Ologies with Alie Ward - Conservation Technology (EARTH SAVING) with Shah Selbe

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

THIS IS UPLIFTING, I PROMISE. And it might just make you switch careers. As a bookend to last week's Oceanology episode, Conservation Technologist Shah Selbe chats about saving the planet with some well-intentioned technology. Wind turbines, solar cars, and all the ways in which sensors, drones, recycled smartphones and real-time data reporting can help conserve species, spaces and communities that are threatened. Hear inspiring tales of travel, art, adventure and putting engineering to good use from a former rocket-science turned professional do-gooder.Also discussed: crocodile astrology, fishing vests and hippo power displays.Conservify.orgShah Selbe on Twitter and InstagramMore episode sources and linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hey, it's your weird lady uncle, who sometimes finds Reese's pieces in the pockets of blazers she hasn't worn in weeks and eats them. Alleyboard. Now, I'm kind of excited for you. You get to listen to this episode for the first time, it's all about to happen. Now I've already heard the conversation twice, maybe three times now in edits, but you have even heard it once and it's amazing. So it's about the Earth and also saving it.

Now in the coming weeks, we have episodes about ants and Egyptian mummies and crime and crow funerals and breast health, but last week's episode was on oceanology and we really got a glimpse of how sick we've made the seas. And I heard from a lot of you that it was inspiring and informative, so I thought that could be the one punch and this is the two punch. So this week we're following up with another eco episode that's really, really colorful and adventurous and inspiring and it's gadget driven and it will restore your faith in the future even more.

I think so, I hope so. This one is such a weird ology because it might be one of the newest ologies out there, but it's also at the intersection of nature and the future and machines and animals and brainiac, do goodery, all kind of suspended in an atmosphere of adventure. So this dude has good intentions, a truly boggling capacity with technology and some stories. Dude has stories. But first, you know I do a little effusive thinking up top and I just want to say thank

you to the patrons who spend as little as $0.25 an episode supporting the show, it adds up and keeps it going. For the last year, this has been a totally independently made passion project and patrons help me pay an editor to keep it professional, they help me pay myself a little for the time I put into making it and we buy batteries, sound cards, things like that. Speaking of buying, ologiesmerch.com has all new back to school items like backpacks printed with sharks and coffee mugs about trains and there are college sweatshirts that say ologies and crested items.

Thank you to Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas for making those available and designing them. You can also rate and review and subscribe, that keeps ologies up in the charts so thank you for that. Just a few minutes and it just feels like a good deed, it doesn't cost a dime. Also I lurk around the Apple podcast reviews and yeah, I take a peek and each week I read a fresh one just to prove it and this week, I want to thank Dee Hepting for saying I'm wicked stoked about this podcast y'all. It's every nerd's dream come true.

The podcast is essential because it makes science fun. You'll even pick up useful phrases. I recently worked a boy howdy into a presentation I gave at work last week. So thank you Dee Hepting for your wicked good boy howdy slip. Keep doing it. Okay. Conservation technology. Ward, what is this all about?

What kind of word sandwich is this? Oh, it's a good one. It's a real fluff or nutter of analogy you guys. So conservation in this sense refers to that of the earth or plants or animals and technae comes from the Greek for art or craft. So it's the art of saving the world. No biggie. Now this conservation technologist was recommended by our Lepidopterologist Phil Torres aka Philly

T exoskeletoras and it turns out he also knows last week's oceanologist Dr. Ayanna Johnson. So he runs in some great nerd circles. He started the non-profit Conservify which makes open source technology to very broadly help save the planet. He's also a fellow at the National Geographic Society. He's been on expeditions all over the world and in this episode we talk about tracking gorillas in the Congo, taking the pulse of Canadian glaciers, working with indigenous communities in the Amazon to monitor logging, some shark tagging and also fishing vests

and hippo butts. To score this interview I trekked all the way to the remote reaches of downtown Los Angeles to see his really cool lab slash office and I made him give me a tour first which really consisted of me like just pointing at objects and asking him what they were. So please shore up your hip waiters and roll up your sleeves to dig into a really wonderful chat with conservation technologist Shaw Selby. Okay so you're going to give me a tour of your lab. I walked by and I just saw that there's a whiteboard and all it says on it just, science!

And I'm like, okay, give me the tour. Yeah, okay, so this is our lab. It's kind of in between like a maker space or a hacker space. And now you also have a gurgling algae-filled terrarium. Let's go look at it. Yeah, so it's just a regular fish tank but we've kind of allowed it to grow into this ecosystem in and of itself but we wanted to do that because we build these sensors that can test water quality in different parts of the world and if we were just using a regular

fish tank the data would be boring. So we allow it to kind of grow and get all this weird stuff. So for visual reference, imagine a small gurgling aquarium thick with algae strands kind of like if Beetlejuice dropped his wig into a fish tank but more vibrant and alive and with electronics submerged. You can see there's a whole bunch of sensors that are sitting in there now and we have some of them connected to some of our electronics monitoring it and this is the sort of setup that we end up taking and deploying in places like Botswana or the Amazon Rainforest or

some of the other places that we work. And you're testing it in a fish tank in your office in downtown Los Angeles. Yeah, well I like to call it our ecosystem. Pardon, pardon fish tank, I meant ecosystem, how dare I? And then you have, let's see, I'm just going to start naming things off, it appears you have mallets, hammers, soldering equipment, correct, more microscopes, what are you doing with all this? Are you tinkering with technology to make it work better for you?

So we use this setup to build the technology that we take out on Expedition, it's actually a lot of the same gear that you would find in like your local maker space because we use a lot of the same methods that makers use when they're building their projects but we do all the building and the testing and everything here before we take it out on Expedition. Do you 3D print things? We do, we have two 3D printers, we have a laser cutter, it's a lot of fun stuff. Dang, this is awesome, okay, let's sit down, okay, let's get to the interview. So I'm a conservation technologist, which it's actually a title that didn't really

exist before, I sort of made it up and fortunately now other people are calling themselves conservation technologists, so it's become more of a thing. The work that I do came from stuff that I was doing when I was going to grad school at Stanford, I studied engineering and university, I always only wanted to be an engineer, that's all I wanted to do and I, but I always also felt that engineering kind of had this great role that it could do some amazing things in the world, right, I mean it helps us protect people, solve diseases, build these cities and everything that we live in and so I thought that there was kind of more profound work that I could do with engineering, so I was

always searching a bit. So little aside, Shaw got his bachelor's at UC Riverside in chemical engineering and his master's at USC in systems architecture and he also studied engineering at Stanford. Now in grad school, he started working with an environmental non-profit using technology to address illegal fishing and he was like, ooh, well I can use gadgetry to help address the earth's ills, this is a thing. And from then on everything just kind of took off and so I was looking at ways that we could use new technologies, you know, like mobile technologies and drones and satellites and

all sorts of stuff like that to help to find people who are fishing in places that they shouldn't be fishing. And then it kind of expanded to doing work in a lot of different areas in terms of like conservation and ecology and saving the general planet from just current fuck-ed-ness that's happening, right? Yeah, totally. And so a lot of those technologies that I was looking at for that one very specific problem could be applied to other problems as well and so I started branching out more and more

and reaching out to beyond just ocean conservation stuff and to terrestrial stuff and so now the work that we do is kind of a mix of both. Take me back to your childhood. At what point did you know you were good at engineering or mechanics or had a passion for environmental things? Did you take like toasters apart? Yeah, actually, you know, I was that kid that would take things apart. I was very curious about what was inside of, you know, it actually turns out that I was

very curious about what was inside of my dad's expensive audio equipment. Like, why did we have this try? Yeah, exactly. But like, you know, credit to my dad instead of getting angry at me, he would teach me how to put it back together and I feel like that put that little engineering bug in me at an early age. Oh, what a good dude. Yeah.

What kind of, I love that you went for the expensive audio equipment, like not a Walkman from like 1986, but you're like, the new surround sound, why don't you take apart? Yeah, I mean, it was his amplifier and like his whole set up that I ended up kind of taking apart initially and then we would, we would just start to take other things apart and learn about how they worked. My dad wasn't even an engineer, but he was very curious about that stuff all the time. So we'd explore it together and I knew from then on that I wanted to, you know, be somehow involved in technology and making things like that.

And then when you were deciding what your major was in college or deciding what your path was, I understand and it seems to be well known that you were just like a casual rocket scientist professionally for a number of years. How did you go from, you know, being a curious kid who took apart amplifiers and probably like made them even hella sweeter before putting them back together to being a rocket scientist? Yeah. Yeah.

I did that for, I worked as a rocket, I don't like saying rocket science sounds, but okay. So my official title was I was a spacecraft propulsion engineer. So I would work on all the rocket engines and tanks and everything that would move around satellites when they're in space. And I did that at Boeing for 10 years. And so I ended up going to school for chemical engineering and coming out of school, I was looking around at the kinds of jobs that a chemical engineer could get. And the only thing that I could find at that moment was working in waste treatment plants,

which is a very important role, but it didn't, I didn't feel very inspired by working in waste treatment at that moment. By the way, I have someone on deck to do this, a, shall we say, reclamation hydrologist named Laurie. I mean, I want to know about wastewater and what happens. Where does it go? What do we do with it? It's so important.

Okay. But that's an analogy for another time. But okay. So Shaw was less interested in underground waterworks and instead looked to the sky for his first post college job. And he says he sent out letters and reached out to as many people as he could. And he landed a long running and very successful gig at a little space place called Boeing, where he worked on satellites, including 13 satellite launches.

He said 12 of which made it into space. And I was curious, I had to ask, like, how does it feel when one does not make it? And so we sat around for about an hour, hour and a half. Everyone knowing something kind of went wrong, but we didn't get the official word from them until then. So people are starting to get more and more depressed. And finally, we just all ended up at a bar. Well, yeah.

You're like, hot wings, anyone? Yeah. Let's do that. But I mean, that's part of science is failures. I mean, everything that you do that isn't a huge success out of the gate, like literally out of an out of a launch gate. You end up learning from, right? Totally.

I mean, and, you know, I would say even more so now failure is part of our process. I mean, we're trying to do some really hard things here at this lab where we're trying to bring technology in places where technology doesn't want to be, you know, in the middle of wetlands at the bottom of the ocean, all sorts of places where the environment is drastic. And we're trying to do it in a way that's, you know, affordable for anyone to use or for, for scientists that are outside of kind of the richest universities in the world have access to. So that means sometimes things fail.

You have to, you have to be okay with that. And now when you left Boeing, what was it like to be like, I'm, I'm been here for a long time. I'm good at what I do. It's time to move on to something that is maybe more like enriching on a personal level. What was that decision like? Did you just like wring your hands about it for a year? Or were you just like, boom, I made a decision yesterday.

It's happening. It was a bit of a process as these things tend to be, you know, I was kind of known at Boeing as, as the do-gooder engineer. I worked with engineers without borders for a long time. And then this stuff started happening and, and towards the end of it, towards my last year at Boeing, I was going on expeditions all the time. I'd be gone for a month in Africa or something. And it just got to a point where it's like, it very clearly made sense for me to, to move

forward into this other one. I, the thing that kind of lit the fire underneath was I was offered a fellowship at National Geographic Society. So basically, you know, it's a very hard thing, a very prestigious thing to be able to get to be a fellow there. And so once I got it, that came with funding that allowed me to start my nonprofit and do this full time. But I had been doing this work for, for a decade before.

What was it like when you gave your notice? It was very exciting. What did you do? Did you write it on a cake and be like, Hey guys, there's cake in the break room. It's like, I'm out. No, I mean, I remember I walked into my, my boss's office and I sat down next to her and I started to tell her and she's just like, I already knew, yeah, I knew this is coming. This is like, not a surprise.

So she said, that's fine. They actually, you know, Boeing really liked me being there. So they, they offered to put me on a extended leave of absence just to see if things worked out. Right. Yeah. And I, I never went back. So can you tell me, you work on so many things in so many parts of the world.

Can you give me a little bit of a rundown? Sure. Yeah. So yeah, we do, we do a lot of stuff and it's quite exciting. The kind of the longest running project that we've had was what has now become a major initiative, National Geographic called the Okavango Wilderness Project. And so that's, that's the project that's in Botswana and Namibia and Angola. And it's really focused around how we can better protect the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Which is where a lot of animals live. It's very rich with wildlife. Yeah. Incredibly rich with wildlife. And it's just, just this beautiful wetland that it's a series of rivers that flows into the middle of the Kalahari Desert and just becomes this paradise. I mean, there's so many, so much wildlife there that some of those days I'd be in my tent, I'd open up my tent and I'd walk out and it felt like you're in the middle of a

Disney movie. Oh my God. And then you're walking out with giraffes and wildebeest and I mean zebras, everything. It's just, it's amazing. You know. Like bird lands on your shoulder, a butterfly comes and offers you coffee, you're like, what's happening? Totally.

So what we were doing with that project was it's actually pretty interesting. You know, traditionally when scientists want to kind of protect an area or understand an area better, they do these biodiversity assessments. So they go in these expeditions through the area and they count wildlife and they take other kinds of scientific readings. But the way that had always been done in the past was they would write their stuff down in notepads or something and then they would come back and all go in some Excel file or something on their desktop and then it gets locked away and eventually the scientists

would want to publish it. So it would take them a couple of years to publish the papers on it. And we thought, you know what, that whole process isn't really welcoming to anyone outside of the science field, right? There's scientists are going to these amazing places all the time and they're not really sharing what they're seeing and we wanted to try and facilitate a better way to do that. So that's what became the Okavongo Wilderness Project. We thought we can build these technology tools that allow the scientists who are on expedition

to be able to share everything that they're seeing and all the data they're collecting absolutely live, like immediately as it's happening. And so with other partners, we built this website called Into the Okavongo that you would go to while we were on expedition and you would see where we were at. You'd see the pictures we're taking, you'd hear the audio of the places we were at. I mean, if you went to the website, you'd see a little bubble that had an S on it and that was me traveling down expedition as we're going. That's better than watching Coachella live on YouTube and avoiding having to wear sunblock.

So for more on this, Nat Geo made the dock into the Okavongo, which came out this April and it details the challenges of doing research in the region from dried up riverbeds to leftover land mines from ankle is civil war. It's also a really, really great portrait of the teams going out doing the work from tons of local scientists and guides and then researchers from all over the world with different specialties. And of course, I started poking around the Instagram into the Okavongo for visuals and one recent post is this stunning photo of a field scientist writhing from having a tick

embedded in his ear. It was clasping onto his eardrum, but mostly there's just gorgeous photos of wildlife. So in summary, it's beautiful and it's not easy work. So what was Shaw up to there? Yeah, no, it was cool. And we would gather all sorts of data because we were just curious about what would come out of gathering all this data and seeing these interesting stuff. So I built sensors that would measure water quality and weather.

We took 360 degree photos, you know, through the whole expedition so you could put on VR goggles and see. We even took the measurements of the heartbeats of the researchers while they're on expedition. We gathered as much data as we possibly could and we had it all streaming up live via satellite. And part of what we were trying to do with that project was outreach, right? Reach out to the public, explain to them what a wonderful place this is, why it's so special. As part of the 2015 expedition, the team was in a part of Angola that was very difficult. It was like rough, you know, the rivers were windy, boats kept on capsizing, there was

bees everywhere. It was just a very brutal part of the expedition and, you know, a lot of fires and landmines and all sorts of things that you have to avoid. And so it kind of in the nature of sharing everything with the public, we complained about it on Twitter, you know, so we told everyone about what a horrible time we're having at that time. Well, so one of our followers actually ended up seeing that complaint and tweeted us down this message of support.

And that follower was Samantha Christopheretti who is a European Space Agency astronaut on the International Space Station and following our expedition from space. So she took a picture of the Delta and tweeted us down this message of support and good luck. And let me tell you, that was like the most uplifting thing you can imagine. I look this up and yes, Astro Samantha tweeted down from frickin space, a you are here kind of aerial shot of this massive glimmering River Delta, this network of like tributaries fanning out over the wetlands. It was taken from 250 miles above Earth and beamed down via Twitter to the scientists

and guides who are dragging their heavy canoes over riverbeds fighting bees. And yes, the whole thing made me cry. Someone in space is like, good luck with the bees. And you're like, what is life right now? Yeah, it was unreal. It was unreal. What other parts of the world have you been to and what kind of projects have you done in them? Because I can't even imagine your passport, dude.

Like it's got to be how many shots do you have to get a year? Where have you been? Like, yeah, I mean, I actually I've been vaccinated for everything. I even have I have cholera. I have a cholera vaccine, which most people don't have. I didn't even know you could get one of those. When I got it at the travel clinic, they were like, are you sure you need this? Because nobody ever gets this.

And I'm like, yeah, I think I need it. That's like an off menu item in and out. That's like hit me with the collar. They're like, ooh, stuff. So yeah, where else have you been? So I mean, this year, we, you know, we've done some work in the Amazon rainforest. And so that's a big project that we have to it's basically around citizen science in the Amazon.

And we're trying to track migratory fishes as they travel through. And so Cornell's Lab of Ornithology built this app to allow them to track the fishes. And then we're building sensors that we're going to put through the Amazon. And and we're trying to do it to better protect those fishes that there's some fishes that start in Brazil and end up in Peru and go back to Brazil. I mean, the longest freshwater migration of any fish in the world is in the Amazon. How many miles is that? It's thousands of kilometers.

Yeah. And the amazing thing about it is, you know, right now they can do that. And that fish is important to every single indigenous community along the way. But there's a lot of plans to put things like dams in the Amazon. And if you were to dam up a lot of those rivers, it ends up stopping those migratory fishes from getting through. And so we're trying to document things now before they start to change. Another trip that I recently did, I went to the Republic of Congo. And so we went to Odzala National Park, which is very close to Gabon.

And the work we were doing there was with one of the world's leading researchers on Westland Lowland Gorillas, which was pretty amazing stuff. So I came in to use drones to help to map out those sorts of areas. The reason why, you know, these these gorillas have this very interesting behavior around certain types of trees where they like to dig up parts of the root and eat them. And we wanted to find out where all those trees are so we could try and see where all the gorillas are.

And that's a very difficult thing to do if you're just hiking through rainforest. Yeah, it's a lot of land, a lot of trees, a lot of gorillas. Very dense, hard to see. Yeah, I mean, it's just very difficult. But with a tool like a drone, you could fly it over the whole area and you can you can map out that area and then you can like either individually go in the in the model or the picture and identify those trees or we can even build like artificial intelligence that will kind of go

through all the data for us and pull out the stuff that we need to do for it. So Shaw is using technology to preserve areas from technology. It's kind of like an inoculation, like a little bit of the virus in a vaccine, maybe, I don't know, as perhaps the first ever conservation technologist on the planet. Does this intersection ever befuddle people? How misunderstood is your field where you're using technology to help the planet when when technology is kind of to blame for the problems of the planet?

Like, do you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, I mean, I think so, you know, the crazy thing about it was when I first started working on this stuff, know a lot of people didn't get it. Right. I mean, some people got it. But but when I was in a room of conservationists, they were all saying, you know, we don't need technology. We could do this the old fashioned way when I was talking to technologists. They were like, how are you going to make any money off of that?

That doesn't make any sense. You know, nobody was nobody really got what we were trying to do. But now it's really changed. Now it's to a point where every single major environmental NGO out there has technology programs. Now, technology in the science and conservation space is not entirely new. You know, that it has been used there in the past. But the way it's been used has either been one of two ways.

One is, you know, you have a PhD student that needs to measure something weird. And as part of their PhD, they develop some technology. But usually, you know, it's developed by a biologist. It's not necessarily optimized or using the newest kind of technological approaches. So as a result, it's it's expensive. The other way is you would buy it from one of the very few companies out there making this sort of thing. And and then again, it's expensive because these companies are only selling it

to a handful of people. So side note, computers, of course, get better and better every year. With, according to one figure, I saw a one trillion fold increase in computing power from 1956 to 2015 and then upwards from there. Now, Shaw says every year he sees a rise in the availability of tech to help out with nature. I mean, like remember when our tiny purse computers, a.k.a. phones couldn't even do portrait mode and we didn't even have a robot with a microphone in our living room so we could shout, please play me some solid 90s jam.

I'm sad today. Just every year keeps getting better. So now we're in this like really amazing time with like things like, you know, smartphones and the maker movement and all this where the price of developing technology just dropped to the floor. It's become incredibly cheap to do that sort of stuff. We end up leveraging a lot of that maker technology. A lot of the open source technologies to go into these places and implement solutions

and also work with the communities there and allow those solutions to become the community solutions and not, you know, some random guy from the US that's flying in and saying, you should do this better. Right. Like help to build capacity in those areas overall. And do you feel like conservation technology, the main thing that it can do is gather information so that we can better protect the environment? Yeah, I mean, for the most part now it is. Right. And it's starting to transition a little bit.

But the biggest threats that we had to the planet. Well, the biggest start to the plan is humans and the impact that we have. But the threat behind that related to conservation is the fact that we hadn't ever been able to to quantify it very well. Right. There's a lot of parts of this world where anybody who wants to do anything that's bad, like poaching or anything illegal, nobody's ever going to know about it. Right. It's just it's it's if you go out to the middle of the high seas, it's like the Wild West people are just doing whatever they want out there, you know,

because they could always get away from it. And so now, you know, the first part of conservation technology is how can we start to document what's actually happening in this planet and gather this data and then also create a baseline so we can see how things are changing over time. So by gathering data and monitoring, scientists can catch things like heavy metals in a river when it's still early, instead of just seeing the effects of, say, crocodiles dying off.

And I know some of you are like, OK, yeah, I'm not super concerned about saving a crocodile because they would literally eat my butt off my body if given the chance. But they are part of the ecosystem and they do have birthdays and feelings. And if they're tiny claw hands could hold pencils, they would probably journal. Also, isn't it weird that every crocodile has a birthday and thus an astrological sign? OK, I'm sorry, but I had to figure this out. So in the southern hemisphere,

crocodile mating season is between November and March. They're out wild and for a considerable time and eggs take three months to hatch. So I think by my calculations, most crocodiles are probably Gemini's. I mean, anyway, what about rivers without crocodiles? Do places like the US, do they have those kinds of sensors in our rivers and like how well monitored is it in different countries? Yeah, I mean, not really.

You would think that the US would have a lot of them. But because of the the regulations and the strength of the industrial sector here, a lot of those places are not monitored. And so that's where why we see things, you know, bad things happen. Environmental issues happen in this country from time to time. In other parts of the world, it's not monitored at all. And it's a lot easier for us to go in and kind of install these sensors

because the communities where we're installing them, they'd love to have this sort of stuff. But, you know, when I was just in the Amazon, we were talking to a lot of the indigenous communities there, people who are our partners in implementing some of these ideas. And they were so frustrated because of the the oil spills and the other kind of chemical spills that happen in that Amazon. And the fact that they have absolutely no way to just to prove that it's happening. You know, when when it happens, the government says, no, that's actually not.

Then nothing happened there, right? And they and they brush over it. And so these these communities feel marginalized, like they can't do anything about it. We want to build sensors to give to them to allow to say, hey, no, actually, this is actually happening. And right when that starts to happen, it automatically posts to the Internet. So there's no like, take that information, give it to someone, and then it gets swept under the rug somewhere, right?

That information goes straight to the world to see what's actually happening there. So it's quite a powerful thing. And what other kinds of technology are you using? We already know drones, gorillas, sensors, fish. Like, what else is what else are you using to help what? Yeah, I mean, so we're using sensors in other ways as well. So we're like one example is a project that we had in Canada in Banff National Park. This project was a partnership with the City of Calgary and Parks Canada.

And basically what we were doing was monitoring a glacier that was melting. But instead of using kind of the big expensive equipment that's used in other parts of the world to do that, we built low cost sensors. It was pretty much the same sensors that you find in your cell phone that can tell when you turn your cell phone and move it. So we would put those around the glacier and we could be able to tell in a three dimensional perspective how the glaciers melting over time. Whoa. So you're like, oh, it's shifting to the north,

which means that this space of the glacier is. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and the cool thing about that project is that, you know, all of that data is streamed back live. So we built this little observatory on the glacier that collects that data and it sends it back to a lodge and that lodge, it posted on the internet. And then so we have it and we're giving it to a glaciologist to do their research on it. But they're also going to take that data and they're going to stream it to

this installation in Calgary. And so in downtown Calgary, they're building a park that looks like the glacier that we're protecting and all the movement and melting and everything is translated to lights and sounds through that park. So people will end up seeing that that glacier is melting over time. And the reason why the people of Calgary care is because that glacier is named the bow glacier. The bow glacier feeds the bow river, which ultimately flows right through Calgary.

So once that glacier melts, it's going to impact the people there because they're going to have a dry river now. It's not going to flow anymore. So imagine a sleek modern building in downtown Calgary, a series of vertical light tubes display almost like an EKG of glacier shifts and cracks and pops and movement. Well, all these ambient sounds play in a line of speakers nearby without context. You just like walk through and be like, oh, this is trippy with context, knowing that this glacier is melting in real time at an alarming rate.

You're like, one sec while I sink to my knees and hoarsely cry into my scarf, as one does. So what happens when people see, oh, shit, our glacier is melting? Like, does that mean that different legislation gets put in place? Does that mean like what what practical things do they do to be like, we got to save this glacier? Yeah, I mean, part of what we like to do, it's two ways. One is when we collect this sort of data, like like glacier data or other types of animal data, we always go to work with the governments

who are involved with it to show them this is this is what's happening real time and allow them to use that data to do something good. But we also like to just put it online for people to see because if people see this kind of information, get excited about it, that can lead to additional pressure that can, you know, try and force the government to do what's right when it comes to that sort of thing. And so so those are like the two two pronged approach we like to take on things. And then tell me about some other technology.

Sure. Yeah. So another technology that we're we're working on right now is GPS tracking of animals. So, you know, a lot of scientists, they like to put these tags on animals to understand where animals are going. The great thing about putting a tag like that on an animal is that, you know, once the researchers leave, then the animal starts acting actually how the animal acts when people aren't around. It's like when you bid your lover adieu for the day.

And then once in solitude, you can finally fart. And we can start to learn some really interesting things about them. Researchers have been tagging animals for a very long time. But the tags that they use are made by just a handful of companies and they're very expensive. I have one over here that if you wanted to buy, it would cost you five thousand dollars to build. Yeah. Are these the radio colors like you see on Puma's and they're very huge and they have like a big antenna sticking out?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the one I have is not is not very huge. It's pretty small, but it does have a big antenna sticking out of it. And yeah, that's exactly what they are. Now, they're made there. They cost five thousand dollars because they're just made by a handful of companies that have kind of cornered the market. But the amazing thing is we could use that same technology that we use for other reasons. You know, the smartphone technology, the maker technology to create low cost

versions of these open source versions. So we've been working with some other collaborators that are also in the conservation technology space to develop these sorts of tags. So side note, later this year, Shaw is just casually heading to Belize and Antarctica to tag sharks and sperm whales. Just in case you need like a dream job for your vision board. Now, how do these aquatic tags work, though? Is it like smacking a tile on one of them and being like, yeah.

Well, actually, so the whale one is actually really interesting because there's a second component to this project. Traditionally, in whale tagging, for those sorts of whales, the best way to attach it to the whale is actually they essentially put harpoons on the end of it. So they end up stabbing it into the whale and it stays on as the whale dives. Well, the main part of the project is around how can we develop a mounting mechanism for this tag that is non-invasive, that actually doesn't hurt the whale.

Yeah. So we're we're trying all sorts of crazy material stuff and looking at the way geckos attach to walls and like all sorts of things. We have like a lot of crazy ideas and a lot of strange materials that we're going through now, but but ultimately the idea is that this thing is going to be able to attach to a whale without actually hurting it. I mean, if you stabbed me in the butt, I would act weird for days, if not forever. Like a knife hits me in the butt. And then it's like, OK, go off and be yourself.

And you're like, no, I got to deal with this thing through all of this. I just can't get over thinking about this one nagging question. I'm still trying to like wrap my brain around your passport. I every time you mention a new country, I'm like, that's another stamp. Like is your passport. Did you have to extra pages in it? Yeah, I'm actually on a new passport recently. So I mean, maybe in the last year or so.

But but it's filling up pretty good. How do you decide which project you're going to be working on next? Because you've worked in oceans, you've worked in deltas, you've worked in glaciers, like so many different animals. How do you know what's next? How do you decide? Yeah, so in certain times, it would be an idea that we have that we want to develop. But but I'd say 90 percent of the time it's someone who is working in an area

that that needs something and can't afford it or or like has an idea for something new and comes to us and we help to develop it. You know, we could be experts in the technologies and how the technologies can help conservation, but we don't necessarily have to be experts in gorillas. Right. And so a lot of the projects are started by those people coming up to us and saying, hey, I have this crazy idea. Do you think it could work? You know, and the the fun thing about having a lab like this is we could take

a week and we could see if it would work. You know, we have a bunch of electronics in here and 3D printers and things like that. And so we'll just we'll quickly prototype something and see if it looks like there's a possibility there. And if it is, then we, you know, will either like go and find grant funding from a foundation or something, or we'll we'll wait until an opportunity when we can actually go and deploy these things. How important is waterproofing and what you do?

It's very important. So, I mean, you know, we're in some of these places, we're putting electronics like it just will not live there unless you very, you know, waterproof it very well. I mean, wetlands, rainforests, things like that. Yeah, it's just got to be it's got to be very well built and engineered to be able to kind of withstand that. Shaw is also always looking at how to keep costs low. And he says he wants to move beyond the days of good science just coming

out of well funded universities and empower more people locally to keep collecting and sharing environmental data. The other thing we really try and do is work with scientists that are in other parts of the world, you know, traditionally scientists that go out into the field, have gone into these countries, studied a bunch of stuff and then and then left and gone back to their universities. And a good friend of mine, she calls this a parachute science, you know, because it doesn't really help the community that's involved, you know.

And so we try and partner with people in the community and engineering university from that country or scientists that are in the field that are from the country themselves. What is the craziest thing you've seen out in the field? What's the crazy like craziest moment where you're like, damn, if I ever read a biography, this is going in. Yeah, so I would say one of my favorite moments is something that actually, you know, I do a lot of talking to like classrooms for STEM stuff.

And this one kills with little kids. So the work that we're doing in in Botswana meant that we were always in the water. We're always in canoes and we're always surrounded by hippos. And so I don't know how much you know about hippos, but they're like horribly, horribly mean, right? They're feisty beasts. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, super territorial.

I've never seen something that go from like completely asleep to the angriest thing you've ever seen in your entire life, faster than a hippo. It's insane, you know, real bitches. All right. Quick apologies to hippopotamia for calling you bitches. I thought you killed more people each year than other animals. But it turns out you kill like 500, which is still a lot of people. But crocodiles kill double your amount.

They're such Gemini's rabbit. Dogs kill 25,000 people a year and snakes kill 50,000. But really, what are the animal kingdom's biggest bitches? Well, mosquitoes responsible for 750,000 deaths annually through the spread of infections. And I feel I can call mosquitoes bitches because only the females take blood meals. But really, you know what? None of these animals are bitches. They're just doing their jobs.

They're living their lives. They're snacking on people or standing up for themselves. So in summation, hippos are boss bitches. Yeah. And so, you know, we've been charged by them. They've like they've like charged us with water, which is like scary. I mean, when they charge you under water, they they drop to the bottom of the river and they run.

And so you just see this wave coming towards you. It's super terrifying, especially when you're just in a little fiberglass boat and they're doing that running towards you. But the but the my favorite encounter was something that hippos do very rarely, but they do it when they're when they're very angry. It's a threat display. And this hippo was outside of the water and we're in the water in the area where where that hippo considered its home.

So it ran from where is that up to the very edge of the water and it started spinning its tail in a circle and and started defecating. And and it starts spraying it. And the reason why kids love it when I tell the stories is because I call this the poop tornado. So the hippo does this massive poop tornado. And I I ended up just picking up my camera and taking a picture. And I just got the perfect shot of of this hippo.

You see the tail and then just all these brown specks flying through the air. That is rough. That's like that's like shit hitting the fan. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. And and I mean, it's meant as a threat threat display. And like it is a very threatening or are you kidding me? You see anything doing that with its poop and that's a threatening thing. I just watched videos of this and I'm so sorry.

But it is very funny. It's very good. It's it's super boss bitch move. And I really I challenge anyone to try this maneuver, especially if you keep getting interrupted at meetings. Oh, my God, have you ever been super afraid for your life? Have you ever been like, oh, this is this is a widowmaker? I don't think I've ever been truly afraid.

One there was at one time that we were we were charged by an elephant, a mother elephant that was with with her child. And that was like very frightening because she got very close. And I think that's the closest I felt to death. But usually, you know, when we're out in these places, we're, as I said, we're with experts and we've learned enough to know like what we can and can't do. And and so I've been in the water with big sharks before or been around

lions and all sorts of stuff and never really felt felt truly scared. Yeah. Is it true that people who are explorers wear a lot of khaki vests with pockets? Yeah, I mean, yeah, pockets are important when you're exploring. When you keep in all those pockets, you got to have a lot of stuff. You have to have flashlights. OK. Trail mix. Yeah. You travel like sometimes. Yeah. Like flares. Yeah.

Compass, things like that. Do you actually have a khaki vest, like a fishing vest? I do. I do have a khaki. Do you wear it in the field? No, I don't usually wear it in the field. I've been thinking about getting one of those just in general for like going into airports or not having a purse. Why don't I just wear a fishing vest that has so many pockets?

You should. I support this idea. OK, I'm going to look into it. Oh, man, I'm so glad I investigated this very important piece of American history. OK, so the modern fishing vest was conceived of and invented in 1930 by a man named Lee Wolfe, who ran a fly fishing school on the Beaver Kill River in the Catskills. And not only did he have impeccable style, he was also very active in conservation efforts.

He was a key player in popularizing the catch and release method of fishing. He coined the popular motto, quote, game fish are too valuable to be caught only once. It's also like, well, maybe don't hook him in the mouth in the first place, Lee. But yes, I hear you. Good call. Anyway, Lee Wolfe, inventor of the fishing vest, died in 1991 at the age of 86, piloting a small plane. And journalist Charles Corralt eulogized him, saying, quote, Lee Wolfe was to fly fishing.

What Einstein was to physics. Now, his personal fishing vest remains on display in a fly fishing museum in the small town of Livingston Manor, New York. Now, next time you see me, I will be wearing a khaki vest and it will be stuffed with lip balm and phone chargers and quarters and errant Reese's pieces that I will eat upon discovery. OK, now it is time for the rapid fire round. Questions courtesy of patrons who support the show for a buck or more a month.

But first, super quick before the Patreon question round, I do want to give a special shout out. I'm doing a little bit of a promo swap with another really, really good podcast. And I'm excited to be in cahoots with. And so this is just a promo. If you like this podcast, you might want to check out a podcast called Flash Forward, which is hosted by Rose Evelyn. And she's amazing.

So the premise is that each week she takes on a possible future scenario, like the existence of artificial wombs or what would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to Earth, like what happens if we live under the sea? And if we could understand animals with some common language. And so each episode starts with like a little audio drama, like a radio play, and then transitions into these interviews with real experts about what would happen if that really happened. You can find out more about it at flashforwardpod.com.

And she's had guests on like Katie Mack and Jenna Wortham and Kim Stanley Robinson and Ed Young and all these great people. And so people say it's like a radio lab meets black mirror, but with jokes. And I very much agree with that. So if you like this podcast, check out Flash Forward. And now we're going to go ahead and do the rapid fire round. Here we go. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners,

we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where oligies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, oligies gives back. There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week.

So if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to go, those are all picked by oligists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. OK, your questions. Patreon questions. You ready? Yeah. Betsy Long wants to know, why can't those of us with lots of snow

send it to parts of the world suffering from droughts? Yeah, I mean, that's actually a question I've heard before. Part of the problem is that we, you know, you don't we don't really realize how much water people use. I mean, it's it's a crazy amount on a daily basis, like what each household uses, how much water goes into producing different types of food. I just think logistically, it would it wouldn't make sense from like a would it be financially feasible for a pipeline to be general, you know,

run from some snowy area into Southern California? Just it doesn't make any sense. And so I think like with that, the best option is trying to conserve. We have to be better about how we end up using water. Maybe we need to stop putting it in a bunch of plastic bottles. And then and then there's desalination technologies that people have started to use, but that's also very expensive. It can have wildlife implications as well.

Oof. Yeah, that was the next question Christopher Royce Royce wanted to know. I'm interested in desalination tech. Will it ever become cost effective or are water wars inevitable? Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that they probably are. You know, I guess it's going to be rough. Yeah, I mean, the way the planet's changing, we just there's nothing good about it. There's actually an area of south central part of the United States, Texas and Oklahoma and a lot of that area.

And they're they're all fed by the same aquifer. And they think that it's going to basically dry up in the next 30 years. And so we're going to see it in this country. We're going to see lots of impacts when it comes to that sort of stuff. So I think unfortunately, I think desal technology is going to become viable once things are dire enough that it has to become viable. But it's it's not the best option. This is a real dumb question.

How come you can't just boil the water and the salt stays behind and then you gather the water? Yeah, I don't think that's how it works. I have no idea how desalination works. OK, so I looked into it and apparently there are two main ways desalination is happening. There's multi stage flash distillation, which uses heat to evaporate water and leaves the salt behind. So this accounts for 84 percent of desalination.

And it's what I guess happened. So I feel very smart and important right now. There's also reverse osmosis desalination desalination or desalination. I don't know. Say whatever you want. Now, reverse osmosis takes less energy than heating all the water. But it still takes quite a bit of energy to pump water through these filtration membranes. So some folks are working on low temperature heat desalination, too, which might work with clean solar power.

But for now, I guess the point is you have to burn fuels to heat the water or to pump it. So it's costly in terms of energy consumption and a carbon output. But when I have a hydrologist on, we will talk all about this and also our future drinking sewer water. Catherine Chavez, Tobias Milton, Olaf Daschke and Annika Merkelbach all asked essentially the same question. Like, what can I do besides just recycling? What's the simplest daily change we can make?

Like, what's one thing we can all focus on? What can we do? What do we do? Yeah, I mean, so there's a there's a ton we can do. OK, like the the choices that you make as a citizen and consumer have a massive impact on this sort of thing. And they can actually help to stop environmental destruction happening in other parts of the world. And so one example of that single use plastics are just generally a bad idea

all the time and things like styrofoam, things that can't be recycled. You know, by stopping doing that, by using reusable waddles, bringing your own bags, you can actually make a massive impact on on that problem. Eating less red meat is always a really good thing. Red meat actually has a pretty massive impact on the environment. Being more of a vegetarian is actually very helpful to do that sort of stuff. And also like buying products that don't have palm oil in them. So if you were to look on the back of a lot of candies or other products,

processed products in stores, they have palm oil in them. And palm oil largely comes from these plantations in in Southeast Asia, where they've they've basically cut down a lot of the rainforest and made these plantations. And it's putting, you know, orangutans and all sorts of animals at risk as a result of the stuff that they're doing. So for more on this, you can catch Ology's episode number two on primatology.

So I think, you know, just by being a smarter consumer and picking better options, there's there's a lot that you ended up doing and helping. Do you think we're going to look back and be like, oh, my God, so much plastic, so much meat. What were we doing? Right. Like when you my mom told me a story once when she went to the obstetrician, when she was pregnant with one of us, I can't remember. And the her doctor was like smoking. Yeah.

And we look back and we're like, that wouldn't even that would be like over the top if you saw that like in a comedy sketch. Like, are we going to look back and be like, my God, we used to order things from Amazon and it would get shipped to us in a big truck, billowing smoke and carbon. And then we'd open it up and then we'd throw away a bunch of plastic for like a little tiny item. Yeah. Are we going to be appalled? We are 100 percent going to be appalled.

I mean, I think like, you know, future humans will look back on our generation and just say, what were they thinking? Right. Yeah. That's just absurd. I mean, we're at the point now where we know better. Yeah. And the only way things are going to change is if people demand that it changes. And so that's that's why each person's opinion matters. That's why these little acts can actually make a massive impact when the entire country is doing it, right?

Then we can force these companies to stop using these stupid methods to do things. Right. I remember when they banned plastic bags in LA, everyone knew it was coming and was like, oh, man, you're going to have to bring your own bags in a grocery store. And now it's so commonplace. It's like, I keep a bunch of canvas bags in my trunk because I don't want to be that asshole in the front of the line. It's like, load me up with all the plastic you've got.

You know, like you just adjust. Another patron by the name of Larry Ward himself, a fishing vest aficionado. Also, my dad and thus your grand pod asked about photovoltaics and hydropower and what kind of batteries need to be developed to really make the best use of those forms of renewable energy. I love solar. I think solar is fantastic. And I think the two things really holding that stuff back is like your dad said,

battery technology, battery technology is something that we're we're dying for amazing innovation to come out of that. I mean, once that comes, everything's going to change. Right. And we're still kind of operating on this old technology that we've had for a long time. And they're just tweaking the chemistry just a little bit here and there to try and to get a little bit more efficiency out of it. If we can bring that up even higher, that's great.

But we have to move towards renewable sources of power on that note. Rodka Vakari wants to know how long until I can buy a solar car like with months, states, if you could be. Yeah, I mean, he, you know, probably make a solar car. But but yeah, I mean, that's, you know, if you did make a solar car nowadays, it'd have to be very light and basically full of batteries. Right. So this just in a Dutch company called Lightyear

is working on a fully solar powered car and it's due out in 2020. It's priced around 140 G's, but it's fully solar. So Tesla, watch your back. Although I feel like if you have solar panels on your roof and they juice up your Tesla, you kind of have a solar car. But that's like saying that all cars are solar because petroleum is dinosaurs and they could have been plants. But that's bullshit. You know what I mean?

Anyway, the point is all solar cars, they are better. Let's have them, please. Jack Kelleher wants to know solar, wind, water, which is the best renewable resource overall? I like I like solar. I like solar. And I think wind's pretty great, too. If you're smart about how you you put it, a lot of people like to talk about the impact that wind has on birds. Yeah.

But I mean, if you look at the impact that buildings have on birds, it's far more than wind turbines do. OK, quick aside, I looked into this and almost a billion birds a year die from window strikes, mostly to residential and the shorter commercial buildings. But wind turbines kill about 75 percent fewer birds than windows do. The top bird killer, though, it's kitties. Up to four billion birds are killed every year in the US at the hands

or, I guess, the paws of the nation's outdoor and feral kitty cats. I could not, however, find statistics on how many birds are killed by American hippos. And so I think that's just something that's like kind of drummed up by opponents to wind technology as a as a means of kind of slowing it down. I think if done responsibly, it's a fantastic, fantastic resource. Those same people are probably like eating chicken Parmesan as they're being like, we got to we can't use this.

We need oil because of the birds. Elliot and I wants to know what emerging technologies do you foresee having the most impact on conservation? Yeah, I mean, so that I think that's pretty exciting. There's there's there's three that I'm like really kind of excited about. One would be satellite satellite technologies. The amount of stuff that we can now sense from this from space and do it cheaply is amazing.

And so if you take a picture of the earth every single day, then you could really start to see how fast things are changing. You could see deforestation. You can see, you know, algal booms. You can see all sorts of stuff that's like really fascinating from a conservation perspective and important for us to know. It's like taking a selfie every day to see if your haircut looks stupid as it grows out.

And I really like the second I would say that I'm excited about is is low cost sensors, you know, because in the past, like we built a sensor device. And I talked to a scientist that used a similar device 15 years ago. And that device cost him almost $40,000 to buy. And then we built it for $1,200. Oh, my God. Instead of buying one of those sensors, he could have bought 10 of them. Now we can start to measure more things in more areas

or keep them out for even longer in ways that we just had not been able to do before. So that's super exciting. And then I would say the last last technology I'm excited about is is the stuff that artificial intelligence can end up doing. Because, you know, as we talked, you know, as conservation technology gathers more and more data about this planet and how the plan is changing, you we need to build better tools to be able to go through all that data and pull meaning out of it.

That's cool. You're like, computer, tell us how fucked we are. Exactly. We are very fucked. And you're like, thank you. That's so helpful. Katie Cobb wants to know, other than what's wrong with you, what do you say to someone who feels that recycling or any other simple means of conservation individual responsibility to the environment isn't worth their time because, quote, they will be dead long before it matters.

What do you say to those people? Yeah, it's you know, it's it's it's rough to deal with people who are just, you know, cynical just to be cynical, you know, I mean, the hardest thing is to try and try and get through to those people. I sometimes it just helps to tell those really sad stories about the kinds of things that you see out there. You know, I I'm an optimist when it comes to conservation and for the planet. So I try not to be too much of a downer.

Like I try not to talk about poaching and all this sorts of things unless I need to. Unless it's relevant to the stuff that we're doing. But it's like, you know, just what was it a week ago or a week and a half ago, there was that story about that pilot whale where they found 80 pounds of plastic bags inside of its stomach. And so the poor whale is going around the ocean eating what it thinks are jellyfish because it eats jellyfish. But they're really just plastic bags.

And I mean, you've picked up a plastic bag. You can imagine how many plastic bags it would take to get to 80 pounds of it. It's a lot, a lot. And that killed the whale, you know. And so your choice, the decisions you make on a daily basis about the things that you buy or the things that you take and and what you throw away actually matters, right? And and and I think I didn't say this earlier when you're asking what we can do. But I think the other sort of other thing is, you know,

we as a society need to learn to use things longer, right? Or repair things that break, right? It's very popular now to get a new phone every time the new phone comes out. You know, I mean, I've even been guilty of this as well. But each time you make something, there's an energy that goes into it. There's resources that have to be mined to be able to create these sorts of things. And then once you throw it away, it goes into landfill and it's there forever, right? And and there's this great movement that's happening in certain parts of the world.

This repair movement, you know, where people are trying to repair some of the things that they have instead of throwing away to kind of give a longer life on it. And us bias doing that, bias buying better quality stuff and keeping it for longer. We lessen our impact on this planet. What is that that saying, like you can buy it buy it nice or buy it twice? Oh, yeah, exactly. Invest in something that's a little bit better, that it'll last a long time instead of just getting things at all, you know, you'll keep throwing away.

Me like, oh, I'll replace it, you know. Yeah, no, I like that. I know I think back to like, you know, my my great-grandparents had this thing that was next to their hearth that was a shoe repair iron. And they would put the shoe on it upside down and then they'd nail on another. So and I remember being a kid being like, what is this? And my dad's like, oh, that's the thing you put your shoe on when you repair it. And I'm like, who did that?

Right. But that's what they used to do now. Yeah, you would just throw your shoes in the garbage and be like, new shoe times. You know, I was at this conference and I cannot remember the name of the individual. I think he was Austrian, but he would he he did this thing where he would set up these repair shops in cities. And and the repair would be I will repair anything that you bring it. So it's any toaster, your espresso machine, your TV, whatever. You bring your boyfriend, you're like, can you help us?

Yeah, exactly. And so you bring it in. And the one requirement was that you have to sit there with him as he repairs it and like learn how to do it. You know, they were saying that like some people would come in and they would just get furious. They'd be like, no, just fix it. I'll pay you twice. Then I just fix it.

And he said, no, the whole point of this is that you learn how to fix these things. You learn about the importance of repair and it would go through. And some people would come in and spend all day with them to repair an espresso machine or something and, you know, learn a ton out of it. And I think that's amazing. I couldn't find exactly who this gent was. But in researching, I did learn that there are fix it clinics at local Goodwill stores and other places.

There's even a whole organization called I fix it dot org dedicated to repairing things instead of throwing them into a chasm of trash and replacing them. So Google fix it clinic and your city and then bring your broken hairdryer over and learn how to tinker it back to life. And then you can rightfully brag about it for several years and also teach other people how to fix their hairdryers. Also, when I went to track down who started this movement,

I found some leads to something that began in the Netherlands. But in Googling some keywords, something went wrong because I somehow found myself reading a news article with the headline Dutch Mobile euthanasia units to make house calls. And I was like, well, OK, that's a very different than a broken toaster. Anyway, do you try to apply that to the technologies that you use, whether it's in the field or if you're developing a technology from an old technology?

Yeah, totally. I mean, that's why all our stuff is open source so that we can share the information and move off of it. One of our collaborators on one of the projects that we have is this individual named Tophur White. He's a great guy. He started this organization called the Rainforest Connection and they do amazing work.

What they do is they take cell phones, smartphones that people don't want anymore and they recycle them as these forest guardians. So basically what they do is they put a microphone on this smartphone, they write some software and they put it up in the rainforest and they put they put it out there to listen for illegal logging happening in the rain forest. And so so he's he just gets all these old smartphones. Nobody wants anymore and then ends up taking them and giving them this life

as a protector of the of the rainforest, which is a really amazing thing to do because normally those were just gone and been thrown away. Yeah, it's cool that you can use technology and people who are passionate about the environment to have like an eco snitch movement where you're like, listen, you're poaching dolphins, you're logging in areas you shouldn't. We're watching like totally. Yeah. And that's I mean, that's a big part of some of the stuff that we do. The the the technical term for that is called environmental justice.

Oh, so environmental justice, that is a way better and more apt term than eco snitching. I'm just I'm not very good at marketing. Basically, you know, a lot of these places, these communities, they don't really have a voice. And when they see this kind of environmental stuff happening to them, it's hard for them to to to find someone to to tell it to. So the environmental justice movement is all about making tools and mechanisms like legal mechanisms and stuff like that, where they can kind of

they have someone to go to to say, hey, you know, they cut down our forest or they've been poisoning our river that we depend on. And and document the impact that the stuff is happening. Right, which is amazing, because it would just go untold. Those stories would be undetected and like they have been for a very long time. Right. Speaking of legalities, Rhonda Grizzle wants to know I'd like to install a water catchment system at my house, but they're not legal in my county.

So I'm not sure who to work with to get these systems added to the building code here or what arguments to make. But I'd love any ideas how you could help make that happen. What do we do about rain catchment? Is that legal? What's the deal? Yeah, I mean, in some places, it's not. It's really weird why it wouldn't be. I think it's a holdover of like weird regulations that came as a result of working with water groups and all sorts of stuff like that.

But but but you know, I think just getting involved in in like the municipal process and trying to talk to the right folks in your local government to change that. There's really no reason that water rainwater catchment should be illegal ever. You know, it's completely natural. And I guess a lot of people do that just by having a barrel out in the garden. Totally. Yeah, I mean, that's that's what a lot of people do. We we when I was doing a lot of work with engineers without borders, we built a lot of them all over the world.

We never built them in the US because in some parts it is illegal. But it's it's a fantastic way to get extra. Even if you just use the water for irrigation, yeah, yeah, it's great. Do you have to worry about more skaters? I mean, not if you engineer it, right? Usually it's not just an open barrel. And then the one thing you do have to sometimes worry about is, you know, it's not necessarily good water to drink.

So it's more like gray water. Gray water heads up is the term for relatively clean wastewater, like from sinks and appliances in the bath. Anything that doesn't involve toilets if you catch my drift. So reusable, maybe not something you drink. Because, you know, if it's coming off your roof, you don't know if birds have been pooping over something like that. And so so it could it couldn't be bad.

So if you did want to use it for drinking, you'd have to add a filtration system and what they call a first flush device that basically takes all the first water that goes on the roof and just pours it on the ground. Yeah. What kind of water filtration system do you use when you're in the bush? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I I don't use anything special. I use iodine tablets and then I have one that has a little carbon filter in it.

But in some parts of these places, I just I just drink the water there. You know, so how's that worked out for you? It's fine. I mean, I don't think I have any parasites living inside of me. But none that you've none that have tried to get out explosively. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, in the in the Okavango Delta, the water is just so amazingly clear and pristine that it just tastes wonderful. And it's fine. You know, I mean, you just you don't want to drink a leech or something. But you're fine.

But but other areas in some parts, you just you have to buy bottled water, which is rough. But that's the only option that they have in certain areas. Mike Monakowski, this is a great question. Are biofuels used for vehicles energy positive? Or do they consume more energy to produce and transport than they provide? So biofuels, what's the deal? Yeah, I mean, so I think that's I think that's a great question. I mean, I think there's a lot of potential for biofuels.

And, you know, I've had friends that have converted cars to biodiesel cars and stuff like that before. But I mean, I think generally what we need to do is just try and move away from any kind of fossil fuel for for that sort of stuff. If I could buy an electric car, I would. Yeah. Yeah. What about veggie diesel, where you just get this stuff from friars? Yeah, that was that was so the friends of mine did convert cars from veggies. I mean, it smelled like Chinese food when you drive behind them.

I love that. How come more people aren't doing that? You think I don't know. I think that like you have to build the kind of the equipment in your garage that allows you to to filter and process it in the right way. And that just seems like too much for some people. Right. But it's like we are a country that relies so heavily on cars and onion rings and chicken tenders. You think it would be a match made in heaven. All right. Yeah.

It's like the one thing that we have a lot of is fryer grease. Yeah. Like welcome to the United States. No, no shade on that. Shaw and I also talked about ocean conservation and plastics and even Baltimore's own Mr. Trash wheel. But I trimmed a lot of it out because we went into such detail about the same thing last week with oceanologist Dr. A. Anna Johnson. So if you miss that, listen to it next.

Doctors orders. We've pretty much ruined things when it comes to plastics in the ocean. Oh, my God, that's the most depressing thing in the world. It's also true. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. How do you approach fatherhood knowing what you know about the environment? It actually. So for me, it like fuels my passion in the work that I do is because I want us to not be that society that, you know, future humans are like,

what are you guys doing? Or my daughter, when she's older, say, you know, my parents' generation, we're all idiots. You know, I want us to be able to to solve some of these problems before it's too late and help to bring back spaces where wildlife can grow and thrive and and not go extinct. So so for me, being a dad, it's it's a big driver in every every single thing that I do. And it's really kind of changed my focus in terms of trying to solve some of these bigger problems as opposed to just like, you know, tinkering around with really cool technologies in different areas, starting to think about things in a big system.

And how do we solve that broadly across across the globe? So hopefully, hopefully I'll be successful in that. So she'll live in a better world. So if nothing else, we can all feel a little better knowing that people like Ayanna from last week and Shaw are on the case. Leslie Nielsen said it best. I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you.

Guy R. Thomas wants to know, are IOT devices useful or really just make the problem worse? Yeah, my question with the hell is an IOT advice. So so so IOT is is the Internet of Things. Oh, God, I got it. Yeah. So so I mean, when I talk about sensors, I'm I'm essentially talking about IOT devices. OK, because, you know, the sensors, we attach these small processors and we attach radios to them. So that's basically what an IOT devices. And so we've we've actually leveraged a lot of that technology that you see in

smart cities and smart homes and brought them into these sorts of places to create the same sorts of networks like we use similar radios that they use on IOT devices. We use similar processors that they use on IOT devices. And the the project that we have that that came out of the the Okavango work that we call Field Kit is basically an open source IOT ecosystem to allow you to be able to put these sorts of things all over the world. And it's all free and open and available for anyone to use. How are those devices powered?

So with a small battery and a solar panel, typically is how we do it. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell me in a nutshell, how screwed are we in the ocean? Global warming and water access for people. I feel like those are our biggies. Yeah, they're big. Yeah, they're really big. I would add one more. OK. And I would it would be extinction.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I so let me start with that one just because I mentioned it. So, you know, this planet has gone through five mass extinctions before. There's actually a fantastic book called The Sixth Max mass extinction, which is what we're going through right now. And the thing about, you know, you ask any school kid about extinctions and they've all heard of the Ice Age or dinosaurs, and they know that that sort of stuff happens. But this is the first time in history that it's all been caused by a single species.

And that's, you know, us, that's humans, right? And so the the the level of extinction that we're seeing, the biodiversity loss that we're seeing right now is a thousand times higher than what we would consider just baseline. Oh, my God. So it's it's incredibly bad. I mean, we're seeing things die off super fast, faster than we can even discover them or learn more about them. And so all most of that comes from human impact.

You know, it comes from poaching. It comes from habitat loss. It comes from things that humans are doing to this planet that's making it harder for wildlife to live. So I think I am, as I said earlier, I'm optimistic about that. I think we're starting to become smarter about it. And we're we're doing better things with our land use and habitat protection and creating parks. What was the second one?

A global warming, global warming. Oh, yes. I mean, I get very scared about global warming just because, you know, human behavior isn't necessarily one that will see a threat coming and then make the smart decision to avoid that threat. We usually wait until the threat kicks us in the face. And then we're like, oh, we shouldn't do that anymore. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, with global warming, I just don't I don't I guess I don't have a lot of faith

that we're going to do the right thing until some really bad stuff starts happening first. How do we know that it's. Like, definitively, our fault and not just like a weird solar flares happen and then the climate goes like, can you debunk that flim flam? Yeah, 100 percent no. I mean, you know, they throw this like 99 or 97 percent of scientists or whatever number. But it's global warming is caused by humans 100 percent. OK, it's entirely it is caused by humans.

OK, this was just some major flim flam that I needed triple debunked just in case anyone out there still doubted it like triple flim flam debunkage. There's no concern or like skepticism in the broad scientific community about that. Just check it. And I mean, if you just think about things logically, like the earth is a closed system, we're pumping a bunch of stuff into it. It's going to change. It will change the system. So so human human caused global warming is a thing. It doesn't help when we have administrations like we have now in the US

that kind of go back on a lot of the work that we've been doing for a number of a number of years. So yeah, I'm not super. I'm not super optimistic about that topic with this current administration. Right. Global warming stuff is really going to change when we start to see sea level rise impacting communities and weather events getting much more severe and having huge economic decisions. And we get to the point where we have to do something about it. Now, you know, some people are in favor of

geoengineering and things like that. I I don't know. Maybe we'll get to the point where that's OK. I I get worried about unforeseen circumstances. If we start pumping. So so there's a lot of ideas about how we can put different things in the atmosphere that will reflect sunlight or, you know, change the chemical composition of the atmosphere and slow this climate change that's happening. There's a new technology that came out that has brought down the cost

of extracting CO2 from the air. I mean, that's a way of slowing that is by removing some of the greenhouse gases, the CO2. But I'm not I'm not necessarily in the camp of, you know, throwing a whole bunch of particles into the atmosphere and seeing what happens. There's plenty of conspiracy theories about chemtrails anyway. Yeah. Right. Can people plant more trees? Yeah, planting trees is a fantastic way to help.

You know, there's a lot. Drive less plant trees, do a bunch of like stuff like that. And that's super helpful enough with the straws already planted tree. And then a little bit about about clean water access. You also work in that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's going to be a big thing. The one thing I do want to say that is, you know, these projects, when to give access to clean water to places, they have to be really thought

about in a kind of a sustainable sort of a way. A lot of the work that we're doing with engineers about borders was repairing the clean water projects that previous generations did. So, you know, in the 80s and the 90s, there was a bunch of churches and nonprofits that decided they're just going to drill a bunch of wells all over Africa. But they didn't really think about the life cycle of the well, who's going to maintain the well, what happens when the well breaks. And so there's just a whole bunch of broken wells in a lot of these places.

And so we would have to go through and try and fix them. So if you think about these kind of these sorts of projects in kind of a more sustainable or like holistic whole life cycle way, then you can really do do a lot more good work out there and not waste, waste money and effort. I bet that's not as glamorous to be like, or fixing an old well, isn't as glamorous as we've given you a well and we're leaving now. Like, you know what I mean? Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's I mean, it's, you know, they they they built these wells, they put pumps that they brought over from some company in the US. So if that pump a piece on that pump breaks, you know, those people in that community can can't buy replacements. Right. They can't just go to, you know, the internet and order something to some random part of of the community that they live in. So we have to think about the solutions that we make in ways where they're they're maintainable.

They if they fail, they fail in ways that aren't catastrophic and that they that they empower the people that they're they're looking to help. How can you convince people not to be morosely depressed about the environment and life? I mean, I think there's the the planet is still an incredibly beautiful and wonderful place. There's parts of this planet you can go to that will literally there's not a single person on this planet that will not their mind won't be blown.

It's just this beautiful, wonderful place. And it's incredibly resilient. I mean, the the this planet wants to get better. And all we have to do is just give it a little bit of room and allow it to get better. And so that's a really exciting thing. I mean, it's you know, it's been around for billions of years. It's going to be around after humans. And we just want to make sure that it's it's around in a way

that is best best for everything that lives on this planet. Are we like bedbugs on earth? Are we like a bedbug infestation in a building? Yeah, there's there's definitely people out there that consider humans parasites. Yeah, like an infestation. Yeah, I mean, I think humans are wonderful. I think we we do incredible and amazing things. And we have the power to do to just inspire millions and really, you know,

make this place a better place. So let's make it a better place. Let's not destroy it. Yeah. What's the hardest part about your job? That's a that's a good question. I absolutely love my job. But I but I'd say the hardest part of my job is is just being able to do as much as we want to do.

It seems like there's never enough time or there's never enough money to to really fix the problems at a fundamental level. Now, you know, that being said, we've also very recently in the last couple of years seen this amazing change in terms of people who are excited about kind of, you know, funding and getting behind this sort of work. So I think, you know, now there's never been a more exciting time in conservation or in conservation technology.

So I'm super excited about it. And I think we can really we don't have to be the generation that ruined everything. We can be the generation that fixed it, you know. That's so optimistic. What's your favorite part of your job? Do you have a moment that was just like, oh, yeah, I would say my I mean, my favorite part of the job is without question, the field. I love love just being in a place that is, you know, completely new to me,

entirely different from my life in Los Angeles. I'm surrounded by things like wild animals and mosquitoes. And I'm trying to figure out some technological solution or how to fix some bug without, you know, having any of the resources that I have here in my lab. I love that that puzzle. I love being stuck in those situations and trying to figure out a way out of it. That's like extreme camping.

Yeah, it is some hardcore camping. What's your next trip? We have a couple trips. We're going to Cameroon with UCLA. And so we're we're deploying a bunch of sensors around some of the the research stations that UCLA has in that part of the Congo base. And we're also going back to the Amazon, where we're deploying sensors with the Wildlife Conservation Society across all the countries that make up

the Amazon. So this is a longer project. And later on this year, we'll be going to Sri Lanka, where we're going to be using drones to try and monitor the very aggressive whale watching industry that's happening there, which is impacting this unique type of blue whale that only lives near Sri Lanka. So it's like they've got the paps following them. Yeah, like whale watching, just like super aggressive. Like, what are they doing?

So you have to be like, hey, leave them alone. Yeah. And if we can document it, we could talk to the government about it and we can we can make some changes there. And then so we'll be going to Belize to Tag Sharks and we'll be going to Antarctica to tag whales, which will be pretty fun. Oh, my God. Is that all coming up this year? Yeah, it's it's this year into next year. Oh, my God.

So you've got some packing to do, right? Yeah, it's a lot. And I've got a lot of building and testing to do, too. Vastly different wardrobes for those expeditions. Vastly. And so now where can people find you? Where can they learn more about it? And you're a nonprofit.

So conceivably, if people wanted to donate, they could help. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the organization is called Conservify, C-O-N-S-E-R-V-I-F-Y. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at that. And then I tweet a lot and post a lot on Instagram. My Twitter is at Shaw Selby and my Instagram is at S-S-E-L-B-E. So there will be links in the show notes as well as up on alleyward.com slash allergies, because maybe you're listening to this while operating

a forklift or doing kidney surgery, brushing your cat's teeth. I don't know. It's OK. Check the show notes later. Yeah, you could follow the expeditions and see the sort of stuff that we're doing. And, you know, if if you are an engineer or if you actually, you know what? If you have any kind of skill and you want to help conservation project, definitely feel free to reach out to me because I know people who need not only engineering skills, but marketing skills and, you know, design skills, all sorts of stuff that that can actually help a lot of these

engineering, a lot of these conservation groups or, you know, NGOs and scientists that are out in these amazing places, amazing parts of the world, they can use all the help that they can get. What if someone's like, I'm really good at baking cookies? Cookies help. Cookies are important. So reach out if you have any skill and you want to help save the planet. Yep. OK. I don't know how you do all of the things you do.

How do you do it? Do you sleep? Not much. So while we all might lose a little sleep over the state of the earth, no one more so than the amazing, brilliant and hardworking conservationist out there. Thank you for all that you do on behalf of me and the eight billion or so of us who need this big planet to live on. So follow Shaw on social media, check out his nonprofit,

Conservify, and if conservation technology is something you'd like to get all up in, reach out to him. Sounds like the more the merrier. Follow Allergies on Twitter or Instagram at Allergies. I'm on both at Alliward with one L. There are tons of links for each episode up at alliward.com. Slash Allergies. You can become a patron at patreon.com slash

Allergies, you can get merch at AllergiesMerch.com, including brand new designs this week. Very exciting, major autumnal and collegiate vibes. Thanks to Bonnie Dutch and also Shannon Peltis. Thanks to Aaron Talmert and Hannah Lipo for admitting the great Allergies Facebook group. And I'll see y'all at Camp Allergies this weekend, some of you. Thank you to Stephen Ray Morris for conserving my sanity

technologically by editing this all together. You are a boss, bitch. And to Nick Thorburn, who wrote and performed the theme music. He's in a band called Islands. You can also listen to speaking of listening. If you listen to the end of the episode, you know, I tell a secret. And this week's secret is that I don't know if I've told the secret before, but I do have all of my books out on my bookshelves, except for all of

my self-help books. I keep on a shelf in a closet that way. If anyone comes over, they can't just see this whole array of psychological topics about myself I'd like to fix. But I did realize, why don't I just go to the library and get my self-help books there? It's one quick, possibly embarrassing transaction. And then once I'm done with it, I just put it in a shoot in the dead of night and I never have to hide that I have a book about like overcoming

anxiety with meditation and stuffed animals or something. Anyway, that's my secret is self-help books and get them at the library. Libraries are so great. Libraries are really wonderful. When was the last time you went to a library? Just go to a library, just spend an hour there. Just kick it. They're so, it's like my new thing. Anyway, OK, that's it. Bye bye.