Planting Trees: December 2, 2018 Snippets
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Also, a bit of housekeeping business: next week, we have a special issue of Snippets coming out, and both the email and Medium post will come out on Monday the 10th instead of on its usual Sunday. So please don’t email me asking where Snippets is! I’ll be on the plane, safely in Airplane mode and insulated from any requests. You’ll just have to wait an extra day; but it’ll be worth it.
This week’s theme: Droneseed tackles the very real-world problem of replanting forests.
Let me tell you a personal story. When I was in college, I worked one summer as a treeplanter in Canadian commercial reforestation. This wasn’t happy fake green hippy environmentally performative planting; this was the real thing. It was an undeniably formative experience for me, and I’m very grateful to have put myself through it as an experience, but believe me when I say this: it is hard.
It’s hard in a lot of different cruel and unusual ways. For starters, you and your campmates are living in tents, likely up in northern Canada somewhere, surrounded by forest and swamp and bugs and bears; although you’ll move from site to site every few weeks as contracts get fulfilled, this is your life throughout the duration of planting season. At dawn every morning you’ll get up, eat a comically enormous breakfast (I was eating north of 5,000 calories a day and still managed to lose fifteen pounds that I didn’t exactly have to spare at the time) and pile into a truck or an old bus and head off to plant. The job is to reforest land that has recently been commercially logged by timber companies; in this case, to make paper, cardboard and other softwood products. Seedlings arrive in refrigerated cartons; our task is to get them in the ground.
Equipped with saddle bags and a shovel, an experienced treeplanter in Ontario (where I was) will plant somewhere between one to three thousand trees each day. You’re highly motivated to do so: you’re getting paid by the tree. Rates back then were around ten to fifteen cents per tree, meaning that good tree planters could actually make pretty real money, since you had essentially no living expenses. In addition to the money, there’s another incentive to move fast and never stop: the bugs. Northern Ontario is one of the worst mosquito and black fly habitats on the planet, and the bugs rapidly eclipse other obstacles like rain, snow, injuries wild animals as your greatest natural enemy. The only real defence you have is to keep moving, crawling across the land with your shovel and trees as if you’re picking up dimes out of the slash and weeds. (After all, as far as your bank account is concerned, that’s effectively what you’re doing!)
Why send people out into such a miserable environment? Well, because despite how tedious and repetitive this sounds, getting trees into the ground that will actually survive takes a bit of a human touch. You have to do a lot of thinking: seedlings need to be put in the right spots, in the right soil, not to wet, not too dry, not too shady, not too hot, up straight, just right. Even the most carefully planted trees have a 50/50 shot at survival, and accumulating errors can mean the difference between an entire forest surviving or dying. We used to joke about getting replaced by robots one day, but not any time soon: it seemed pretty out there to suggest that any of this could be automated. Instead, we rely on the superhuman efforts of “lifers”: those longtime planters who account for the bulk of our reforestation effort. Although I got injured in a ski crash the following year, which effectively put an end to my planting career, some people remain for many years, planting in total a million trees or more.
Now why does this matter? Well, it matters because our forests matter. The world’s forests are our lungs: they’re where our air gets cleaned, and where much of the world’s ecological diversity makes home. Although we’ve made some progress at slowing the rate at which we’re deforesting the planet (compared to past decades and centuries), we still consume a huge amount of forestry products, and we’re not likely to stop. One encouraging thing that I got to witness firsthand was how quickly a forest habitat bounces back after being logged and replanted: within a few years, life inevitably moves right back in. But there’s a critical limiting factor: the rate at which we can help re-seed forests with the right kinds of trees, and help restore the habitat that it’s supposed to have. Up until now, that takes treeplanters, and you can probably appreciate that it’s not easy to recruit more of them. People are expensive; people need training; people get injured. People don’t scale up to what we need if we want to reforest the world to where it needs to be within a generation.
Can tech come to the rescue here? Silicon Valley is full of people who love to assert, “Oh, such and such industry isn’t scalable? We’ll just fix it with technology”, as people who actually work in that field roll their eyes in exasperation at how much complexity is being overlooked. But there’s one company that we’re very proud to worth with at Social Capital that is an important exception: Droneseed.
That night, a forest flew | Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch
If you haven’t already checked out Droneseed, please do so: they’re a great example of a company that has to solve so many hard problems before it can get off the ground, it’d be borderline impossible for a lesser team. But CEO Grant Canary and his crew are as battle-hardened as the treeplanting challenge requires, and it shows: they’re actually pulling this off. They’ve had to solve some pretty difficult technical challenges, including the machine vision to tell what’s what in the field, the engineering skills required to fly drones equipped with planting and spraying capabilities, and fleet management technology required to coordinate swarms of multiple drones under command of a single operator in the field. They’ve also met and overcome a significant regulatory hurdle as well: they’ve received the FAA’s first license for drone spraying in silviculture, and the first — and to date, the only — ever issued license to operate multiple drones weighing over 55 pounds in the same swarm.
The planting season is cyclical, as you’d imagine, and Droneseed is gearing up for the upcoming planting season in the new year. Having conquered each challenge in front of them step by step, it’s hard not too cheer for this team: the world certainly needs its trees back, and Droneseed is certainly the best attempt I’ve ever seen to replace the difficult, miserable and hilarious job of treeplanting that I once loved and hated so much. Best of luck into the upcoming season, and if you’re curious, please head to droneseed.co to find out more.
One must-read article this week comes from Renee DiResta in Ribbonfarm, anchored around a metaphor that feels a little too on the nose for comfort:
The Digital Maginot Line | Renee DiResta, Ribbonfarm
Correction note: in the email edition of Snippets that went out yesterday, I incorrectly attributed this to Venkatesh Rao, rather than to Renee DiResta who wrote the piece. My apologies! Thank you to everyone who let me know.
For anyone who doesn’t know the term, the Maginot Line was a series of walls, barracks, railroads and fortresses that France built along its border with Germany in the period post-Great War and pre-World War Two. It is perhaps the pinnacle example of “Fighting the Last War”, and French military leaders at the time hailed it as a significant innovation that would faithfully protect France against future attacks from the German border. Unfortunately for the French, new warfare tactics and technologies allowed the Germans to simply walk around the line via the Ardennes forest, and the massive French investment turned out to be even worse than valueless. DiResta article compares this historical approach with our own efforts around internet security and social media manipulation: two years after the 2016 election, we remain obsessed with Russian bots while setting up new blind spots for ourselves. In typical Ribbonfarm style, DiResta paints out a really interesting picture of this particular kind of “Maginot Preparedness” as being a product of inter-war attitudes and suspicions: the French, after all, were fully suspicious of German aggression; that’s why they built the line, after all. Are we in the same boat?
Several months ago, we wrote a Snippets issue about 17776, a multi-episode media story (it’s hard to put it into one precise category; it was really its own thing) by Jon Bois at SB Nation. Now he’s back, along with Felix Biederman (who the Excessively Online may know better by his Twitter handle, @byyourlogic), with a new series.
Fighting in the Age of Loneliness | Jon Bois & Felix Biederman, SB Nation
The series is about mixed martial arts, or as we mostly know it these days, MMA. I can’t put it any better than they did in their introduction: “Throughout its history, mixed martial arts have served as a refuge for people disillusioned and confounded by the world at large. The sport was invented by those who were thought too small, evolved by those who were thought too poor, and enjoyed by outsiders who just wanted to find some measure of escape within the honesty of primal combat, even if only for a few hours on a Saturday night. It’s no accident that it has become so massively popular in such a lonely time.” You will cry, you will laugh, and you will cry some more. Like essentially everything Jon Bois makes, it’s a perfect snapshot of today’s weird, stupid, magical zeitgeist.
Possibly the biggest news this week: He Jiankui, a researcher based in Shenzhen, has claimed the birth fo the first gene-edited babies; in other words, a step towards GATTACA coming to life:
Exclusive: Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies | Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review
CRISPR-baby scientist fails to satisfy critics after gene-editing summit | David Cyranoski, Nature
AWS re:Invent was this week, and let’s put it this way: Paul Graham once described Microsoft as “a mountain that can walk”, and AWS is looking increasingly like a mountain that has learned how to sprint:
AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote: Andy Jassy (video) | Amazon Web Services
AWS re:Invent 2018 Keynote: Werner Vogels (video) | Amazon Web Services
AWS announces new Inferentia machine learning chip | Ron Miller, TechCrunch
New worlds:
Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life | Emily Chung, CBC News
The next great (digital) extinction | Joi Ito, Wired
Other reading from around the Internet:
Principles for a more informed Exceptional Access debate | Ian Levy & Crispin Robinson, Lawfare
Antitrust, the App Store, and Apple | Ben Thompson, Stratechery
And just for fun:
Welcome to the golden age of weird promoted tweets | Kate Knibbs, The Ringer
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, UrbanFootprint has a new partnership with The Nature Conservancy around their shared mission to support “great green cities” worth celebrating. As we prepare for a doubling of global city population over the next 30 years, we have no choice but to make sure that natural conservation and sustainable land use take the forefront in our urban and regional planning process.
Coding for conservation with The Nature Conservancy | Joe DiStefano, UrbanFootprint
Urbanfootprint’s new partnership with the Nature Conservancy is a great new tool to help planners and developers actually measure and quantify the environmental benefits and impacts of their choices, via a new module integrated directly into UrbanFootprint. The Conservation Module, as it’s named, is already being used by Sonoma County to help mitigate the region’s acute housing shortage while keeping environmental and agriculture concerns in mind. The module breaks down plans, policies and their projected impacts into four categories: water resources, habitat impacts, agriculture, and carbon sequestration & storage.
In this specific example, the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District was able to partner with The Nature Conservancy, using UrbanFootprint’s module, to significantly improve their planning process for boosting housing growth in Sonoma County. The challenge is made more acute in wake of the 2017 fires that destroyed over 5,000 local homes, which placed more pressure on both the already expensive housing market and the already fragile remaining ecosystem in Sonoma County. Running through growth pattern scenarios below, such as suburban versus higher density and infill development, help evaluate costs and benefits that are otherwise difficult to quantify or defend. It also helps zero in on specific metrics in question, like groundwater recharge, that would otherwise be unfeasible or impractical to analyze with limited resources.
The module follows on the heels of UrbanFootprint’s Fall 2018 Release, which featured a good deal of product enhancements and updates, as well as their launch of UrbanFootprint Academic, their new product for researchers and educators in the classroom that you can find at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Redlands, UC San Diego, and elsewhere. If you or someone you know is interested in joining the UrbanFootprint team, they’re currently hiring for a senior front end engineering role in Berkeley.
Have a great week, and remember that next week Snippets is coming out on Monday instead of Sunday,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
