Subtitles section Play video
-
(Rainforest noises)
-
In the summer of 2011, as a tourist,
-
I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time,
-
and as you might imagine,
-
it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the most.
-
There's this constant cacophony of noise.
-
Some things actually do stick out.
-
For example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill.
-
This buzzing is a cicada.
-
This is a family of gibbons.
-
It's actually singing to each other over a great distance.
-
The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve,
-
which is why you can hear so many of them,
-
but in fact the most important noise that was coming out of the forest that time
-
was one that I didn't notice,
-
and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it.
-
So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve.
-
They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons,
-
but they also have to spend a lot of their time
-
protecting their area from illegal logging that takes place on the side.
-
And so if we take the sound of the forest
-
and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest,
-
in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard,
-
was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance.
-
They had three full-time guards who were posted around this sanctuary
-
whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging,
-
and one day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest,
-
and within five minutes' walk,
-
we stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down,
-
five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters from the ranger station.
-
They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws,
-
because as you heard, the forest is very, very loud.
-
It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time,
-
just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station in a sanctuary,
-
that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has a chainsaw gets fired up.
-
It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true.
-
So how do we stop illegal logging?
-
It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech,
-
super-crazy high-tech solution,
-
but in fact, you're in the rainforest.
-
It has to be simple, it has to be scalable,
-
and so what we also noticed while were there was that
-
everything we needed was already there.
-
We could build a system that would allow us to stop this
-
using what's already there.
-
Who was there? What was already in the forest?
-
Well, we had people.
-
We had this group there that was dedicated, three full-time guards,
-
that was dedicated to go and stop it,
-
but they just needed to know what was happening out in the forest.
-
The real surprise, this is the big one,
-
was that there was connectivity out in the forest.
-
There was cell phone service way out in the middle of nowhere.
-
We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road,
-
there's certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service,
-
these people in the towns were on Facebook all the time,
-
they're surfing the web on their phones,
-
and this sort of got me thinking that in fact it would be possible
-
to use the sounds of the forest,
-
pick up the sounds of chainsaws programmatically,
-
because people can't hear them,
-
and send an alert.
-
But you have to have a device to go up in the trees.
-
So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of the forest,
-
connect to the cell phone network that's there,
-
and send an alert to people on the ground,
-
perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them.
-
But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest,
-
because it's something that we've definitely all heard about forever.
-
People in my generation have heard about saving the rainforest
-
since we were kids,
-
and it seems that the message has never changed:
-
We've got to save the rainforest, it's super urgent,
-
this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday.
-
and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains,
-
and we have potentially more urgent problems like climate change.
-
But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time:
-
Deforestation accounts for more greenhouse gas
-
than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined.
-
It's the second highest contributor to climate change.
-
Also, according to Interpol,
-
as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest
-
is illegal logging, like the illegal logging that we saw.
-
So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there,
-
then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent
-
and potentially have a major impact in the short term.
-
It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.
-
And so here's the system that we imagine.
-
It looks super high tech.
-
The moment a sound of a chainsaw is heard in the forest,
-
the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw,
-
it sends an alert through the standard GSM network that's already there
-
to a ranger in the field
-
who can in fact show up in real time and stop the logging.
-
It's no more about going out and finding a tree that's been cut.
-
It's not about seeing a tree from a satellite
-
in an area that's been clear cut,
-
it's about real-time intervention.
-
So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it,
-
but in fact, actually, as you saw, they weren't able to do it,
-
so it may not be so cheap and fast.
-
But if the devices in the trees were actually cell phones,
-
it could be pretty cheap.
-
Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of millions every year,
-
hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone,
-
not counting the rest of the world, which of course we should do,
-
but in fact, cell phones are great.
-
They're full of sensors.
-
They can listen to the sounds of the forest.
-
We do have to protect them.
-
We have to put them in this box that you see here,
-
and we do have to power them.
-
Powering them is one of the greater engineering challenges
-
that we had to deal with,
-
because powering a cell phone under a tree canopy,
-
any sort of solar power under a tree canopy,
-
was an as-yet-unsolved problem,
-
and that's this unique solar panel design that you see here,
-
which in fact is built also from recycled byproducts of an industrial process.
-
These are strips that are cut down.
-
So this is me putting it all together
-
in my parents' garage, actually.
-
Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that.
-
As you can see, this is a device up in a tree.
-
What you can see from here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured
-
up in the tree canopy at a distance.
-
That's important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises
-
up to a kilometer in the distance,
-
allowing them to cover about three square kilometers,
-
if someone were to take them, it would make the area unprotected.
-
So does it actually work?
-
Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia,
-
not the same place, but another place,
-
to another gibbon reserve
-
that was threatened daily by illegal logging.
-
On the very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises.
-
We were able to get a real-time alert.
-
I got an email on my phone.
-
Actually, we had just climbed the tree. Everyone had just gotten back down.
-
All these guys are smoking cigarettes,
-
and then I get an email, and they all quiet down,
-
and in fact you can hear the chainsaw
-
really, really faint in the background,
-
but no one had noticed it until that moment.
-
And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers.
-
I was pretty nervous.
-
This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers are.
-
This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting
-
perhaps the entire endeavor.
-
I'm not really sure what's on the other side of this hill.
-
That guy's much braver than I am.
-
But he went, so I had to go, walking up,
-
and in fact, he made it over the hill,
-
and interrupted the loggers in the act.
-
For them, it was such a surprise --
-
they had never, ever been interrupted before --
-
that it was such an impressive event for them,
-
that we've heard from our partners they have not been back since.
-
They were, in fact, great guys.
-
They showed us how the entire operation works,
-
and what they really convinced us on the spot was that
-
if you can show up in real time and stop people,
-
it's enough of a deterrent they won't come back.
-
So --
-
Thank you. (Applause)
-
Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people,
-
and in fact, then some really amazing stuff started to happen.
-
People from around the world started to send us emails, phone calls.
-
What we saw was that people throughout Asia,
-
people throughout Africa, people throughout South America,
-
they told us that they could use it too,
-
and what's most important,
-
what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional,
-
in the forest there was pretty good cell phone service.
-
That was not exceptional, we were told,
-
and that particularly is on the periphery of the forests that are most under threat.
-
And then something really amazing happened,
-
which was that people started sending us their own old cell phones.
-
So in fact what we have now is a system
-
where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there,
-
who can both improve and use the existing connectivity,
-
and we're using old cell phones that are being sent to us
-
by people from around the world
-
that want their phones to be doing something else in their afterlife,
-
so to speak.
-
And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled,
-
then we believe it's an entirely upcycled device.
-
So again, this didn't come because of any sort of high-tech solution.
-
It just came from using what's already there,
-
and I'm thoroughly convinced that if it's not phones,
-
that there's always going to be enough there
-
that you can build similar solutions
-
that can be very effective in new contexts.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)