Given the choice between worrying about the climate crisis or doing something about it, as an engineer I’m temperamentally much better suited to the latter. The science is clear: we all need to stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things, and I don’t see that worrying helps anything. We have to get to work.
Our partnership with Billion Oyster Project
One of my favorite 'get to work’ kind of organizations here in New York is Billion Oyster Project (BOP).
I first met Executive Director Pete Malinowski a little more than a year ago, and I immediately wanted to see if Viam could support BOP’s mission to restore and renew New York City’s harbor and waterways. So in the spirit of getting to work, I’m really pleased that we’ve announced a pilot project that is doing just that, and I’d like to share some details here about the partnership and what conclusions we can draw from it.
For complex ecological reasons, these days oysters have a hard time propagating in New York’s waterways, and to somewhat cut to the chase: that’s bad. (You can learn more about this on Billion Oyster Project's website.) Oysters clean a lot of water—as much as 50 gallons per oyster per day—and increase biodiversity, restoring natural habitats; and beyond these intrinsically good effects, oyster beds operate as natural protections to destructive storm surges and rising sea levels. It’s estimated that in the 1600s there were 220,000 acres of oyster beds in the waters of New York. So oysters are a keystone species in New York’s water ecosystem. We need to bring them back.
Billion Oyster Project has grown 30 million oysters in tanks on Governors Island to prepare them to be introduced to the waters near the Brooklyn Bridge. Oyster larvae are delicate, and need specific conditions to thrive. We needed to give the team a way to monitor the tanks remotely, and get alerted to issues, avoiding the expensive, difficult, and non-real-time task of sending someone to the tank site. We recently connected sensors and cameras in the oyster tanks to the Viam platform, which means the BOP team can now monitor the tanks from anywhere, saving them a lot of time and effort, and making sure that the water is in a great state all the time. Now we can ensure we have optimal growing conditions for the oysters until they are transferred into the “wild” of New York Harbor. Over time we hope to use this data and AI to help us become more and more adept at helping the oysters renew and regenerate.
The role of technology in tackling climate change
This is a very small example of how technology might help to solve the challenges of climate change rather than deepen them, simply by empowering the people who are already working on real-world solutions. My instinct is that we will find that many of the seemingly ‘impossible’ problems of the climate crisis might be best addressed by using technology to support and encourage nature’s astounding ability to regenerate itself. Even simple things, getting the right data from the real world, into the right places, at the right time, can have surprisingly large impacts. The key is to give the people with good ideas about how to do that—scientists and engineers—more efficient and effective tools with which to build their projects.
Billion Oyster Project is very candid about the fact that re-seeding oysters alone is not going to save New York City from the ravages of warming and rising oceans, and increasingly destructive storms. But if an innovative software and hardware convergence like the one Viam has provided in the oyster tanks can give a meaningful boost to an already remarkably efficient natural protection like a wild oyster bed, that seems like a paradigm that is more than worthy of exploration and support.
I think we should be constantly looking for ways that real-world systems of technology can assist and complement nature rather than degrading and destroying it. I want engineers and scientists to realize that we can easily help get data to them from anywhere, and then help automate and take action; understanding that even small solutions can have large effects. Supporting scientists who are helping oysters restore NYC’s natural defenses; that’s the sort of AI application I want to see. It’s a simple example of what it means to stop worrying and get to work, and I’m really excited to explore similar projects where Viam might make a significant difference.
