Novel Operating Space for Conservation

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Do curso por Duke University

Innovation and Design for Global Grand Challenges

32 classificações

Duke University

Innovation and Design for Global Grand Challenges

32 classificações

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to current global challenges in conservation and development, including changes in both sectors. This course will inspire you to rethink assumptions to address global challenges in conservation and development, and introduce you to new models and approaches that harness technological, behavioral, and financial innovation. This course will equip you with the insights, skills and approaches necessary to successfully overcome these obstacles. In addition, this course will provide participants with the tools, models, and approaches to address global grand challenges in conservation and development, to question fundamental assumptions, and to create and execute new solutions. Course participants will be trained in the processes around innovation and design to address global grand challenges. This includes content focused on constructing innovation pipelines, principals of design and engineering unique to the developing world and to conservation (Design for the Other 90%), on harnessing and developing disruptive technologies, principles of behavior and marketing, and on overcoming the challenges with setting up social ventures. The course format will facilitate the development of a global community of innovators who will help solve the current and future grand challenges our planet faces in conservation and development, and will encourage thinking about how to do so that rethinks traditional assumptions and approaches within both conservation and development. This course will leverage the incredible idealism and interest in social entrepreneurship, design, and innovation among the millennials, in the US and abroad, and is intended to appeal to those interested in the maker movement. It also seeks to engage individuals in the developing world who are closest to the problems of conservation and development, who would benefit from the approaches taught in the course, and who can leverage their own knowledge of local culture.

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Grand Challenges in Conservation

We are in the middle of a period of extraordinary change on the planet, a sixth great mass extinction. Unlike the previous mass extinction events, this is the first extinction in Earth’s history that is driven by the actions of a single species. During this period, the earth has been fundamentally changing physically, chemically, biologically, and ecologically. The problems of extinction and habitat destruction are increasing exponentially, while our solutions are incremental. Conservation remains at times technophobic, risk-averse, reactionary, intransigent, and uninspiring, but it is changing. Much as humans have caused these problems, we have the ability to solve them. This module will present the Grand Challenges in Conservation, from wildlife trade, to energy, to climate change, to addressing the underlying drivers of global extinction. You will hear from leaders of some of the world’s most important conservation organizations working on these topics. We will examine the current debate underway in the future of conservation. <p> This week's module will demonstrate ways to: (1) apply our unparalleled innovation capacity and harness our technological advances to engineer resilience to global environmental changes; and (2) change demand and incentive structures to alter our behavior, and improve our ability to monitor and protect species around the world. Finally, this module looks in-depth at one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, Madagascar, an 8th continent that has served as a laboratory for evolution. To get started, begin by watching the video "Conservation Grand Challenges."

The Future of Conservation10:11

Novel Operating Space for Conservation15:33

Rethinking Approaches to Conservation8:59

Conservation Technology6:09

Conheça os instrutores

Alex Dehgan, J.D., M.S., Ph.D
The Chanler Innovator in Residence and the Inaugural David M. Rubenstein Fellow
Innovation & Entrepreneurship

This isn't me I never had such pretty blue eyes, but I was raised in a simpler time.

Where it was very clear that there were such things as natural things and

beautiful places such as this.

And then it was very clear that they were humans and

they were less beautiful places like this.

In that world it was clear, and I was taught, and

I experienced that humans existed as smaller units in this matrix of nature,

as pieces and processes, but in a natural world.

And humans were bad, by the way, so things were threats, and

humans were the sources of threats, and they had this kind of an impact on nature.

And therefore, in order to save those things,

what you needed to do was exclude people.

It's a fairly simple system.

Now nature got humans, humans are problems, you keep humans out, and

nature's okay.

Because then, without humans, it would be free to interact, evolve, and

in all of its splendor, be the natural world, and all seemed good.

I mean, and I spent decades of my life trying to make this remain like that and

feeling that that was it, the job was done.

And then it all went to hell,

which is an odd place to go if I'm on a mission from God but.

>> [LAUGH] >> But these are square watermelons, or

cubicle watermelons.

And they were made, not made, they were grown in Japan,

because Japanese buy small refrigerators.

And if you've ever tried to put a watermelon in a refrigerator,

you know how inefficient it is.

And so, Japanese weren't buying watermelons.

And so, the watermelon growers in Japan made square watermelons,

and then sales went up.

Or we had this extraordinary case, and it's now being repeated more and

more with other bird species.

But these fabulous birds, Lyre birds,

which are great singers in the South Pacific were imitating chainsaws.

They'd added the sound of chain saws to their vocal repertoire.

And that's found more and more now, so

that cat birds in the United States imitate cellphones.

And there are some very funny stories about people trying to answer their bird,

I mean, because they're sure their phone is going.

Or in this case great tits in the UK,

this is one worth a little moment of explaining.

So if you see on the left that's the natural song of great tits,

you see where it falls.

And then on the right hand side, my right hand side you see what a great tit lives

in, in an auditory neighbourhood In a city where all that red and blue are the sound

of city traffic and humans, and notice what's happened to the calls of the birds.

It's gone up, so the very fact of the matter that we make

noise has caused the natural world to respond.

And this is just half a block from where we used to live in

Westchester County in New York, which was a place just ridden with deer.

It turns out it was a town that had 2.2 acre minimum lot size.

And it turns out in a study that was done,

2.5 acres fragmentation is the ideal size to grow white-tailed deer.

So we had lots of white-tailed deer, and we had so many white-tailed deer,

that the state of New York collected road kill deer and composted them.

So you have to understand the logic.

So if you wanted to grow a garden you could go to the state and

get compost, which would make the garden richer which

would attract more deer [LAUGH] >> And you understand you're all at Duke,

you know what that means.

And what you perhaps don't know, being at Duke is there are also places that

you can go to get a pedicure with fish.

It's a particularly expensive pedicure, but

these little fish will pick off the dried bits of skin.

And you can sit, these are ladies, I asked to go.

I spent a little of time in one of these.

And once you get over the ticklishness it's quite fun.

It's a kind of odd relationship for the natural world you have to think.

Being at Duke you might not know about furries.

Although it sounds as if Xander might know about furries.

[LAUGH] You can talk to him later.

In fact, maybe there's a Duke furry club you can join.

>> [LAUGH] >> The point is that this is a whole

subculture in the United States and in other parts of the world,

in which there are people who believe that they should not have been born as humans,

but should have been born as animals.

And so you go to conventions wearing the suit, and

you notice the Star Wars guy in there who clearly got the wrong room,

but you can imagine in, anyway, you can imagine.

And so you vocalize as your animal, I draw your attention to the bunny sitting down,

he's actually a jackal-a-lope.

If you know because it's a bunny with deer antlers.

So again, but I mean everybody's fine.

But it makes you pause to think about what generates this as a view

about your relationship to the natural world.

And on this more serious note, there was the development of this field called

Historical Ecology, which is a really interesting one, and it has shown,

this is from low land Bolivia, a place where I spent some time.

It is shown that many of the things that we think are emblematic of the natural

world, in fact, are ghostly manifestations of previous human occupation.

So that these things, that I was trying to call forest islands, these patches

of forests in the back, this is a flatted savanna in the Belize Savannas.

That is a forest island, but

it's entirely constructed on the reminisce of human civilization.

But they were created and the trees then are recruited to them.

And in fact, some of this work you've seen Hackenberg and

others has suggested that vast parts of the Amazon, and other researchers in

West Africa saying vast parts of that, in fact, are the very forced composition

itself reflects previous human action in advertent and inadvertent.

Then we have a set of things called Human-dependent species.

So this is a Corncrake from Europe, and these birds used to inhabit

natural grass lands in the island of Britain and, in fact,

only reproduce in a nest, raise their nesting in grass of a certain height.

Well, that grassland long disappeared, but

they took over nesting in agricultural fields.

And unless you practice a certain kind of agriculture, you drive corncrakes extinct.

So they are entirely dependent on traditional forms of grassland management.

So I'm building this case for how this world in which I was raised is no longer

one in which really allows me to continue to think that way.

This really kind of ironic and sad picture is of

the New York Aquarium, after hurricane Sandy hit.

And you notice it's a marine fish tank, with the ocean,

that's the ocean that flooded the aquarium,

outside the tank, kind of strange.

And of course, you're very familiar with this notion of the Anthropocene,

that we're entering a geological epoch in which the very basic

formation processes of the natural world by our geochemical processes and

evolutionary processes have been co-opted or

at least largely altered in scale and extent and nature by humans.

So this simple dichotomy, right, in which you had fields with cows in them,

or the natural forest, is no longer one that works.

And instead you're in a world like this one in which there's

an amazing intertwining and intertangling.

A hybrid world of humans and nature.

And it's not all clear how you're going to separate those.

And so we find ourselves engaged in practices.

And I'm going to give you a couple examples.

Re-wilding and de-distinction.

So re-wilding is an attempt to bring the wild back in

an already more modified human world, bring the wild back.

So you're sort of trying to reach back and bring something forward.

And part of that is being done by this process that the Europeans are engaged and

called D-Domestication which is exactly what is says it is.

Here is a place, and I won't try to pronounce that, it's a Dutch word you see

it Oostvaardersplassen, I said I'm going to pronounce it.

There are going to take these horses, which are a breed that is as close as

they can get to what they think where the plactacen to see horses in Europe.

And they're placing them in nature reserves and

they've gotten a special dispensation to allow the animal

rights laws of the Netherlands not to apply to those horses And

when it snows and the winter is hard those horses die.

Old ones die and young ones die.

They are reestablishing natural selection on a domesticated breed.

And an even kind of wilder version,

there are no South China tigers left in the wild.

So, you can imagine, if you think about what South China looks like,

but they have them in captivity.

So, there is a group that is really interested in reestablishing,

rewilding South China tigers.

But they can't do this in China, so they have leased land.

And if you are a people like Cathleen and

Louise over there should recognize what's wrong with this image.

That's a South African antelope that's being killed by a tiger.

Now, remember your zoogeography, those things are separate and

they shouldn't come together, but we are, this group is teaching predator behavior

to South China tigers by having them learn how to kill South African antelopes.

And something that I know you guys have covered in the course that has received

a certain amount of press is this notion of novel ecosystems, that is,

combination of species in ecological processes that have not previously

seen in Earth's system.

So you have a set of forests in Puerto Rico, for example, which mix tree and

bird and mammal species in ways that are correctly managed in an ecological

structure, but involve pieces that come from all over the world.

Ecological actors that hadn't met until this long bus ride they got put on in

Puerto Rico.

And they're going, okay, fine.

I'll be the predator.

No, you can't be the predator.

I said I wanted to be the predator first.

You be the seed disburser.

And off they're going in these novel forest ecosystems.

And then this that I mentioned before, cyborg ecosystems,

in which there's a deliberate mechanical intervention to try to

reestablish what you might call natural geochemical patterns of deposition.

So this is a basin in the Gulf of Mexico that doesn't

have the soil deposition that it should have.

And so they're building these little modules which then pick up

the sedimentation and carry it forward and then drop it where it, quote, should be.

Then printing reefs, so this is a 3D reef.

It's been made from a 3D printer.

And they are out there now in the ocean having little going,

geez, this looks nice, settling down and reestablishing reefs.

Now this has been done with a variety of concretes and

other sort of things including, by the way, your ashes.

If you wish to be buried in a reef there is a company to which you can send your

ashes, they get mixed with concrete and

you too can be a coral reef if you want to.

But you're too young to want to be coral reefs, but, or

machine animal hybrids, so this is a moth- And you see in the upper

right-hand corner the pupae that had a computer chip put into it so

that when it eclipsed into the adult, it had that computer chip,

which allowed control of the moth's flight with a laptop remotely.

Now you say what, but I noticed proudly, because I could have been a Duke person,

that you are celebrating some anniversary of cochlear implants,

created I guess here at Duke, or else you wouldn't be celebrating them.

Except you are celebrating, not celebrating, but

commemorating Dean Smith's Yeah, which seems an awfully generous thing

considering the way you probably thought about it in his life.

Anyway, the point is that a cochlear implant is nothing more than a human

machine hybrid.

I mean, that's what it is.

That's what a pacemaker is.

It's just when we look at them in other animals we go ew, how weird.

But we're doing it to ourselves quite a lot.

And just because we want to be able to think about the natural world without

even having the natural world, there's now an effort,

an open source effort, to make this round worm entirely digitally.

They are going to simulate this animal.

One of the best understood animals for lab purposes.

They're now building the DNA so that you don't need the worm, I guess.

All you need is the numbers.

So, the argument then is obvious, that these things are so commingled one with

the other that it's tough to know what conservation is supposed to do.

I know part of this class was reading some of these papers that make this argument

and it's a really hard problem and I think it's the major problem facing us.

The problem with the way the argument is framed

now is that it's nowhere near big enough.

That is they think that's a tough argument,

well I'm going to tell you what's an even tougher argument So

the problem is that these current debates are circumscribed by the past.

They're not informed by the novelty of the emerging future that we're talking about.

And they're not alert to the perils and possibilities of this future and

they are not fit for purpose in terms of whatever responsibility are going to be

in this new world In fact what has happened is that there has opened for

conservation, what can only be called a novel operating space.

Something that we have no tradition of operating in but

we have the potential to go in and start doing something about.

We are not offered this as an opportunity and as a challenge Or

as a challenge depending on how you think about this.

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