I've tried many ways to free my brain from my iPhone. I’ve invented rules, bought books, deleted apps, installed other apps. But the only thing that reliably works is to leave the phone at home and to walk along a path through the nearby woods. With trees overhead, and mud below, you quickly forget the last social media notification. You escape the internet of things by surrounding yourself with things that can never be plugged in.
Nature and technology seem to pull us in different directions. Silicon Valley prophets talk of colonising new planets, conveniently sidestepping the challenge of saving our own. Smartphones drag our attention into a vortex of high-definition screens and endless notifications, while the demand for ‘innovation’ drives an endless cycle of consumption and waste. Amazon and Twitter take their names from the natural world, even as they invent products that seem bent on supplanting it. At Google and Facebook, the world’s best engineers are engaged in souping up our own species via artificial intelligence (AI), rather than protecting millions of others.
Behind all this tension is a cultural clash between the optimism of the tech industry and the pessimism of much of the green movement. In its crudest form, conservation tends to be about keeping people ‘out’ to minimise humanity’s destructive impact; it rejects the idea that we can improve places through our presence and inventions. Conservationists are disposed to have an inbuilt skepticism of grand projects – derived partly from bitter experience, such as Australia’s notorious decision to introduce cane toads in the 1930s to eat agricultural pests (now it’s the toads who have become the pests).
Yet the tech community has always had its hippies and its environmentalists. What if technologies were to become part of the natural world, woven more closely into its rhythms and processes? You might have heard of smart cities; now we have the conceptual seeds of smart countryside, forests and wetlands too. Picture green landscapes populated by an army of self-guided bots, responding to the shifting needs of the environment in which they’re embedded, and evolving alongside it, too. After all, the most recent wave of innovation has been driven by ‘machine learning’ or ‘deep learning’ – self-teaching algorithms that get better and better at detecting and predicting patterns in data, a computer-science version of an adaptive process.
Drawing a bright line between humans and nature has always been tricky. It’s all the more difficult now, when no ecosystem on Earth is free from human influence; in the Anthropocene, nowhere is truly pristine or wild. ‘The paradox, in a nutshell, is this,’ writes the journalist Oliver Morton in The Planet Remade (2015), ‘humans are grown so powerful that they have become a force of nature – and forces of nature are those things which, by definition, are beyond the power of humans to control.’
Perhaps the answer is not to try vainly to remove ourselves from the equation. Instead, we might create a different category of place, one shaped not just by humans and nature, but by thinking machines as well – what the philosopher Huw Price at Cambridge University has described as the ‘Machinocene’. But will this new era remove a source of wonder from our world, or create a whole new one?
To start to understand the dilemma, take Mallorca, the Spanish island where tourism has left a deep footprint in recent decades. Last year, I visited S’Albufera national park, one of the richest ecosystems in the area, which my Lonely Planet guide optimistically describes as having the best birdwatching in the Mediterranean.
The park’s entrance is located halfway down a road lined with luxury hotels and shops selling rubber inflatables. The land was farmed until the 19th century; even as a national park, it requires invasive infrastructure – cement paths, a visitor centre, bird-watching huts. Planes fly overhead. In other words, it’s a human-shaped environment masquerading as a natural one. ‘If you don’t explain to people that it’s human-made, they don’t realise,’ Maties Rebassa, the park’s director, told me. ‘I always say, it’s artificial, but very naturalised.’
The real problem lies beneath the surface. Over the past 15 years or so, S’Albufera has become overrun by carp. The park’s authorities are unsure how the population started, but their favoured hypothesis is that someone released the fish in the hope of later fishing them. You can now see the glistening bodies of the creatures, bobbing under the surface. By displacing sediment in the canals, the carps turn the water muddy, and prevent plant life from growing.
Each year, using nets, hooks and cages, the authorities extract hundreds of thousands of carp from the waterways. But the younger, smaller fish elude capture, and there are huge areas of reedbeds that the park officials can’t even reach. The result is a losing battle. The authorities can’t drain the park, because it’s connected to the sea. They’ve even considered using genetic alteration of the carp to somehow bring about a population collapse.
For people fighting such intractable environmental wars as this one, the appeal of new ‘smart’ technologies is clear. ‘The idea that autonomous systems could solve complex problems about conservation is inevitable,’ says James Canton, a self-described futurist who has held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University. As in S’Albufera, the reality is that we’ve damaged so many ecosystems that, if we want to experience something wild, much of the time it might have to be constructed.
‘A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.’ So claims the character of the real-life Facebook investor Sean Parker in the film The Social Network (2010). Lauren Fletcher, a former NASA engineer, has imbibed this calculus, but with a twist. ‘We’re going to plant 1 billion trees a year,’ he says in a promotional video for his business, which shows him tramping through the countryside in an anorak and glasses, before putting a plastic sheath on a seedling. ‘We’re going to change the world 1 billion trees at a time.’
BioCarbon Engineering, Fletcher’s company, with offices in Oxford, Dublin and Sydney, is banking on using drones to reforest large expanses of the Earth’s surface. Like many tech ideas, it has a beautiful simplicity. Planting by hand is an expensive process. So is planting by planes and helicopters, which has been done for decades. But drones could do the same thing in less time and for little cost. In places such as the Amazon and Borneo, where tropical forests have turned into dull pasture and plantations, mass plantation could restore some of their lost wonder.
BioCarbon Engineering’s drones scan the landscape for suitable soil, then fire out seedpods with sufficient force for them to break the surface. The company claims that it has already planted 25,000 trees in trials worldwide, and is working on replanting mangroves in Burma. A next step might be to use its drones to replenish areas hit by mining and forestry.
Despite its early promise, question marks hang over the venture. The biggest is whether it’s really ambitious enough. On its own, aerial planting seems best-suited to pioneer species – those trees that grow well on bare land – and even then, once seedlings are established, they generally need protection. What’s more, the fundamental worldwide problem with tackling climate change is not really reforestation – it’s preventing forests from being destroyed for agriculture and forestry in the first place. ‘Planting seeds isn’t going to solve that,’ says Glyn Davies, senior advisor at the World Wildlife Fund Malaysia.
Still, these experiments suggest that conservation is not the amateur, artisan pursuit some critics might imagine. Environmental scientists also use technology such as lidar – a form of laser surveying, similar to radar – to map forests and the threats to them. Lidar not only measures the height of the forest; it can also be used to gauge how much light penetrates the canopy, and what species might thrive below. Conservationists also deploy sensors and camera traps to detect animal movements, augmented by software that can, for example, help to identify tigers by building a three-dimensional model of their skin and stripes (no two tigers have exactly the same pattern). And machine learning has accelerated these developments. Researchers at Georgia Tech, IBM and the Smithsonian Institution are working on tools that can accurately model what will happen to whole ecosystems in response to environmental shocks – an exercise that requires AI capable of crunching decades-worth of data, from the specific mass of microorganisms to the growth processes of coral reefs.
These are examples of conservationists exploiting technology to guide decision-making. Even people who might see nature in spiritual or semi-spiritual terms – to be kept as far away from human influence as possible – probably wouldn’t object. But we should also prepare for technology to go further: to start making choices on its own, with less and less intervention from human reviewers.
Nature and technology seem to pull us in different directions. Silicon Valley prophets talk of colonising new planets, conveniently sidestepping the challenge of saving our own. Smartphones drag our attention into a vortex of high-definition screens and endless notifications, while the demand for ‘innovation’ drives an endless cycle of consumption and waste. Amazon and Twitter take their names from the natural world, even as they invent products that seem bent on supplanting it. At Google and Facebook, the world’s best engineers are engaged in souping up our own species via artificial intelligence (AI), rather than protecting millions of others.
Behind all this tension is a cultural clash between the optimism of the tech industry and the pessimism of much of the green movement. In its crudest form, conservation tends to be about keeping people ‘out’ to minimise humanity’s destructive impact; it rejects the idea that we can improve places through our presence and inventions. Conservationists are disposed to have an inbuilt skepticism of grand projects – derived partly from bitter experience, such as Australia’s notorious decision to introduce cane toads in the 1930s to eat agricultural pests (now it’s the toads who have become the pests).Yet the tech community has always had its hippies and its environmentalists. What if technologies were to become part of the natural world, woven more closely into its rhythms and processes? You might have heard of smart cities; now we have the conceptual seeds of smart countryside, forests and wetlands too. Picture green landscapes populated by an army of self-guided bots, responding to the shifting needs of the environment in which they’re embedded, and evolving alongside it, too. After all, the most recent wave of innovation has been driven by ‘machine learning’ or ‘deep learning’ – self-teaching algorithms that get better and better at detecting and predicting patterns in data, a computer-science version of an adaptive process.
Drawing a bright line between humans and nature has always been tricky. It’s all the more difficult now, when no ecosystem on Earth is free from human influence; in the Anthropocene, nowhere is truly pristine or wild. ‘The paradox, in a nutshell, is this,’ writes the journalist Oliver Morton in The Planet Remade (2015), ‘humans are grown so powerful that they have become a force of nature – and forces of nature are those things which, by definition, are beyond the power of humans to control.’
Perhaps the answer is not to try vainly to remove ourselves from the equation. Instead, we might create a different category of place, one shaped not just by humans and nature, but by thinking machines as well – what the philosopher Huw Price at Cambridge University has described as the ‘Machinocene’. But will this new era remove a source of wonder from our world, or create a whole new one?
To start to understand the dilemma, take Mallorca, the Spanish island where tourism has left a deep footprint in recent decades. Last year, I visited S’Albufera national park, one of the richest ecosystems in the area, which my Lonely Planet guide optimistically describes as having the best birdwatching in the Mediterranean.
The park’s entrance is located halfway down a road lined with luxury hotels and shops selling rubber inflatables. The land was farmed until the 19th century; even as a national park, it requires invasive infrastructure – cement paths, a visitor centre, bird-watching huts. Planes fly overhead. In other words, it’s a human-shaped environment masquerading as a natural one. ‘If you don’t explain to people that it’s human-made, they don’t realise,’ Maties Rebassa, the park’s director, told me. ‘I always say, it’s artificial, but very naturalised.’
The real problem lies beneath the surface. Over the past 15 years or so, S’Albufera has become overrun by carp. The park’s authorities are unsure how the population started, but their favoured hypothesis is that someone released the fish in the hope of later fishing them. You can now see the glistening bodies of the creatures, bobbing under the surface. By displacing sediment in the canals, the carps turn the water muddy, and prevent plant life from growing.
Each year, using nets, hooks and cages, the authorities extract hundreds of thousands of carp from the waterways. But the younger, smaller fish elude capture, and there are huge areas of reedbeds that the park officials can’t even reach. The result is a losing battle. The authorities can’t drain the park, because it’s connected to the sea. They’ve even considered using genetic alteration of the carp to somehow bring about a population collapse.
For people fighting such intractable environmental wars as this one, the appeal of new ‘smart’ technologies is clear. ‘The idea that autonomous systems could solve complex problems about conservation is inevitable,’ says James Canton, a self-described futurist who has held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University. As in S’Albufera, the reality is that we’ve damaged so many ecosystems that, if we want to experience something wild, much of the time it might have to be constructed.
‘A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.’ So claims the character of the real-life Facebook investor Sean Parker in the film The Social Network (2010). Lauren Fletcher, a former NASA engineer, has imbibed this calculus, but with a twist. ‘We’re going to plant 1 billion trees a year,’ he says in a promotional video for his business, which shows him tramping through the countryside in an anorak and glasses, before putting a plastic sheath on a seedling. ‘We’re going to change the world 1 billion trees at a time.’
BioCarbon Engineering, Fletcher’s company, with offices in Oxford, Dublin and Sydney, is banking on using drones to reforest large expanses of the Earth’s surface. Like many tech ideas, it has a beautiful simplicity. Planting by hand is an expensive process. So is planting by planes and helicopters, which has been done for decades. But drones could do the same thing in less time and for little cost. In places such as the Amazon and Borneo, where tropical forests have turned into dull pasture and plantations, mass plantation could restore some of their lost wonder.
BioCarbon Engineering’s drones scan the landscape for suitable soil, then fire out seedpods with sufficient force for them to break the surface. The company claims that it has already planted 25,000 trees in trials worldwide, and is working on replanting mangroves in Burma. A next step might be to use its drones to replenish areas hit by mining and forestry.
Despite its early promise, question marks hang over the venture. The biggest is whether it’s really ambitious enough. On its own, aerial planting seems best-suited to pioneer species – those trees that grow well on bare land – and even then, once seedlings are established, they generally need protection. What’s more, the fundamental worldwide problem with tackling climate change is not really reforestation – it’s preventing forests from being destroyed for agriculture and forestry in the first place. ‘Planting seeds isn’t going to solve that,’ says Glyn Davies, senior advisor at the World Wildlife Fund Malaysia.
Still, these experiments suggest that conservation is not the amateur, artisan pursuit some critics might imagine. Environmental scientists also use technology such as lidar – a form of laser surveying, similar to radar – to map forests and the threats to them. Lidar not only measures the height of the forest; it can also be used to gauge how much light penetrates the canopy, and what species might thrive below. Conservationists also deploy sensors and camera traps to detect animal movements, augmented by software that can, for example, help to identify tigers by building a three-dimensional model of their skin and stripes (no two tigers have exactly the same pattern). And machine learning has accelerated these developments. Researchers at Georgia Tech, IBM and the Smithsonian Institution are working on tools that can accurately model what will happen to whole ecosystems in response to environmental shocks – an exercise that requires AI capable of crunching decades-worth of data, from the specific mass of microorganisms to the growth processes of coral reefs.
These are examples of conservationists exploiting technology to guide decision-making. Even people who might see nature in spiritual or semi-spiritual terms – to be kept as far away from human influence as possible – probably wouldn’t object. But we should also prepare for technology to go further: to start making choices on its own, with less and less intervention from human reviewers.
by Henry Mance, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Pierre Andrieu/AFP/Getty
