If a tree falls in the forest…

While I do not have a personal connection to Rainforest Connection, the highly-publicized project provides fertile ground for analysis.

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) has an ambitious mission: stop illegal deforestation, and in doing so, combat climate change. “If we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, we can have an impact,” CEO Topher White explains, “It might be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.”

To achieve their mission, White designed a system of solar-powered cellphones installed deep within the tropical forests of Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Cameroon. Automated algorithms process audio from these cellphones to detect sounds of chainsaws in real-time and send text messages to local communities to alert them about nearby activity.

Rainforest Foundation frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: local people just don’t know when and where it’s happening. It [is not] that the rangers [don’t] care; they just [can’t] hear the chainsaw whirring less than a half-mile away,” White claims. After all, we all know the thought experiment: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If stopping deforestation were a matter of information asymmetry, we would have solved it long ago.* However, the root problem is much larger in scope: consumer demand for agricultural products like beef, palm oil and soy drive over 70% of deforestation in the tropics. Kit-kat bars destroy orangutan habitat in Borneo; increase demand for precious metals in consumer electronics drive mines into the forests of Congo.Global market forces make the opportunity costs of conservation too high. Simply knowing that it’s happening won’t shift this calculus.

Poverty and urban expansion also threaten forests. Deforestation is upheld as a development strategy in many countries, such as Liberia, PNG, and Myanmar, which experienced wholescale leasing of remaining forests by government to private agribusiness and logging companies. Leading researchers on the topic have found that “powerful actors with a stake in deforestation often figure out how to get their way – whether using the rules to their advantage, or going around them.”

Deforestation is a complex eco-social-economic issue without a quick techno-fix. In this context, acoustic sensors are like smoke alarms without a fire brigade: they can help you know when and where a problem exists, but they can’t help put the fire out, or prevent arsonists from burning down your house in the first place.

Of course we all need fire alarms. But we also need phones to call the fire department – and we need them respond to our pleas, quickly. Based on my experiences working in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia and Uganda, even when locals know where illegal deforestation might be occurring – and they often do – myriad factors prevent “immediate intervention”: they lack the vehicles and fuel to travel long distances for investigations. They face threats to their livelihoods; in 2017, more than 197 environmental activists and defenders were murdered – a number that has been increasing in recent years. Their reports are ignored by courts and relevant legal authorities. Loggers are never fined; ranchers are never jailed.

A RFCx “theory of change” diagram insinuates that real-time alerts will a priori enable real-time interventions.

No doubt White has good intentions and a laudable goal. However, one smells traces of Courtney Martin’s “Seductive Reductionism of Solving Other People’s problems” in his life trajectory:

It would have seemed absurd for anyone to suggest, back when he was a nerdy kid attending a San Francisco prep school … that Topher White was destined to spend his days traipsing through the trees… He spent his 20s as a peripatetic vagabond, dabbling as a hired hand at various Silicon Valley start-ups, dancing in a touring Neil Young rock opera, and building elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions at Dennis Hopper’s New Mexico estate.

Then, in 2011 … he took a side trip to Borneo to volunteer at a gibbon reserve…. and then baffled when, on a leisure hike, he came across a group of men illegally cutting down a tree.

White is a brilliant technologist doing what technologists do best: deploying gadgets at scale. Western readers love the story of a Silicon-Valley do-gooder, so perhaps it is no surprise that press about RFCx obscures the real agents of change – local people – by focusing on the genius of the creator or the ingenuity of the device. But while the technology itself scales, the complex governance, economic, normative and legal issues driving deforestation manifest locally – and are perhaps best navigated by an Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Brazilian or Cameroonian affected by these dynamics.

Given its simplistic diagnosis of the problem, RFCx makes for easy critique. But, being a relatively new project, RFCx might yet yield results; more data are required to understand its effects and potential unintended consequences over time. But in the absence of more meaningful interventions that address immediate barriers to acting on deforestation, as well as the root economic drivers, I remain skeptical. RFCx is like a very TED-friendly fire alarm, ringing while the house burns down around us.

 

*NB: my previous project, Global Forest Watch, also frames deforestation as a metaphysical problem: if we just give people real-time deforestation data from satellites, they will act. 

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