Hey folks. I’m Rachael, a research assistant and MS candidate in the Media Lab’s Space Enabled group. Before MIT, I helped launch, grow, and dep. direct Global Forest Watch, an initiative that monitors deforestation in real-time from space. Previous to Global Forest Watch, I spent a year living in remote indigenous communities researching the use of technology to protect local rights, lands and culture. With a background in environmental policy, anthropology, and earth observation, I use tools of ethnography and policy analysis to imagine how global environmental data can enable local conservation action.

Or so it says on my Media Lab profile. The reality is that I’m a jaded environmentalist deeply skeptical of the power of technology to solve wicked collective action problems like climate change and resource management. I am taking this class to indulge my nihilism, perhaps inspire a dash of hope, and to develop analytical frameworks to understand enabling conditions and barriers of technology for social change.

But let’s take a step back.

Satellite data provides a synoptic view of the world’s forests, oceans, freshwater, and cities. My professional career has centered on using earth observation technologies to produce timely, accurate data on the environment. I helped create reports, blogs, guidance, apps, and interactive webmaps to deliver this data to decision-makers, assuming if they saw the scale of the problem, they’d act. After all, “we can’t manage what we don’t measure.”

The reality, I have learned, is that data is necessary but not sufficient to spur environmental action.

An example: I spent several years leading a mobile app project called Forest Watcher, developed together with the Jane Goodall Institute and local communities and rangers in Uganda, Peru and Indonesia. The app receives satellite alerts of deforestation in the user’s area. Users navigate to alerts and collect photos, text and GPS points to document the change. Local communities use the resulting data to inform conservation plans, report illegal activities to authorities, and prioritize resources for at-risk areas. The ultimate goal? Reduce deforestation rates in areas with active app use.

The app works; the concept doesn’t.

This is because users face myriad individual, systemic and institutional challenges to reducing deforestation. In Uganda, park rangers didn’t have motorcycles to visit remote deforestation. In Peru, cutting down trees to cultivate coca proved more lucrative than conservation. In Indonesia, corrupt official advance infrastructure projects in protected areas, in direct violation of the law.

The app is sexy; the problems are not. Lines of code can’t overcome governance, corruption, incentives and resources limitations.

I thought data could save the planet, but it can’t. Someone please prove me wrong.