Reusing Old Cell Phones to Save Rain Forests
Could recycled cell phones save the rain forest? 2015 National Geographic Emerging Explorer Topher White thinks so. A physicist, engineer, and inventor, White is adorning trees with old phones that can pick up sounds of illegal logging activity and send real-time alerts to rangers. White's work comes at a critical time since deforestation is the second largest contributor to climate change.
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Transcript
Illegal logging, according to Interpol, makes up about 50 to
90 percent of the logging in the rainforest worldwide. It's true that
deforestation alone counts for more carbon emissions than all transportation, all
the cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes combined.
In the summer of 2011, I visited the forests of Borneo, the
rainforest of Borneo, for the very first time. As you can imagine, it was the
overwhelming sound that really struck me the most. But there were some things that
actually stuck out from this cacophony. This is a hornbill. This is a cicada. And,
uh... This is a family of gibbons. They're singing to each other over a great
distance. This was not something we were aware of. But in the background of
this sound, this overwhelming cacophony, is the sound of chainsaws. In fact, if
you turn down the sound of the forest, there was actually a chainsaw noise
behind that, the entire time.
It's very, very hard to know where illegal logging is taking
place, even over a short distance of the forest, because it's such a loud place
and because it's such a dense place that you can't move through so easily. I
think, you... you have to realize that it's hard for people in the field. There's
lot of sincere people out there who are trying to fight deforestation but it's
not easy to know where it's happening at all times. And having real time
knowledge of this is pretty important.
So, here's this idea, right. The moment that a chainsaw goes
off in the forest, a computer, a device is able to pick up the sound, pick it
out of the rainforest, chainsaws, and alert the local authorities who can show
up in real time and halt the loggers. The most important part of the equation
are the people. The people who can actually show up and respond, who've taken the
risk of being there to actually stop it. But the amazing thing is that there's
sometimes pretty good connectivity. There's cell phone service out in the
middle of the forest, particularly on the periphery. Um, out there there's no
electricity, no running water, no roads for hundreds of miles, in some cases. But
they're all on their cell phones. People in the villages were surfing Facebook.
They're on the web. They charge their phones on a generator at night, and then
they do the same thing the next day. And so there's pretty good cell phone
service. But you need a device, right? And so we're talking about cell phones. What
can cell phones do? I mean, what can't cell phones do these days, right?
So, cell phones are fantastic little computers. They're everywhere.
We probably all have them in our pockets right now. And they're a fantastic development
platform. There's hundreds of millions of developers who are willing to use it.
To protect it from, from... from the elements of the rainforest, we put it in a
box. There's a powerful microphone on it. You do have to put some solar panels
on it to make sure it can stay powered, which is actually the hardest part because
under a tree canopy it is pretty dark. This is actually what it looks like all
put together. This is the prototype. There's a phone inside that box. And
you're able to listen to the sounds of the forest. This is me, sort of, putting
it all together, just to show you guys how simple it really actually can be. But
you have to test it in the field. So, we took it back to Indonesia. This time
on the island of Sumatra. And, somewhat to our surprise, on the second day we
were able to pick up sounds of chainsaws and send a real time alert to myself and
to the rangers that were there. We took off to go... to go see where this was. This
is the moment where we've just sort of walked through the forest and we're not
sure if this has been the best idea altogether. There's supposed to be loggers
on the other side and so we're kinda regretting this... “Oh,
God, he's moving. I gotta go, I gotta follow him.” Okay, so we get over... We
get over the hill. And on the other side, we managed to catch some loggers in
the act. And our partners there talked them down. Nobody had to be arrested. They
actually were acquaintances of the people that run the reserve. And although we
didn't know that this was on there... So, they were able to leverage this, these
partners. They're so fantastic. They were able to leverage this to diffuse the
situation and according to them, the loggers have not been back to that area
since. So, as far as they're concerned, this was very effective.
But the question is how do we pick it out? Look, it needs to
be automatic. There's... Sometimes people think that it's about, perhaps, people
listening on the phone to the forest and looking for the sounds of chainsaws. It's
not really feasible to expect people to pick the sounds out, even. But
computers are really, really good at it. On the top you see data from Sumatra. The
exact test. This is the event that we were able to respond to. This is almost a
kilometer away from where the device is throughout the cacophony of the forest.
But there's these peaks, these four little bumps and those represent these... The
signal of the chainsaw, which really does not belong in the forest. This is not
cutting edge science, this is really... old school data analysis. And you can
see it's... this is much closer than one kilometer. But you can see these peaks
that show up and even as the peaks move around back and forth, they are always the
same distance away. That's something that a computer can pick out pretty
easily. Based on this, if you can pick up the sounds of chainsaws at one
kilometer away, then you can perhaps set them up around the periphery of a
reserve and protect up to two kilometers inward. Especially because the periphery
of the reserve is the most likely to have cell phone service. We thought this
is pretty exciting so we shared the news with the world. And people came, people
came to us and said “Hey, we can use this elsewhere.”
The first one... The first one was our partner: Zoological
Society of London, who invited us to Africa to do it. And they had an even
better idea than picking up chainsaws. They said to us, “Look,
there's this FSC concession here. There's about two-thirds of it in the south that
is under threat from illegal logging and poaching but there's one access road. There's
just one road that people use to get in and out. So, you could blanket the entire
surface in cell phones which doesn't seem very feasible. Or you could just set
them up along this road and if only your system could detect vehicles, then you
could know the moment that loggers come in and out or poachers go in and out.”
All of it goes through this one gate. This is in Cameroon. And working with an FSC
certified company that's responsible for protecting this area as part of their
certification. These are the guys that man the gate. And you can see behind
them, all of these animals that are there. These animals that they are responsible
for protecting including elephants, chimpanzees and gorillas. But it was known
that there was a decent amount of illegal logging taking place there. So, we
set up our system along the road and trained it to pick out the sounds of
motorcycles. And you can see the same sort of system applies with these peaks and
being able to pick them out.
Moving from Africa to the Amazon. Now, on the outskirts of
the Amazon you have this ocean of deforestation with these little islands of
forest. What's going on with that? Well, those are indigenous reserves. They
are not necessarily protected areas in the traditional sense. They're lands
that have been... have been maintained by the indigenous people and are
recognized by the government. And, somehow, that seemed to work. So, you move
down here, this is the Tembé Reserve. The area to the south is a different
tribe. And there's about 1500 of them left. Most of their villages are in the
north and the south edge. This was pristine, virgin rainforest just a few
decades ago. But the middle area is under constant threat from illegal logging.
Sometimes, ten logging trucks at a time are settling and also drug plantations
are there as well. So, we spoke through our partners to the Tembé and they said
this... this vigilance program, this program of driving people out of their
land could use a technological edge. These are the Tembé. They believe that
they are currently on their last stand for the survival of their entire race. And
it is, sort of, you know, the way forward or annihilation. Fortunately for
that, they are well organized as of late. They are well armed and they are very
motivated to fight back against the drug smugglers and illegal loggers. So, we
were working with the chiefs in the village in the north and the south, because,
again, it's always about using what's already there. In the case of Africa, there
was a cell-tower right smack dab next to the reserve. But in Brazil, we don't
have that. There is infrastructure, there's cell phone towers... This is huge,
this is a 6,000 square kilometer reserve. And so these cell phone, sort of,
points of access that you see here, are actually up to 50-60 kilometers away from
the areas that are most under threat which made this next part pretty
important. So, being up in the trees is important because it allowed us to do
things like this. Just sitting up here in the tree while it rains away. I'm
about 120 feet up. But, pretty amazing thing is that... ...if you look at the
signal up there... Well, now it's not very good. Look at the signal up there, we
got cell phone service. Thanks to this huge... ...parabolic antenna that we
got, which is picking up a signal from about 30 kilometers away here in Brazil,
in the Tembé territory. Okay, so, they don't all need those antennas. But, that
one actually was able to pick up a signal from 30 kilometers away. We were able
to repeat the same experiment at 50 kilometers, meaning that we can really push
the limits of where this system is able to potentially work. I just got back
here this weekend from the Tembé Reserve and one week ago, this last Friday, we
became aware that there were vehicles moving through one of the areas where we
set up a device. It was some of the illegal settlers who came back. They
noticed that we'd been there. They burned down one of the Tembé bridges. And so
this is from less than a week ago, in Brazil. So, this fight is just beginning
but it's clear that already we've been able to lend a hand to that. Thanks.