Transcriber: Katarina Ericson Reviewer: Denise RQ
Well, good evening and thank you for being here.
I'm going to talk about this collaborative project,
extreme citizen science
which is a sort of odd thing which came inadvertently
out of my experience of working with hunter-gatherers in Congo.
But really it's a story
not about the hunter-gatherers or about us particularly,
but about listening to each other, and about sharing perspectives,
and about the importance of being willing
to spend the time necessary for that to happen
if we really want to start to develop interesting solutions
to problems which seem intractable.
This is a large forest which you will see is probably looking very empty of people,
but underneath, inside that forest, are large numbers of people.
Those people live in small camps,
dispersed quite widespread across the forest,
and I spent the past 18 years or so working with them,
learning their language, sharing their lives,
with my wife Ingrid and my son Lando for three years in the early 90s.
And in that process, we became aware of a very different way of living,
and as anthropologists, we used a method called participant observation,
which means that you really learn the language,
you spend time really getting into the lives of the people you're living with
so that you understand what really matters to them.
And I had fairly standard interests at that time,
which were in ritual, which were in dance and music,
things that anthropologists often enjoy getting their teeth into.
But at the same time as we were doing all that, we started to learn
that there were quite serious other issues going on in this forest,
and those issues...
- I'm sorry but the slides are somehow not coming in my order -
were really ones that these young people will face as they're growing up.
This is a society which is based on sharing,
and sharing results in some very interesting consequences
if you apply it rigorously.
They have politically egalitarian social forms,
nobody has more than other people.
If I have more than I initially need,
I can immediately have that demanded from me
by somebody who hasn't got that thing.
So in a sense, in these societies, goods are free.
You don't have to pay for the things you don't have, you have to ask for them.
This sharing ethos is really very dominant in these groups,
and now, unfortunately, surprisingly rare in the world,
though of course, we have all evolved as hunter-gatherers;
hunter-gathering represents probably, the most stable,
enduring, and sustainable life-style of any human groups anywhere in the world.
But this way of life is being challenged very radically by notions of development,
and the importance of monetizing resources
that otherwise are sitting quietly in nature.
What happened in the Congo is that these huge forests,
something like the size of Belgium,
were under pressure from international organizations
like the World Bank and other international creditors.
The government was told they must develop it,
so they start to generate an income
to repay these huge debts that they have taken.
So the idea was by creating concessions:
you could invite outsiders to bid for the rights to exploit those resources.
In these cases it's mostly trees,
though mines and minerals are now becoming the really big issue,
the big resources that people want to extract from these areas.
But as you can see, the whole forest has been carved up and rented out
to various international companies,
without any regard for the local hunter-gatherers.
And these outsiders,
the first thing they need to do of course is get access to these resources.
And so suddenly, areas which the hunter-gatherers controlled,
because you wouldn't be able to go there, unless they took you,
were accessible to anybody who could get into a car.
The resources that people have been mainly extracting up until now are these trees,
and in particular the African mahogany, which is also called Sapele.
And it's not clear-cut logging as you get in some parts of the world,
this is very selective logging, it's about 1.5 trees per hectare.
So it doesn't have a big impact on the biomass of the forest
but it has a substantial impact on the biodiversity of the forest.
It also, of course, generates huge income,
and areas of forest like this, in extraordinarily short amounts of time,
become areas of forest like this,
literally, five or six years.
Thousands of people are suddenly living in an area of huge biodiversity,
and they have needs, they have lots of different food that they need,
money, and social life, and all sorts of other things
that people living in groups require.
Now this forest is full of Tsetse flies, so cattle don't survive,
but people of course use the protein around them which is the bushmeat,
the wild animals that roam in the forest.
So suddenly, with this huge demand for bushmeat,
you have commercial hunters moving out, using those roads,
and accessing lots of different parts of the forest.
Maybe if it was just consumed locally, it wouldn't be too much of a problem,
but of course these things are exported nationally
along the same roads that allow you into the forest,
connect up to other road networks, and even internationally.
You can buy bushmeat, probably from this forest, in London here,
as well as in America, in New York, and in Paris.
This attracts, of course, the attention of conservationists,
and on your left here, you can see about 3000 wire traps
which were collected in just two weeks of patrols around a small area of forest.
This really is having a serious impact on the animals living in this forest.
One of the key solutions for the conservationists
is to train up these paramilitary units called ecoguards
who move round the forest looking for poaching and poachers' activities.
And one of the problems that they face is
that actually, the really serious poaching is organized by national elites,
and they can't control them without fearing reprisals,
risking reprisals, quite serious ones.
So, because they want to do their job
and they are concerned about addressing poaching,
they tend to go for softer targets,
very often the local hunter-gatherers and local farming people.
The local people, the forest people, feel very persecuted by this,
and they feel very resentful that the really big poachers
who are causing very serious problems are not being tackled by this process.
In about 2005,
the logging company who dominated most of the area I did my research in,
decided to go for a Forest Stewardship Council certificate.
Now this certificate requires a whole set of environmental calculations to be done
about what is a sustainable harvest, and so on,
but also a whole set of social activities to ensure that it's socially durable,
that the people who also depend on this same forest can continue to live
and use the forest resources in the way they have previously.
The forester is a technician, so calculating the sustainable harvest,
how to narrow the roads and so on,
was something they were very capable and able to do.
But they weren't anthropologists,
and they didn't know how to deal with the issues around people,
so they asked me to help them.
So I went to see my friends and I said, well, what do you think about logging?
Is logging good?
They said: "Look, we've got a big forest, it's full of resources,
we share things, we don't mind sharing some of our trees with them.
But there are some things that annoy us.
We don't like it when their bulldozers drive over our tombs,
when they spoil the springs that come up in the forest where we get good water.
We're not happy when they cut down our medicinal trees, or our sacred trees,
and one thing that we really are unhappy about
is when they cut down our caterpillar trees."
These caterpillar trees give abundant amounts of caterpillars,
just at the time when the animals are dispersing in the forest
at the beginning of the rainy season.
They grow on the number one commercial species
that the loggers like to take out, the Sapele trees,
and so this posed a problem.
When I reported this back to the logging company,
they were very distressed, they thought they would have to withdraw
their main commercial species from production
if they wanted this green certificate.
I assured them it wasn't every tree, just key trees that go above the canopy
that attract the butterflies that lay the eggs that the people want to keep,
because they're the ones that they regularly go to.
So we decided we'd have to map it, and to do that,
they had to first identify who was responsible for which parts of forest.
We began by noting down which clans were responsible for which areas of forest.
With that, they were able to then go and talk to people,
ask them to take them round the forest, and using GPSs they began to mark out
and to geotag the different trees that people wanted protected.
And this process was very laborious, it took a lot of time,
it required large teams of people,
and there are huge amounts of human error
that enter into these kinds of transcription processes.
It was unsatisfactory, and I wondered, why don't the local people do it?
It's a huge area, half the size of Belgium.
We need scalable and sustainable solutions.
I imagined using icons to allow people to collect the data themselves;
and we found a UK software company willing to make it into software.
They turned it into this piece of software,
which we loaded onto a hand-held computer with a GPS unit on top.
We started to show it to people,
and very quickly, within 15 minutes actually,
most people can learn how to use it quite effectively.
The only people who had slight problems were people with eyesight issues,
some of the elder people.
So what would happen is, we'd get combinations
with the old people telling the younger people
where to note the particular resources, and the younger people learning,
of course, in the process, where those resources were.
And so very soon, we started to replace the GPS, on the right there,
with these hand-held computers,
and people started to make maps.
If, for instance, you were a lady who wanted to protect a sacred tree,
you'd start on screen one, on the left here,
and you'd pick, at the bottom, this icon with people,
which represents cultural and religious resources.
That would take you to screen two,
where you would have a choice of another set of icons,
and this one at the bottom is one of the forest spirits,
so you would press on the forest spirit,
and that would take you to a third screen,
where you have a choice of marking a sacred path,
which are always marked with these palm fronds, or a sacred tree.
And you press the sacred tree, the machine goes "Beep!"
and you know that you've recorded that particular resource.
So very quickly - maybe we need to dim the lights slightly -
maps like this would start to be made by the local hunter-gatherers
and would show the particular areas where they had resources.
The loggers could then turn these maps into GI Arc view,
which is the geographic information system software that they use
for planning and managing all their cutting schedules,
and so protect and remove from their cutting schedules
any resources that the local people wanted protected.
Even in areas of forest as heavily used as this,
they were actually able to protect and remove from the cutting schedule
all the resources that local people wanted protected,
and the reason was that they had a 15% margin of flexibility
in planning their cutting schedules.
So the system suddenly allowed people like this,
who prefer to stay in the forest, in their forest camps and forest places,
an ability to speak in places like this,
but not by being there, but by sending their maps there.
They love the fact that the maps now go into these intimidating environments,
and the loggers love the maps because they can very easily integrate them
back into their GIS systems that they use for managing their exploitation,
and the communication suddenly flows in a very easy way,
in a way that it never did before.
Once agreed upon, the communities go back, and they mark the cemeteries,
or the trees that they want protected.
And now every logging company in the Congo basin
that wants to go for this Forest Stewardship Council label,
uses this system.
With varying quality, I must say.
And so this now continues on as we speak,
wherever there are new places they're going to cut.
But of course, trees are important for all the forest communities
and particularly for those who are the poorest ones
because those are the resources they can collect for free.
In southeast Cameroon, the Baka communities there
have a great problem with illegal logging.
What happens here is that artisan cutters will come into the forest,
cut down caterpillar trees like this one,
saw it on site and then transport it out of the forest.
So we developed a new set of software which tried to deal with that.
Here we have a stump,
and because the size of the stump depends on legality,
you can't cut trees that are too small,
we had sets of strings of different lengths
which people could use then to give a rough sense of the size
of the stump or log that they found in the forest.
We would go round to different communities showing them the icons,
not telling them what they meant,
so they told us what the icons meant,
As people stumbled and didn't recognize them,
we would adapt them and change them,
and then we would test in another village.
But of course, after having gone through what the icons meant,
we would take them into the forest,
and we would have a group of women on one side, and a group of men,
and we would check that the icons responded to what they wanted to map,
and worked for the things that they felt were important.
There were huge amounts of illegal and wasteful logging
going on in their local areas.
But very soon, and on return to the village,
the software developer would refashion the software
according to the feedback we got from the village,
so when we went to the next community we could test it again.
After three communities, in fact, we managed to stabilize the software,
and have all the issues that people wanted to address addressed.
And this is the one which is to do with illegal logging number six, FLEGT here.
Notice these caterpillar tracks, the bulldozer tracks,
which show it's an industrial logger
as opposed to the planks on the bottom here,
which show that it's an artisanal logger
who's going to be cutting with his chainsaw.
This has implications for the sorts of maps that we make.
So here for instance, you can see that someone's been cutting undersized logs,
but we see planks next to caterpillar tracks,
so we don't know if it's an industrial logger or a local person.
These are the sorts of issues
which the Ministry of Forestry officials go and check.
This community, for instance, very wide use of forest,
lots of resources that they're exploiting,
but when we remove the layers we can show very clearly
which of the resources need to be checked by the government's officials.
People aren't making mistakes, they're recognizing the different sizes.
This is a community forest,
which is normally meant to be managed for the benefit of the community,
but the management group in charge of this community forest
are clearly not doing that,
and they're allowing artisanal loggers to come in
and cut all sorts of undersized trees,
which will have negative consequences for people's access to resources.
Here's a couple of communities,
who have a very wide use of resources even in this logging concession
which is colored in pink here.
But what we can see is that the loggers are also exploiting outside the limits
of their logging concession, which is of course a serious offense.
The Congolese hunter-gatherers were so impressed
by the efficiency of the maps
to make changes in the way the loggers were working,
so they asked us to develop some anti-poaching software,
so that we could start to address the problem caused by poachers.
Together with them, we elaborated a set of new icons for that,
and just in April, I've just been in Congo testing.
Now what we do is we can use smartphones
because they're sufficiently robust and efficient
to replace those rather clunky hand-held computers we had previously.
To our great pleasure and surprise, they worked well under the forest canopy,
the GPS is quick-reacting,
and the software, while having some changes which we need to make,
was largely successful.
We're working with some Italians called X-tribe who develop games,
and we're developing geographic games where we try to train people to understand
two-dimensional representations of landscape.
So here, we have some satellite imagery, and we're trying to understand
what degree of zoom people find most easy to work with,
so that as we develop mapping applications for the hunter-gatherers,
they'll be able to understand them easily.
We're also looking at alternative forms of energy generation.
Solar panels don't work well in the forest because of the canopy,
so these heat-charging pots are very efficient in this particular context.
So we're looking for solutions
that are appropriate to the particular places where we're working.
Now, this is all part of a group actually,
which is made up of people from all over the world,
we are from all sorts of disciplines,
we've mentioned anthropology, computer science,
but there's also geography, there are artists, foresters, hunter-gatherers,
and it's actually the combination of all these different knowledges
which is what allows us to come to appropriate solutions.
I think that actually this is a really important point
which I've learned from the hunter-gatherers,
the importance of sharing.
Of being willing to share knowledge, to share skills, to share perspectives,
and it's only through that sharing I think we'll really have a chance
of coming up with the solutions that we require to address
some of the very serious problems
that humanity is going to have to confront in the next century.
And I think that ExCites is just one small way that we're experimenting
with different ways of creating those collaborations,
which will provide us with the opportunities
of finding solutions to those problems.
Thank you.
(Applause)