- I may not have a technical scientific background,
but I have one thing that the scientists don't have,
which is I know my backyard.
If I can chronicle that,
show it with certain kinds of tools,
I actually have scientific validity.
Every person's individual piece of information put together
gives you a cloud of real knowledge.
- Right, so conventional science
happens outside of public view,
so it's kind of in this black box, almost,
or up in the ivory tower.
We have a lot of stereotypes about
the scientists that do it,
what they're doing, and how that works.
And what's exciting about citizen science
is that it brings it out into the open.
It really refers to the rights and responsibilities
that anyone on the planet has
to participate in making new discoveries.
To me, citizen scientists kind of fall into two categories,
although they're not mutually exclusive,
and it's basically, one is a super curious person,
and I think we all have innate curiosities
about our natural surroundings.
We're gonna say, "Huh, I wish I knew more about that,
I wanna know more about that."
And related to that is people who have concerns,
concerns about health, about environment,
and I think that those curiosity and concern
tend to drive people toward
wanting to participate in citizen science.
- Let's see, where was it?
One of the things that I realized as a city planner
is you look at this, this looks like concrete,
but you peel that concrete back,
and what's underneath the concrete
is a marsh system and a stream system.
By using imagination, a place that was not that interesting
suddenly became filled with stories,
and then those stories could also guide you
into what you would want your neighborhood to become.
I first became involved with
Public Lab around 2010, I think,
when I started using their aerial photography kits.
- Public Lab started back during the BP oil spill.
I was working for a small nonprofit organization
that set up community monitoring programs.
And so at that time, one of my other co-founders
showed up in the doorway with a big red balloon
and several of his friends and proposed that
we start launching them over the Gulf of Mexico.
The idea was that we were going to use
low cost open source tools to start addressing
a wide variety of environmental problems.
- We as an environmental community
are engaging with the physical world every day,
and you need tools to do that.
Our open source hardware is what we work with
to take something from where it exists in the environment
and transform that thing into data that can be used
to paint a picture about what's going on.
- What we're doing
and the types of tools that we're building
really comes out of a very long and deep tradition
of people using both analog and digital tools
to collect their own information
to tell their own story of what they're experiencing.
- One of the community's goals is to
get all this pink stuff out of our waterways,
the pink stuff being coal tar and oil, essentially.
The Gowanus Canal is one of the branches of the East River,
so it's basically a connecting point
at the end of New York City
between the Atlantic Ocean and the East River.
Historically, people came here
because it was a great place to fish.
The first Indians looked at a beautiful tidal marsh,
and then the bankers looked at it and thought,
"Hm, great place to build piers
and ship stuff from and then build factories."
And so the flat area you see all around you
was from a tidal marsh,
suddenly one of the busiest, richest places in America,
where millions of gallons of stuff
and piles of things came through here,
and then they had to get rid of garbage,
and what did they do with it?
They said, "Well, let's dump it in the pond."
I found out there was a canoe club here that was
crazy enough to go out on these highly polluted waters.
Traditionally, the reason why we started
the program photographing our backyards
is we'd go online or we'd go to
the official city photography sources,
and they didn't have anything,
they wouldn't allow you to have it,
and we wanted to be able to photograph
the site which we thought was polluted,
and to do so at a higher resolution
than anything else was available.
- What they're mostly using
in the Gowanus Canal are aerial photography kits.
Those generally include kites or balloons,
cameras that have been modified to take time lapse photos,
rigs that help those cameras stay stable
as they're kind of bouncing around on a balloon or a kite.
- And then use an organic carrot juice bottle,
and hack the script in here to make
this camera shoot every five seconds,
and suddenly I had a high resolution aerial photography kit.
Let's see why this guy's giving me a hard time.
And there we go, I think this is it.
But I find an essential thing to have
in the field is recycled telephone wire
from old phone cables, wonderful material,
and electrical tape is my other friend.
And between the two of those,
I can usually solve just about any problem that I need.
We look at the world, the landscape, with forensic eyes,
and then rebuild what you can't see.
And the way we do it is we try to take
what are just boring underwater flows,
and show them as a network of ghost streams,
and relate them to real issues that people are facing.
And that was only possible by
having access to that set of technical tools.
- A lot of times, people might have
health problems or asthma,
or something that they're encountering,
and they think it's just them,
like that they're the only ones
who maybe are having this problem.
It's really when people start to
work together and monitor their health,
monitor the environmental health of where they live,
that they start to see that it isn't just them,
that actually sometimes there are systematic issues,
systematic pollution problems,
that actually are affecting
a lot of people in their community.
So I think when people start to notice things
and then start to use tools to make really good measurements,
and to work together with other community members,
that kind of equipment really to help communities
learn about the problems that are local to them,
and help address and fix those problems.
- So this is the AirBeam1, I'm opening it up.
You got your power button, the sensing chamber.
The particles come through, light scatters off them,
and then it gets registered by a detecter.
So the way it works is that when the top's on like this,
it has a happy little face that says don't cover me up,
and this is the intake where the nose is,
and this is the exhaust over by the chin.
Oftentimes communities already know about a facility
that's problematic because they smell it, they see it,
but again, they don't have the evidence to basically prove
that whatever's happening with their health
is related to that facility.
But when you make a measurement, then you can do that.
What the AirBeam measures is
small particles in the air, PM2.5,
and the new one's gonna measure PM1, PM2.5, and PM10.
What is PM2.5?
So it's particles that are less than
two and a half microns in diameter.
You could put about 60 of these particles, line them up,
and they'd be about the width of a human hair.
The hazard that they pose to human health
is that they're so small that a larger particle might get
trapped in your nose hairs or caught in your throat,
but these particles are so small they pass
deep into our lungs, and then get into our bloodstream.
And they cause short term problems
like asthma and bronchitis,
and long term problems like cancer and heart disease.
HabitatMap is a Brooklyn-based
environmental health justice nonprofit,
and the primary thing we do is we work with
schools and community-based organizations
to create planning and advocacy maps.
And we do that through our two community mapping platforms,
AirCasting.org, which is focused on
measurements, physiological or environment,
and HabitatMap.org, which is focused on
community knowledge and reporting community knowledge,
and mapping community knowledge.
What we kept hearing from people was that the AirBeam1
was very useful to them to measure personal exposures,
but many people wanted to say,
"I just want to set this up in my house and run it 24/7."
So this is the AirBeam2,
and it's a little different than the last one.
What makes AirBeam unique is number one, it's open source.
It's rare that you find a commercial product
that releases all the code
and all the schematics that's involved with it.
So now we've got, of course,
the Bluetooth module which is here underneath,
we've got the Wi-Fi module,
and then here we've got a 2G cellular module
and a SIM card, and the antenna.
And the sensor's of course a lot smaller too,
we can pull it off here.
You can see it's got its own intake and exhaust,
and it's got its own shielding so that
we don't have to worry about light interference.
So what I set out to do was say
we know this is a pressing need
for the communities that we're already working with.
They need a tool where they can
document the exposures that are happening to them,
so how can we do that?
So I have my relative humidity coming in,
my PM2.5, PM1, PM10, and Fahrenheit.
And then if I tap it, I can go ahead and graph it.
I can see my measurements over time.
If you have a low cost instrument that's easy to use,
then all of a sudden, science becomes
something that everyday people can do.
I'll see you guys down there?
Okay, we'll see who wins.
- When you first hear about an environmental organization,
you mostly hear about
planting trees, gardens, things like that.
You don't really think about things
that are really gonna affect you.
- And I did not like science at first at all.
But this was important to me,
and I wanted to help other people.
- Sunset Park is a working class community, right?
And so they have all these environmental burdens
that just kind of surrounds us.
- They were key in the sense that one,
they have a longstanding relationship with the community,
they have a group of active youth justice organizers,
and so they provided great feedback
for the creation of the app and the AirBeam device itself,
but then really took it and ran with it.
- The project with Michael was to figure out
how many pollutants, specifically particulate matter 2.5,
was coming into the neighborhood
through the Gowanus Expressway.
- They'd wear the AirBeam, or they'd hold it in their hand,
making sure not to cover the intake or the exhaust,
and just stand here.
And they had a sheet, and on that sheet
it would show the different types of trucks.
They would just tally them up and sit here with the AirBeam,
and every once in a while
they'd pull out their Android device
and make sure that the measurements were coming up.
- The Gowanus Expressway in Sunset Park is very different.
There are no entrances in Sunset Park,
so what we're left with are the exits.
Thousands of cars and trucks pass through there every day,
and that's part of the reason why the asthma rate
and other upper respiratory diseases
are very high in Sunset Park.
So we could kind of see it, and we know it,
but we don't know how much.
The AirBeams allowed us to see what was really happening.
- We wanted to capture that and prove to the city
that this is what's going through Third Avenue,
and people are living here.
- What we're able to prove is one,
it's more polluted here than other places in the city,
two, a lot of that's associated with diesel truck traffic,
and three, a lot of that diesel truck traffic
is the carting vehicles that are coming
to these waste transfer stations.
- You really see for yourself what's happening,
and I think that's important.
When we go out and try to find the answers ourselves,
that's when we are truly learning,
that's when we truly become scientists.
- I think a lot of the important change
that's happening is how it's changing scientists,
and how it's changing the way scientists
approach scientific research,
how we approach prioritizing
what research we're going to do,
how we're gonna carry that out,
and really starting to think differently
about how knowledge is made,
about who really is involved in that
and should be involved in it,
and about who that serves,
and whose priorities that should serve,
because it enables people to be able to
collect the observations that are needed
and that are rigorous and that meet standards,
so that they can contribute and be part of
this system of scientific discovery.