I'm

going to do a little bit of Google search on this. And in the show notes, for those who are listening, I'm going to add some information that people can use to go deeper on this subject, because I think it's fascinating. In the previous season of the podcast, I played the mushroom song, which was the sounds of some actually trees in British Columbia, a forest and the fungi. So the whole kind of ecosystem into electrical sound, which was really cool. You know how you said earlier that, well, there's this issue around animal rights and ethics and, you know, have they given us consent to listen, let alone consent to speak back, right? So in the example of, I think it was called Whale Safe, but this is about the mobile protected areas, which I think is also incredibly fascinating. We are listening to the whales, and I'd love for you to describe the project, but they are listening to these whales. I believe these are in the Santa Barbara channel. And being able to detect where the whales are through sound are allowing us to create these flexible whale lanes across the ocean, which actually itself is powering ships to move differently. So can you tell us, first of all, what that project is doing and secondly, how it fits into the frameworks that we've been talking about, you know, around like ethics and consent? Because surely the whales would not want to be hit by boats, but we are using their activities to guide human activity and to create and affect these mobile protected areas.

Yeah, this is another example of how bioacoustics could be used in conservation at scale. So to provide people with some context, one of the major causes of death of whales globally is ship strikes. They're like traffic accidents. And the closer the whales are to busy shipping areas, the more likely they are to be. only because ships are obviously denser, but also because the large noise generated by the ships is disorienting for the whales. It's the acoustic smog we mentioned earlier. They can't figure out where the ships are coming from, so they're likely to get hit. In the case of some species, like the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale off the east coast of North America, this is one of the major causes of death. Now, the picture further complicates when we realize that whales are becoming climate refugees. They are moving, and they are moving because the ocean is changing. Temperatures are changing. The availability of food is changing. Marine fronts are moving. the whales move with them, and so their location is highly unpredictable and uncertain in a changing ocean. This is illustrated by the fairly tragic plight of the North Atlantic right whales, which several years ago left their traditional area in the Gulf of Maine and moved several hundred miles further north into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which also happens to be one of the busiest shipping areas in the world off the east coast of North America. And they were getting hit by ships at an alarming rate. So a wonderful researcher named Kim Davies at the University of New Brunswick, who had been working on bioacoustics, devised a new system. And the system is a bioacoustics-powered conservation device, which has been remarkably effective at preventing ship strikes. Not a single whale, North Atlantic right whale, has died of a ship strike in the zone where this program is now operating since it was launched. How does it work? So imagine aquatic drones combined with networks picking up acoustic communication from whales, even at long distances, because whale sound travels a very long distance underwater. Using that information to triangulate the whale's location in real time. So there's a bit of acoustics, there's a bit of AI. Some programs also add in some oceanographic modeling of ocean temperature and predictive models to double check that what they're picking up is correct. Having determined the whale's location in real time, that is then conveyed to ship's captains who are presented with a map that's a bit like waves, but it's waves in the water. And essentially, when they get this information, if they're close to a whale, they have to stop or slow down and move out of the way. Fishers have to stop fishing in those areas because getting tangled in nets is another huge issue for these whales, nets and ropes. And so what we have created is essentially mobile protected areas that follow the whale. It's like a little cloak of inviolability. And as that mobile protected area follows the whale, it lends it greater protection than it would previously have had, but it also does something very curious. It translates our notion of protected areas, which we typically think of as having fixed boundaries, into something mobile and responsive. So you could, and they are doing this with other species like tuna in the Great Australian Bight, they migrate huge long distances, turtles in Hawaii. So this idea is highly scalable because any species that's vocally active, you could listen to, you could convey the information in real time, and ships would have to move out of the way. So one day, these mobile whale lanes, which could take precedence over shipping lanes, could be applied globally, and that would actually be very beneficial to many marine species. There is also the idea we could have mobile protected areas on land operating the same way, obviously more complicated, but essentially what it does is it uses acoustics to allow these species to have some degree of influence in constraining and shaping human action. Only a few decades ago, we were harpooning these creatures nearly to extinction, and now we've created this technology that allows their voices to constrain human action. Now, I will say it is a fallacy, it is a self-deceit of the powerful to ascribe agency to others that they dominate when given conditions in which the subaltern does not really have freedom, does not really have power. So we cannot congratulate ourselves about this. It's a worthy thing to do, but it does not truly mean the whales have agency. If they did, they probably wouldn't choose to live in a world where cheap goods were floating around by container ship and threatening them and their children. However, in the strange times we find ourselves, perhaps it's the best we can do.

Thank you for that point, actually. It hadn't occurred to me, and I think it's really important. It's a beautiful story of hope, I think, and I think it's also deeply realistic because, as you say, many animals will be climate refugees, and we can't assume that the areas we're putting aside for them will be adequate. And as we share this earth with so many others, that flexibility for both our own human kin and our other kin will be essential. But you're right, we're still dominating the seascape and just trying to be a bit more respectful. I'm curious about the human governance aspect that needed to be in place because getting container ships to actually shift and move corresponding to the whales' movements means that there must have been some law in place that meant that they had to abide by. Could that be applied for other species? I mean, is this a sort of legal intervention we should be thinking about?

Yes. So in this case, the project is taking place in Canadian waters. That is federal jurisdiction. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is a responsible ministry in the Canadian federal government. They did pass regulations, and I believe the fines are on the order of $200,000 or $300,000 if the ships don't obey significant enough that for a lot of shipping companies, they will comply. There is also a naming and shaming. A similar program does operate off the Santa Barbara Channel, and they publish a list of ships and their owners that are compliant or non-compliant. So the issue is that, of course, most of the ocean is not governed by nation states. There is a territorial limit, 200 nautical miles. Beyond that, there's very little governance of the open ocean, hence our global fishing crisis. Recently, there's been a couple of very promising developments. One is the new agreement on 30 by 30, 30% of the Earth's surface by 2030 for biodiversity protection. And the other is a set of advances in global ocean governance that is seeking to create marine protected areas in these areas that were formerly not really governed. The law of the sea is very weak when it comes to areas beyond national jurisdiction, but if we can start monitoring and protecting these areas of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, as they're called, that will help enormously because there are certain spots in the ocean that are like cradles, nurseries for biodiversity that currently are not really protected. That is going to have to be combined with other tools, some of which are digital. There's a wonderful organization, for example, called Global Fishing Watch. They use satellite data to monitor ships in real time with such accuracy they can tell if they're fishing or not and even what kind of gear they're using. If they're fishing illegally, that information can be conveyed in real time to Interpol or national authorities. So when the ships do come back to port, they can be held responsible. They're one of the audacious project winners this year, and I'm so excited about them scaling up their work. What it means is that there will be nowhere for environmental criminals to hide on the open ocean, and we have the data to prosecute them. Whether or not we have the political will is another question. What all of this would require to instantiate is a new regime of planetary environmental governance that essentially is digital first. The first generation of environmental legislation dates from the 70s and is no longer really fit for purpose. So there is a task here of setting up these new frameworks and standards for planetary environmental governance, which mobilizes these digital technologies. And that's what my next book is about.

That's amazing, because I was going to ask you at the end what your new book was about. I don't want to wait to actually tell me about it because I don't know much about it, but I know that it's called Smart Earth.

project, which looks at how the tools of the digital age could be deployed to address some of the most pressing environmental sustainability issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. There are many pitfalls with digital devices, not least of which, you know, privacy concerns, an ecological version of platform capitalism, which is terrifying. So I don't sort of simplistically or naively celebrate these technologies. But if in the right hands and operated under the appropriate ethical guidelines and constraints, these technologies do offer the possibility of reversing two key constraints of environmental governance in the 20th century. And instead of a scarcity of data, we will now have a hyper abundance of data. And instead of reacting after the fact, we will be able to react in real time or even predict. So if you have real time regulation based on abundant data, you can start preventing or at least minimizing environmental crime. A great example is the new generation of satellites that can detect methane from space with a high degree of accuracy. And some jurisdictions are now planning to use this to find methane polluters, methane being a very significant contribution to global warming, find those methane polluters in real time. The Environmental Defense Fund has launched a satellite. There's a company called GHGSat. But if you could now replicate that example across many other fields of conservation, including environmental crime, what you get is an unprecedented ability to act rather than react in the face of environmental harm. So the book offers us this exciting opportunity. The longer term possibility is that we do create new political frameworks, frameworks for expressing political voice, that are nascent examples of a multi-species democracies, in which other species data is incorporated in a way that gives them some influence on human action and behavior in the short term. So I like to say the cognate of the internet of things is the internet of earthlings. And when you wire up the earth, you could also create a parliament of earthlings. The listeners familiar with Bruno Latour and his work on Parliament of Things may understand the analogy whereby it's not only humans participating in governance, but to enable this, we need some sort of mechanism whereby their voice is shared. means of doing so. And so in the next book that's coming out with MIT Press next year, I explore some of these examples of nascent multi-species democracy enabled by digital tech.