Good Things That Happened In The World Today

April 22, 2021

Happy Earth Day!

In honor of Earth Day, I'm going to summarize two news articles I read about different sustainability centered topics. One article was about saving the bees and the other is about stopping logging in the Amazon.

The first story I read was about saving the bees, a movement that's been around for quite a few years now ever since we realized a lot of the bees we were used to seeing weren't around nearly as much. A young woman named Katharina Schmidt had been raised around bee hives her entire life and suddenly in the mid 1990s, the bee hut that was usually next to her grandfather's house, was empty. All of the bees had died. Katharina's interest in the bees reignited about three years ago and she set up her own hut, reaching out to other beekeepers and helping them market their honey, but what she realized was that the bees weren't the problem.

"The problem isn't actually that there aren't enough honeybees. The problem is that bees and other insects are dying around the world in large numbers and we don't know why. And that was really unsatisfying to me."

So she started her own company (apic.ai) and set up bee huts with data collecting technology. She shares her findings with scientists and pretty much anyone who wants it in order to help save the bees and figure out where to plant new trees and flowers. 

Link to the bee story: https://about.google/intl/en_us/stories/save-the-bees/
Below is a video about Katharina's company and project.

The second story I read was about a tribe known as the Tembé who are using recycled Android cell phones and machine learning to save their land in the Amazon from deforestation. Their chief, Chief Naldo, became chief at only 15 years old because of how passionate he was about saving their land. When he was eight, he enlisted the help of other children to search the forest for illegal loggers, a dangerous job for anyone, let alone children.

Chief Naldo reached out to the founder of  the environmental nonprofit Rainforest Connection to ask for a collaboration between the two groups to stop the illegal logging of their land. The tribe wasn't afraid of using new technologies or tools to accomplish their mission and that was where Topher White, the founder of Rainforest Connection, came in to play. 

Topher and Chief Naldo used the recycled Android cell phones and Tensor Flow (a Google open source machine learning model) to track the sounds of illegal logging in real time. They affixed an old cell phone to a solar power adapter and external microphone so they can hear up to 1 kilometer away, naming the devices "Guardians".

The Guardians are placed high up in trees so they can get the sunlight they need to power them as well as for better cell service. They listen to the sounds of the rainforest 24/7. Using the Tensor Flow technology, the machine recognizes the sounds of logging trucks and chainsaws, sending a real time alert to Tembé rangers, a security force consisting of villagers who can intervene or contact the proper authorities. 

Rainforest Connection is giving this technology to other partners fighting deforestation in five other countries, including Peru, Ecuador and Romania. 

Link to the Amazon logging story: https://about.google/intl/en_us/stories/rainforest/

Below is a video detailing the journey to implant these technologies in the rainforest but I also highly recommend checking out the website linked above because it's amazing, the design is so cool and they have the sounds of the rainforest playing while you scroll. Awesome dynamics and awesome story.