in Berlin has actually used computer vision to track honeybee movement encoded this information combined with Acoustics into honeybee robots I'll just play you a video this is a honeybee robot trying to do a waggle dance in a beehive largely this doesn't work the bees often attack this robot they certainly don't welcome it but a lenscraft's lab has actually had one result where the waggle dance communicated location information to honeybees he didn't know why it worked that one time doesn't know how to replicate it but that gives you a sense of where we're at in this field essentially developing what are actually technically complex but still very clumsy playback experiments and with those playback experiments we actually have determined that a number of different species have specific signals that means specific things they have individual names bats Dolphins they can convey very complex particular logical information not only between animals but also between animals and plants so there's a huge field of communication out there that we can indeed sense with digital Tech and perhaps one day we will break the interspecies communication barrier so I'll conclude with a very brief description of environmental futures and I I will actually just use this to open up the discussion period because it highlights some of the directions in which this conservation work is going so one of the biggest initiatives to date with smart Earth Tech has been to wire up the oceans um digital instrumentation one example is the Smart ocean system off of the Pacific northwest coast so along with the instrumentation comes at drones this is a caught spot it's an underwater autonomous vehicle it programs the Great Barrier Reef it uses computer vision to identify an invasive species crown of thorn starfish that is incredibly disruptive to Reef life and you can see it in extending its metal arm here and killing the starfish by lethal injection so the this is actually operational these are the sorts of devices that are now patrolling the oceans So within this field this digital field which raises lots of questions about about um the ethics of conservation one application is mobile protected areas remember I said earlier that we were going to have more mobile conservation indeed this is occurring in the oceans so the idea here is pretty simple you put bio loggers on species and you also use underwater digital Acoustics to listen and identify their location um this is very computationally intensive because you're tracking many things to help predict where the animals not only are but where they're going to be so sea surface temperature weather Etc what that translates into is like weather maps for species um this is being done with uh endangered tuna off the Australian coast it's being done with turtles in Hawaii and it's been done with whales um off both coasts of the US in fact off the coast right here in Boston this is a whale map it's um an aggregate of whale sightings I took this just this past weekend the whales have moved further south in the winter they would move further north in the summer this map and the data is distributed to ship's captains with high degree of um geographical accuracy in real time and what that allows Regulators to do is require that ships captains and Fishers move out of the way slow down or stop fishing in areas where whales have been sighted the most stringent regulation is actually on the Canadian side of the border to protect very endangered North Atlantic right whales many of which moved out of the Gulf of Maine in search of food given changing ocean conditions under climate change a lot of species are migrating North bright whales included so this regulatory regime is monitoring whale movements in real time conveying that information to those on boats in the ocean in real time and requiring them to get out of the whale's way the highest fine that could be administered is 250 000 on the Canadian side so imagine this you have a population of less than 400 whales the North Atlantic right whale that is left after industrial whaling only a few decades ago we were harpooning them on the west coast we were machine machine gunning some whales and yet today we have this this digital apparatus that is giving agency to the whales that is a population of less than 400 whales simply by singing can control the movements of tens of thousands of ships along a coast that's how home to hundreds of millions of people so I'm not suggesting that this will in any way be sufficient um to save this population it's certainly uh is an important uh Factor but I want to leave you with this thought about the future potential of environmental regulation to entail some form of collaboration with non-humans enabled through digital technology essentially we now have whale Lanes in the ocean alongside shipping lanes could you scale this up to the global oceans scientists are now proposing exactly that so I will close by mentioning I'd welcome questions about critiques there are many the data critiques alone are a whole chapter um in the book there are many regulatory and legal issues that are analogous to those uh that pertain to digital surveillance of humans there's an extra complication with indigenous data sovereignty and that pertains to the important um fact that indigenous communities control many of these territories they do also often have a fiduciary or stewardship responsibility for territories with high levels of biodiversity and so indigenous data sovereignty comes into play in these debates in a very important way many of the critiques that I am engaging with in the project in the book are also something that's not really front and center for the innovators pushing these um these Innovations forward I mentioned environmental impacts earlier we're adding to the technosphere with all of these devices and we don't have a good plan to clean it up and we are potentially exacerbating the digital divide particularly when these devices and Regulatory regimes are applied in context of power imbalances of areas of aggressive conservation management and so the risk is we're sort of automating inequality rather than democratizing access to digital environmental data and digital decision making so I'll welcome your questions on some of the ethical challenges um I'll leave you with a question do you believe that techno-nature can substitute for the real thing and with that I'll welcome our discussion and turn it back over to Claudia wow ly fascinating um we have a few questions that are you know I'm sure that our audience have more so feel free to put them in in slido let me go to one that kind of seems to hit at the core of your talk you say a wired Gaia a desirable outcome or a trade-off to keep our lifestyle though humans are reliant on machines and tools couldn't we use less of them yes excellent question in fact wiring Gaia may be mistaking the disease for the Cure it may be entirely misguided to seek to apply more technology to solve a problem that's essentially caused by too much technology and you know the the thought of a future where the entire planet and the global oceans are littered with digital environmental monitoring devices is not a pleasant one um I think they're I argue in the book there's sort of a happy medium um I I I argue very specifically that there are certain cases notably the most endangered species which are subject in some cases to significant environmental crimes that are currently not monitored and um or if they are they're not in the regulations are not enforced for those if you like triage cases where digital Tech can help I think we should be doing that I think digital Tech can also be used for environmental regeneration I didn't have a chance to get into it in the presentation but digital bio Acoustics has been demonstrated by Steve Simpson and Tim Gordon and others to be really effective at helping to regenerate coral reefs it turns out because Coral are attuned to sound notably Coral larva and fish larva if you um play the sounds of a healthy Reef coral reef DJ I know this sounds like science fiction but it's actually science two degraded coral reefs you help with coral reef restoration so in these sorts of test cases I think it's this is really really helpful what I think is worrisome is the privatization of the world's environmental data the United Nations environment program is trying to stand up a sort of collaborative repository for environmental data as a digital Commons it's unclear whether that will actually work in the meantime much of that data is being privatized so not only is the the worry about essentially an over application of this technological assemblage but there's another worry about the privatization of environmental data much of which has value we probably haven't figured out yet and for that reason I think it would actually be helpful for nation states for governments to update their environmental governance regulations their environmental laws which is essentially mostly date and spirit from the 1970s and 80s to get ahead of this digital Earth agenda because right now it's essentially private companies that are leading right right um the next question um goes kind of um to the CO2 levels um what digital technology projects are happening regarding CO2 levels and what possibilities for the future do you see in this work oh great I'm going to scale it out slightly to greenhouse gas emissions um so one interesting project uh it's a set of projects entails real-time monitoring of methane emissions by satellite the environment the environmental defense fund I think collaborating with people at Harvard is launching their own satellites so imagine this an environmental NGO launching their own satellite a a company in Canada has also launched one already ghg sat and these satellites have incredibly fine-grained ability to detect methane plumes in real time so for example the largest methane plume in Europe was recently discovered coming from a garbage dump near Madrid the Spanish government was shocked and embarrassed right so methane of course being an exceptionally aggressive contributor to climate change we now have the ability to name and shame the top methane emitters in real time globally and some jurisdictions like California are talking about taking the next step and issuing fines in real time or more complex auction mechanisms that would essentially be very similar to what was used to reduce acid rain if you remember in the 80s and 90s acid rain was a big deal so the analogy would be that when that acid rain work was done a lot of the data got sent back and forth by facts believe it or not but now we have the ability to automate that regulatory regime in real time and with sticks and carrots that can actually have a very significant impact on the most egregious emitters and polluters so there is also other work that's being done more long term that would optimize energy grids using artificial intelligence so as a species we're very wasteful there's a lot of efficiency gains that are possible both within the digital Network you know server Farms Etc which are incredibly energy intensive um but also just more generally um energy distribution transmission so um notwithstanding those gains it is um the best calculations suggest that as we bring more and more people online globally as we intensify our use of of Digital Data um probably the net production of greenhouse gas emissions by the digital sector Tech plus all the digital devices will exceed any gains that we would be likely to make through these Technologies so um there is a huge issue for the tech sector face up to is if the internet were a country it would be the third largest emitter I think in the world after India and China uh the US and China sorry and so the tech sector is a huge issue to face up to so on the one hand are these great Innovations we're creating on the other hand they they themselves have a huge climate problem right um okay let's go back to Wetlands creating pop-up Wetlands seems for uh seems great for complementing gaia's functioning but organic AI um um is organic AI likely to interfere with natural systems your thoughts yeah so we you know we don't have uh organic AI yet one one so there are some like Lucas Jabba who's the chief environmental scientist at Microsoft that talks about building a planetary computer powered by AI so this this AI because in theory it would have so much Earth data environmental data at its disposal it could track these biogeochemical flows and these flows and movements of organisms in real time and it could intervene this is sounding very much like Isaac asimov's Foundation series I know um so first of all we're not there yet we're very far from that and of course nature always surprises us with inter interconnections and interrelationships we don't know about um so I I don't I don't believe that if you like the strong case for organic AI is anywhere close and I actually feel like um that probably wouldn't be a wise idea according to most ecologists because of the um if the the if you like the unforeseen implications of essentially what would be large-scale natural laboratory experiments with whole species now a smaller version however could actually could actually potentially be useful in constrained ecosystems with constrained species which are highly endangered so essentially um I wouldn't want to let these applications loose in the wild um whoever asked the question though it's a very good question I hope they follow up with me after the talk to chat a bit more because there's another interpretation of organic AI that we could also chat about wonderful um the next question um will smart Earth Technologies move us forward in granting legal protection to the other uh parties or other species involved in these Technologies so I mean this is I think a simple way to phrase it is smarter Technologies make it technically possible to enable forms of um a legal personhood that we're formerly not available to us technically whether or not we Grant those to non-humans and extend the political franchise or the economic franchise is of course a political discussion but we now have the ability for examples use blockchain to create property rights we have the ability through digital Acoustics to listen for species and to essentially constrain human movements through the oceans um and and essentially have co-participation in environmental governance through sharing the jurisdiction over ocean space now um whether so whether this actually ends up with the meaningful um granting of Rights environmental rights to non-humans I don't think will will um we will achieve through these mechanisms because these mechanisms are ultimately still eliminate sort of they would be um not participating on a Level Playing Field on a human created system of property ownership and economic relations so so something more significant something more transformative might transpire in the book I talked briefly about the work of Isabel stengers and Bruno the tour on what they call cosmopolitics or the parliament of things what one could imagine as a thought experiment a parliament of earthlings with a greater degree of political voice and agency which we I don't think have invented yet but perhaps these Technologies could open the door to something like a parliament of earthlings right and following up exactly on what you're saying the next question every asked what sorts of international Global forums has the capacity to discuss these issues and act or enforce any conclusions are there any yeah so uh unep the United Nations environment program the Coalition on digital environmental sustainability uh the German environment um agency wbgu did a great report on digital sustainability and when the Germans had the presidency of the EU they were looking at the intersection of digital transformation and environmental sustainability so those are some of the agencies that are examining this but under significant constraints I mean it would be great to see something like the minister Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the future for any of you who've read that science fiction novel um come to life and have something like this under its remit but but again the our environmental governance architecture essentially dates from the 1970s and 80s in a pre-digital Age and what we actually need is an overhaul at the national and international level to begin to implement some of these in a systematic way otherwise we'll just get piecemeal Innovation like we might eventually see the UN convention on the law of the sea and incorporate you know mobile protected areas that are digitally enabled that could take years so there is a sort of Earth system governance question here and this has become a sort of interesting field in academic research there's a new Journal Earth system governance and so that's where some of these debates are playing out but I don't think we have that architecture yet Ashton Native Native communities in your talk and one of the questions asked are there promising economic opportunities to engage minority communities in this kind of work I guess yeah yeah so I'll just I'll talk about a Canadian example um so and I want to ground this critical not being indigenous um but acknowledging there's important work being done on indigenous data sovereignty um Stephanie Carroll Russell for example um tahu kukutai who's written a book on indigenous data sovereignty in New Zealand so this um I would really recommend people go and engage with that literature but what it asserts is it's it's not that we wouldn't use the verb engage um rather that sovereignty and Indigenous law predates in Canada colonialism and that uh those um natural law founded relationships on indigenous territories keeping in mind Canada has a system of legal pluralism where on Canadian territory we have the civil law common law and Indigenous law all are operative all are legal um that that we have a a set of initiatives by indigenous communities which they are leading which they have generated for example indigenous Guardian networks along the coastlines and across large ways of Northern Canada where indigenous communities are the majority so in that context um what I would say is that it's not about engaging it's rather um informing ourselves about the leadership that indigenous communities have shown in digital innovation in um lands management and in conserving biodiversity and that actually it's it's we have to play catch-up because there's sort of a a bit of Amnesia about indigenous sovereignty and also about the Innovation that's happening in those communities and there's some very interesting work being done at the UN level to share those initiatives more broadly internationally right [Music] um there is a question about um if you about the tension between uh the use the collection news of open data for good purposes uh and the tension with you know the poachers and you know people who are not as well intended uh and you know can you speak a little bit to that yeah I mean I think the uh the the internet Mantra is data wants to be free right but with freely available data one can use a lot of that data for nefarious ends Precision phishing Precision hunting poachers could use this data in fact one of some of the tiger tigers that have been outfitted with radio callers poachers have hacked into those systems and used it to track down the Tigers it actually just helps them poach more efficiently so it's like a digital arms race between poachers turned hackers and um you know wardens in Parks so these are these are tricky debates but I think one Insight again from indigenous data sovereignty is we shouldn't assume that this data is free it belongs to someone when so if we assume that non-humans have personhood then perhaps non-humans own their own data we have not asked consent they have not given it indigenous communities have a claim to the environmental data harvested from their territories that would only be shared with certain protocols so I I my sense is that the open data regime would eventually crumble from too many bad actors but we have an alternative architecture to look to um there's some great work being done by groups like anamiki river that are creating alternative data platforms with varying protocols and levels of access and as much as I appreciate the importance of ecological data sharing I think raw data sharing in real time is probably not not the way to go in these alternative protocols would contain the kind of safeguards rooted in respect for land and place that we would need to see to try and ensure that this data is not misused it may also be that we decide there are data free territories that there are territories about which we do not gather any data much like territories today which are Wilderness areas in which human presence is is not supposed to to be so maybe maybe we don't need to collect data about all of the Earth's surface again a good debate not a not a not a decided debate right I want to um ask this question we have one minute um for a question and for the answer this is fascinated work and what lend itself to wonderful exhibitions in museums do you know Amy that have happened or are being created yeah together with Max Ritz who's my brilliant collaborator um now at Clark we've written uh an article on anthropocene festivals there's a lot of interesting work that's going on at the Confluence of sort of digital Tech art um and Museum studies and so I that is an academic publication which is open source so I'd encourage people to go look at that we have a number of examples of different communities and exhibitions that they could engage with if that's of Interest wonderful that that's a great note to end uh our conversation today thank you Karen for your uh amazing presentation and perspectives I also want to thank our audience for your terrific questions I hope you'll be able to join us uh for other actually virtual programs you can find out about future programs and watch videos of past events at rocklin.hava.edu that's all from now today from us today thank you and have a great rest of the day bye

2023-02-23 06:17

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