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Oh hey, it's your weird lady uncle who sometimes finds Rhese's pieces in the pockets of blazers she hasn't worn in weeks and eats some Allie board. Now I'm kind of excited for you. You get to listen to this episode for the first time. It's all a bout to happen. Now I've already heard the conversation twice maybe three times now and edits but you haven't 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 its 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 twenty five cents 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 you know, we buy batteries,
sound cards, things like that. Speaking of buying ologies, meerch dot com has all new back to school items like backpacks printed with sharp and coffee mugs about trains, and there are college sweatshirts that say ologies and crested items. Thank you to Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Felts 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. It takes just a few
minutes and it just feels like a good deed. It doesn't cost a time. 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 de 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 Howdie into a presentation. I gave it work last week, So thank you de 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 anology, you guys. So conservation in this sense refers to that of the earth or plants or animals, and techne 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 Exoskeleators, and it turns out he also knows last week's oceanologist, doctor Ayana Johnson, so he runs in some great nerd circles. He started the nonprofit Conservatify, 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 tech, and also fishing vests and
hippo butts. To score this interview, I trecked 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 gonna
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 suns like, okay, give me the tour.
Yeah, okay, So yeah, so this is you know, 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 ter areum.
Let's go look at it. Yeah, so this is 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.
And 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 Onetown, Los Angeles.
Yeah, well, it's I like to call it our ecosystem.
Pardon, pardon, fishank, I'm an 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. Yeah, correct, yeah, more microscopes. What are you doing with all this? Are you tinkering with technology to make it work better for you?
You know? We use this setup to build the technology that we take out on expedition. It's 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 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 three D print things?
We do? We have two three D printers, we have laser cutter. It's a lot of fun stuff.
Dang, this is awesome. Okay, let's sit down. Okay, okay, let's get to the interview. What's Shaw's job?
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 in university. I always only wanted to be an engineer,
That's all I wanted to do. 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, you know, protect people, solve diseases, build this, you know, these cities and everything that we live in. And so I thought that there was like a 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 nonprofit using technology to address illegal fishing, and he was like, ooh, will I can use gadgetry to help address the Earth's 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 just current fuckedness that's happening, right.
Yeah, 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, uh, 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 quiber like not a Walkman from like nineteen eighty six, but you're like, oh, the new surround sound. What did you take apart?
Yeah?
I mean it was his amplifier and like who his whole setup that I ended up kind of taking it 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 he was very caurious 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. Like how did you go from you know, being a curious kid who took apart amplifiers and probably like made them even hell a sweeter before putting them back together. To being a rocket scientist.
Yeah yeah, I did that for I worked as a rocket scient I don't like saying rocket science it 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 ten 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 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 Lori. I mean, I want to know about waste water and what happens, where does it go, what do we do with it? It's
so important. Okay, but that's anology for another time. But okay, So Shaw was less interested in underground water works 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 thirteen satellite launches. He said, twelve 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 some thing 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 winks 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 scientists that are outside of kind of the richest universities in the world
to have access to. So that means sometimes things fail. You have to be okay with that.
And now, when you left Boeing, what was it like to be like, I've 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.
Yeah. It was a bit of a process, as these things tend to be. You know, I was kind of known at Boeing as the do good or engineer. I worked with engineers without borders for a long time, and then this stuff started happening. 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 move forward into this other one. 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 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 And it's.
Like, I'm out. No, I mean, I remember I walked into 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 was coming. This is like a surprise. So she said, this is fine. They actually, you know, Boeing really liked me being there, so they offered to put me on a extended leave of absence just to see if things worked out, right, Yeah, and I never went back, so they worked out.
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 joke called the Okavangle Wilderness Project. And so that's that's the project that's in Botswana and maybe an 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, I'd walk out, and it felt like you were in the middle of a Disney movie. There's elephants hanging out with giraffes and wildebeeste and I mean zebras everything. It's just it's amazing.
You know, bird lands on your shoulder, butterfly comes and offers you coffee. You're like, what's happening totally.
So what we're 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 it 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'd 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 Okavango that you would go to while we were on expedition and you would see where where we were at. You'd see the pictures were 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 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 Okavango, 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 As 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 ogabango for visuals, and one recent post is a stunning photo of a field scientist writhing from having a tick embedded in his ear. It was clasping onto his ear drum. But mostly there's just gorgeous photos of wildlife. So in summary, it's beautiful and it's no 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 three hundred and sixty 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
were 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 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 twenty fifteen 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 oncapsizing their bees everywhere.
It was just a very brutal part of the expedition and you know a lot of fires and land mines 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, we told everyone about what a horrible time
we were 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 Christoph Ferretti, who was a European Space Agency astronaut on the International Space Station and following our expedition from space. So yeah, 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 freaking space a you are here kind of aerial shot of this massive, glimmering river deltsa this network of like tributaries fanning out over the wetlands. It was taken from two hundred and fifty miles above Earth and beamed down via Twitter to the scientists and guides who 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. 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 didn't have. I have cholera. I have a color of vaccine which most people don't have.
I don't even know you to get on to that.
Yeah.
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.
It's take an off menu item in and out. That's like hit me with the collar. They're like, ooh, this' stup. 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 we're trying to do it to better protect those fishes that you know, there's some fishes that start in Brazil and end up in Proue and go back to Brazil. I mean, the longest freshwater migration of any fish in the world is in the Amazon. What 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 Gubbon, and the work we were doing there was with one of the world's leading researchers on Westland Lowland guerrillas, Oh my god, 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, the these gorillas have this very interesting behavior around certain types of trees where they like to dig up parts of the route 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, right, not a land, a lot of trees exactly very dense, hard to see. Yeah, I mean it's it's just very difficult.
But with a tool like a drone, you could fly over the whole area and 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 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, I know a lot of people didn't get it right. I mean, some people got it, 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 really got what we're 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 optimizer using the newest kind of technological approaches, so as a results, 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 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 a one figure, I saw a one trillionfold increase in computing power from nineteen fifty six to twenty fifteen 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 aka 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 nineties jams. 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 is 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, it 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 informations 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 planet is humans and the impact that we have. But the threat behind that related to conservation is the fact that we hadn't ever ever been able 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 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, Okay, 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 their tiny
claw hands could hold pencils, they would probably arnal. Also, isn't it weird that every crocodile has a birthday and thus an astrological sign. Okay, 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 geminised. 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 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 all 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 oil spills and the other kind of chemical spills that happen in that Amazon, and the fact that they have absolutely no way to prove that it's happening. You know, when it happens, the government says, no, that's actually not that. Nothing happened there, right 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 and 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 glacier's melting over time.
Whoa.
So you're like, oh, it's shifting to the north, which means that this space of the glacier.
Right yeah, yeah, yeah, whoa. 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 posts it on the Internet and then so we have it and we're giving it to glaciologists 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 to 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, while all these ambient sounds play in a line of speakers nearby. Without contact. You just like walk through and be like, oh cool, 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, are glacier's melting? Like, does that mean that different legislation gets put in place? Does that mean like what practical things do they do to be like, uh, 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 what's happening in 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 those are like the two two pronged approach you like to take.
On things, and then tell me about some other technologies.
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 could 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 bolts.
Yeah, are these the radio callers like you see on pumas 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. 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 and 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.
Bies, Yeah, well, actually the 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 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 trying all sorts of crazy material stuff and looking at the way geckos attached 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 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 okay, 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. Every time you mentioned a new country, I'm like, that's another stamp, Like is your passport? Did you have extra pages in it?
Yeah?
I'm actually on a new passport recently, so, I mean maybe even 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 delta's, 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 I'd say ninety percent of the time it's someone who is working in an area that needs something and can't afford it, or or like has an idea for something new and
comes to us and we helped develop it. You know, we could stay be experts in the technologies and how the technologies can help conservation, but we don't necessarily have to be experts in grulus, 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 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 three D 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. If it is, then we you know, will either like go and find grant funding from a foundation or something, or will 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, waterprove 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 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 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 the little kids. So the work that we were doing in Botswana meant that we were always in the water, we were always in canoes, and we were 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 a sleep to the angriest thing you've ever seen in entire life faster than a hippo.
It's insane, you know, real bitches? All right, quick, apologies to hippopotami for calling you bitches. I thought you killed more people each year than other animals, but it turns out you kill like five hundred, which is still a lot of people. But crocodiles kill double year amount. They're such geminis. Rabbit dogs kill twenty five thousand people a year, and snakes kill fifty thousand. But really, what are the
animal kingdom's biggest bitches? Well, mosquitoes responsible for seven hundred and fifty thousand 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 insummation. Hippos are boss bitches.
Yeah, and so you know we've been charged by them, they like they've like or just water, which is like scary. I mean, when they charge you underwater, 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 when you're just in a little fiberglass boat and they're doing that running towards you. But my favorite encounter was something that hippos do very rarely,
but they do it when 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 that hippo considered its home. So it ran from where it is at up to the very edge of the water, and it started spinning its tail in a circle and started defecating and it starts spraying it. And the reason why kids love it when I tell the story is
because I called this the poop tornado. So the hippo does this massive poop tornado and I ended up just picking up my camera and taking a picture, and I just got the perfect shot of this hippo. You see the tail and then just all these brown specs flying through the air.
That is rough. That's a that's like shit hitting the fan.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah, And I mean it's meant as a threat threat display, and like it is a very threatening thing.
Threaten a kidding.
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 as super boss bitch move and I really I challenge anyone to try this manover, 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 widow maker. I don't think I've ever been truly afraid.
One.
There was at one time that where 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, where 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 lines 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 what you came in.
All those pockets.
You got to have a lot of stuff. You have to have flashlights, okay, trail mix, yeah, you trail mixed sometimes, yeah, Like flares, yeah, compass things like that.
Do you actually have a khaki vest like a fishing vest? I do have a kk 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, like yeah, or not having a purse. Why don't I just wear a fishing vest. It has just so many pockets.
You should. I support this idea, Okay.
I'm going to look into it. Oh man, I'm so glad I investigated this very important piece of American history. Okay. So, the modern fishing vest was conceived of and invented in nineteen thirty by a man named Lee Wolf, who ran a fly fishing school on the Beaverkill River in the Catskills. 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 on the first place, Lee, But yes, I hear you. Good call anyway. Lee Wolf, inventor of the fishing vest, died in nineteen ninety one at the age of eighty six, piloting a small plane, and journalist Charles Kralt eulogized him, saying, quote, Lee Wolf
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 lipbam and phone chargers and quarters and errant Reese's pieces that I will eat upon discovery. Okay, now it is time for the wrap fire around 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 Eveleth
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 lived 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 dot com. And she said, guests on like Katie Mack and Jenna Wortham and Kim Stanley Robinson and Edyong and all these great people, and so people say it's like 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 gonna go ahead and do the rapid
fire around 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 Ologies gives our money, you can go to aliword dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've
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Okay, your questions, patron questions? You ready?
Yep.
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 generate, 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 uh, and then there's desalination technologies that people have started to use, but that's also very expensive. It can have wildlife implicates as well.
Yeah, that was the next question Christopher Rice wanted to know. I'm interested in desalinization tech. Will it ever become cost effective? Or are water wars inevitable?
Yeah? I mean I honestly think that they probably are.
You know, Oh my god, that sucks.
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 all fed by this same aquifer, and they think that it's going to basically dry up in the next thirty years, and so we're going to see it in this country. We're to see lots of impacts when it comes to that sort of So I think, unfortunately.
I think decel technology is going to become viable once things are dire enough that it has to become viable. But 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 desalinization works. Okay, so I looked into it, and apparently there are two main ways desalinization is happening. There's multi stage flash distillation, which uses heat to evaporate water and leaves the salt behind. So this accounts for eighty four percent of desalinization, and it's what I guessed happened. So I feel very smart and important right now. There's also reverse osmosis desalination, desalinization 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 car been output. But when I have a hydrologist on, we will talk all about this and also our future drinking sewer water. Catherine schab Is, Tobias Milton, olaf dash Ki, and anacomerkel Bock 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 ton we can do it, Okay, Like 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 wattles, bringing your own bags, you can actually make a massive impact 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 Southeast Asia where they've basically cut down a lot of the rainforest and made these plantations and it's putting you know, orangutangs and all sorts of animals at risk as a results of the stuff that they're doing.
So for more on this, you can catch ologies episode number two on Primatology.
So I think, you know, just by being a smarter consumer and picking better options, there's a lot that you can end up doing and helping.
Do you think we're going to look back and be like, oh my god, so much plastics, 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 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, oh
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 one hundred 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?
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 you using these stupid methods to do things right.
I remember when they abanned plastic bags in La Everyone knew it was coming, and it was like, oh man, you're gonna 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. That'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 phishing vest aficionado, also my dad and thus your grandpod, asked about photovoltaics and hydro power 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 dying for an 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 tech that we've had for a long time, and they're just tweaking the chemistry just a little bit here and there to trying 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 Vacari wants to know how long until I can buy a solar car? Like Month states, if you could be.
Yeah, I mean, you know, could probably make up a solar car if you like, 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 light Year is working on a fully solar powered car and it's due out in twenty twenty. It's priced around one hundred and forty 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 dinosaur and they could have eaten 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 kelliher wants to know solar wind water, which is the best renewable resource overall.
I like solar. I like solar, and I think wind's pretty great too, if you're smart about how 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.
Okay, quick aside. I looked into this, and almost a billion birds a year die from windows strikes, mostly to residential and the shorter commercial buildings. But wind turbines kill about seventy five 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 pause 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 WINS technology 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 it, we can't use this, we need oil because of the birds. Elliott 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 a 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 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 can 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 low cost sensors. You know, because in the past, Like, we built the sensor device, and I talked to a scientist that used a similar device fifteen years ago, and that device cost him almost forty thousand dollars to buy, and then we built it for twelve hundred dollars. Oh my god. Instead of buying one of those sensors, he could have bought ten 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 technology I'm excited about 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, 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? We are very You're like, thank you, that's so helpful. Katie Cop 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 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 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'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 these 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 we can have ago. There was that story about that pilot whale where they found eighty pounds of plastic bags inside of its stomach, and so the poor 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 eighty pounds of it. It's a lot. It's 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 what you throw away, actually matters, right, And I think I didn't say this earlier when you're asking what we can do, But I think the 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. It's there forever, right.
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 by us doing that, by us 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.
Yeah.
Yeah, invest in something that's a little bit better that it'll last a long time, instead of just getting things that all you know, you'll keep throwing away and be like, oh, I'll replace it or whatever. You know.
Yeah, no, I like that.
I know. I think back to, like, you know, 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 sol And I remember being a kid being like what is this And I was 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 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 did this thing where you would set up these repair shops in cities and the repair would be I will repair anything that you bring in. So it's any Yeah, you toaster, your expresso machine, your TV, whatever.
You bring your boyfriend.
Yeah, like can you help us, yeah exactly, 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 the amount, 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 expresso machine or something, and you 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 iFixit dot org dedicated to repairing things instead of throwing them into a chasm of trysh and replacing them. So google fix it clinic and your city, and then bring your broken hair dryer 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 hair dryers. 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, oh, okay, 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 technology from an old technology.
Yeah, totally. I mean that's why all our stuff is open source, so 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 tofer 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 rainforce, and they put it out there to listen
for legal logging happening in the rainforce. And so 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 rainforest, which is a really amazing thing to do because normally those were just gone, yeah 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 ecosnitch movement where you're like, listen, you're approaching 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 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 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 find someone 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 document the impact that this stuff is happening.
Right, which is amazing because it would just go untold. Those stories would be undetected and untapl.
I mean like they have been for a very long time. Right.
Speaking of legalities, Ronder Grizzel 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 love any ideas how you can help make that happen. What do we do about rain catchment? Is that legal? What's the deal?
Yeah?
I mean 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 rain water 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 when I was doing a lot of work with engineers about 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 what even if you just use the water for irrigation, Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Do you have to worry about more skeeters?
Yeah, 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 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 roof or something like that, and so so it could it could 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 a little 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 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 has that worked out for you?
It's fine. I mean I don't think I have any parasites living in front of me, but.
Now that you none that have tried to get out explosively at least.
Yeah. No, I mean, you know, in the in the Okoamongo Deltsa, 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 leach or something, but that you're fine. But other areas, in some parts, you just have to buy bottled water, which is rough, but that's the only option that they have in certain areas.
Mike Manokowski, this is a great question. Are biofuels used for vehicles energy positive or do they consume more energy to produce in 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 that sort of stuff. If I could buy an electric car, I would, Yeah.
What about veggie diesel where you just get this stuff from friars?
Yeah, that was so the friends of mine did convert cars from veggietice. I mean smell 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 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. Yeah, and chicken tenders. You think it would be a match made in heaven, right. Yeah, it's like the one thing that we have a lot of is friar grease. Yeah, like, welcome to the United States. No shade on that. Shaw and I also talked about ocean conservation and plastics and even Baltimore's own mister trash Wheel, but I trimmed a lot of it out because we went into such detail about the same thing last week
with oceanologist doctor Anna Johnson. So if you miss that, listen to it next Doctor's orders.
We've pretty much ruined things when it comes to plastics in the ocean.
God, that's the most depressing thing in the world. Yeah, it's also true. Oh man, how do you approach fatherhood knowing what you know about the environment.
It actually so for me. It 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, oh, you know my parents' generation, we're all idiots, you know. I want us to be able to solve some of these problems before it's too late and help to bring back spaces where wildlife can
grow and thrive and not go extinct. So for me being a dad, it's a big driver and 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 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. Well kind of on you guy.
R Thomas wants to know our IoT device is useful or really just make the problem worse. My question, what the hell is an IoT advice?
So?
IoT is the Internet of things?
Oh?
Got it?
Got Yeah? So I mean when I talk about sensors, I'm I'm essentially talking about IoT devices, Okay, Because you know the sensors, we attach these small processors and we attach radios to them. So that's basically what an IoT device is. And so we've we've actually leveraged a lot of that technicology 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 project that we have that came out of the Okamongo 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, makes sense?
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 big ease. Yeah they're big.
Yeah, they're really big. I would add one more, okay, and I would It would be extinction. Oh yeah, yeah, 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 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 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 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 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 doing better things with our land use and habitat protection and creating parks. What was the second one?
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, uh weird, did solar flares happen? And in the climate goes like can you debunk that flim flam?
Yeah?
We one hundred percent. No, I mean, you know they throw this like ninety nine or ninety seven percent of scientists or whatever number. But it's global warming is caused by humans, one hundred percent. It's entirely it is caused by humans.
Okay, this was just some major flim flam that I needed triple the bunked 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 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 of geoengineering and things like that. I don't know. Maybe we'll get to the point where that's okay. I get worried about
unforeseen circumstances if we start pumping. 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 CO two from the air. I mean that's a way of slowing that is, by removing some of the greenhouse guesses the
CO two. But 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, can people plant more trees?
Yeah, Planting trees is a fantastic way to help. You know, there's a lot of drive less plant trees do a bunch of like stuff like that, and that's super.
Helpful enough with the straws already plant a 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 Without Borders was repairing the clean water
projects that previous generations did. So you know, in the eighties and the nineties there's 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 we're fixing an old well. 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 persons 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 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 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, 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 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 bed bug infestation in an apartment building?
Yeah, 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 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.
What's the hardest part about your job?
That's a that's a good question. I absolutely love my job, but I'd say the hardest part of my job 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 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 to 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, 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 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 deploying a bunch of sensors around some of the research stations that UCLA has in that part of the Congo Basin. 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 can talk to the government about it and we can make some changes there, and then so we'll be going to Believe 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 this year and to next year.
Oh my god. So you've got some packing to do it, right.
Yeah, it's a lot. And I've got a lot of building and testing to do too.
My good. 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 people wanted to donate they could help.
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the organization is called Conservatify con se 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's at s S E l B E.
So there will be links in the show notes as well as up on aliward dot com. Slash ologies 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 Okay, 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 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 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 to making cookies, cookies help cookies are important, So reach out if you have any skill and you want to help save the planet. Yep, okay, I don't know how you do all of the things you do.
How do you do it? 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 hard working 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 Ologies on Twitter or Instagram at Ologies, I'm on both at aliboard with one L. There are tons of links for each episode up at aliyboard dot com slash Ologies. You can become a patron at patreon dot com. Slash Ologies. You can get merch at ologiesmerch dot com, including brand new designs. This week very exciting major autumnal and collegiate vibes.
Thanks to Bonnie Dutch and also Shannon Feltis. Thanks to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for admitting the great Ologies Facebook group, and I'll see y'all at campologies 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 and 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. Man get them with the library. Libraries are so great. Libraries are really wonderful. When was the last time you went to a library? Just go to the library,
spent just spend an hour there, just kick it. They're so it's like my new thing. Anyway, Okay, that's it.
By bye, pacadermatology, hombiology or do zoology, lithology, geology, meteorology, phology, anthology, zeriology, eeminology.
Inside this a wire direct.
Come right on the magic school bus.