Show Notes
How can satellite data and computation fundamentally shift how we understand our place on a changing Earth, and amongst other species? Can we use all that newfound knowledge, transparency, and intelligent data architecture to become better stewards? Allowing the earth to behold itself and its own lifeworld in a whole new way… And what are the ethical implications of having the power of such oversight? In whose hands? Today our guest is Dan Hammer, Managing Partner at Ode, a data and design agency for the environment, and prior chief data scientist at the World Resources Institute, where he co-founded Global Forest Watch, a tool that tracked and monitored global deforestation patterns. He is founder of Spaceknow, a satellite image analytics start-up, and was a senior advisor in the Obama White House, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at NASA, creator of Global Plastic Watch and Amazon Mining Watch. His work has used direct earth observation to locate every wastewater pond in rural Alabama; to watch illegal mining unfold in the Amazon; and to find every plastic waste site along rivers in Vietnam. He created the application Climate TRACE for former Vice President Al Gore, the first facility-level global inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, and much more. In this episode speak about his new endeavour which is attempting to create an open source foundation model for nature – where you can “start to query the landscape like you would Google Maps”. I ask Dan how he manages to strike a balance between high level global information layers, and local relevance, and whether is it really possible that a global model can actually help people on the ground develop a deeper intimacy and action with the lifeworlds of where they reside. Episode Website Link Show Links: Dan Hammer Climate TRACE Carbon Mapper - methane plumes watch illegal mining unfold in the Amazon find every plastic waste site along rivers in Vietnam Amazon Mining Watch Global Plastic Watch Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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More from Lifeworlds
[Republished with better quality audio] This is a meditation I wrote and recorded to plunge us through epochs of cosmic time, through the tremendous evolutionary processes that preceded us, became us, and are us. It grants us invaluable context on the great tales of life whose memories are held in our bones.
What does it actually mean to translate a language that has never been written down or spoken in air, whose holders are ancient ocean denizens, and may not even carry concepts we'd recognize as our own? That's the question sitting at the center of this episode, and those answering it have formed one of the more radical partnerships in science today: Project CETI and MOTH. CETI is a collective of fifty-plus scientists attempting to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. MOTH is a legal collective working to bring that science before courts, in the hope that whales might be granted something like legal standing and rights. In a barn in the English countryside, David Gruber and César Rodríguez-Garavito walk us through what it takes to listen this closely to another species, and whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness. What we'll cover: The sperm whale's anatomy of perception, acoustic vision, and what it's like to navigate a world of inky darkness through sound The deep evolutionary kinship between humans and whales, and what their convergent vowel-like sounds suggest about the origins of language How Project CETI uses machine learning to find phonetic structure and contextual meaning in whale codas The legal arguments emerging from this research, from the right not to suffer to the right to a cultural life A remarkable multi-whale birth event — and what it reveals about coordination, kinship, and social roles among whales The ethical guardrails (NACT) proposed for AI-assisted animal communication technology, and the risks of getting this wrong Whether this new convergence of human, animal, and machine intelligence could spark a watershed moment for conservation and consciousness Episode Website Link Links: Project CETI More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU Nature: Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events What if We Understood what Animals are Saying? The Legal Impact of AI-assisted Studies of Animal Communication.” He Whakaputanga Moana: The first Declaration recognizing whales as sentient beings with inherent rights From Orbit to Intimacy The Crimson: Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something? Time: Researchers are Using AI to Understand what Animals are Saying Lifeworlds Episode: The Sounds of Life: Bioacoustics, A.I. and Ethics – with Karen Bakker Lewis Mumford: Tecnics and Civilisation From Orbit to Intimacy Listening to whales: input requested!! Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Credits: Sperm Whale Sound (Project CETI) Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
What if one of the most powerful tools for saving the Amazon rain-forest was a bee most people have never heard of? Enter the stingless bee – a 65 million year old resident of Earth that produces honeys teeming with medicinal molecules and has co-evolved with indigenous Amazonian communities across millennia. Today, these bees are at the keystone species at the heart of a pioneering conservation movement spanning science, law, economics and Indigenous rights: one that recently secured the world's first legal recognition of the rights of an insect.
What is life, and are we alone in the universe? In this episode I sit down with Adam Frank, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester, prolific science communicator, and author of five books including The Blind Spot and The Little Book of Aliens. Adam is one of the most compelling voices working at the intersection of astrobiology, philosophy, and the human future. We journey from the stunning variety of exoplanets we're only beginning to map, to the deep questions on detecting life in space. Adam argues that the search for extraterrestrial life can't be separated from the question of what life means here on Earth. Astrobiology, it turns out, may be our most useful mirror for understanding our own civilisational moment. We also get into the hard problem of consciousness, the blind spot at the heart of modern science, and how cosmology like art and myth - can be a gateway to awe. A conversation that leaves you more at home in the strangeness of the universe and probably less certain about what “alive” even means. Episode Website Link Links: Adam’s Website Adam’s Podcast: The Blind Spot Adam’s Instagram Noema Magazine: Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) The Atlantic: The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore 5 Sci FI Aliens article Beyond Center at ASU on astrobiology and SETI Sarah Walker’s Assembly Theory in the NYT: A Test for Life Versus Non-Life Nature paper on Assembly Theory Schrodinger: What is Life? Information Theory Book: Human Cosmos by Jo Marchant "Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics" by Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd Photo Credit: Hubble Space Telescope Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today’s episode explores a simple but urgent question: is our education system still fit for the world we’re entering? Climate disruption, AI, and uncertainty demand new forms of education fit for complexity and change. A rich lineage of alternative and experimental education has been evolving for decades, seeking to make learning more holistic, place-based, creative, and ecologically grounded. The focus of today’s conversation is one of those institutions: Black Mountains College in Wales. BMC is building a university model explicitly designed for a warming world, where nature is often the classroom and curriculum blends ecology and climate science with the arts, systems thinking, and community-rooted practice. I’m joined by its co-founder and CEO, Ben Rawlence, award-winning writer and former human rights researcher, to explore: The historicity of Western educational systems What the role of a university should be in society Black Mountains College as model of the future of education The role of ecological imagination Youth, eco anxiety and the challenges of parenting in today’s planetary moment Episode Website Links: Black Mountains College Think Like a Forest by Ben Rawlence Guardian: ‘We create changemakers’: the new UK college dedicated to climate crisis BMC and ecological imagination by Joseph Rowntree Foundation List of alternative schools and earth centered curriculum centers The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below Britt Wray on Climate Grief Future Council Re-imagining education conference Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes. Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.