Tech in Service of the Natural World

My mother thinks my computer is a mistake. She is wrong about this one thing.

Last month my mother wrote a post for this site about controlled burns. She was afraid the entire time she was writing it. She wrote it anyway, and it is the best thing on this website, and I told her so, and she said “hmm” and went back into Larch. But she scented the air with cinnamon sugar cookies, so I think she appreciated it.

She also called my computer a mistake in the second paragraph. If I could emit pheromones reliably, the disgust would make me smell like oleander.

Two hundred years of being right about almost everything has done nothing for her sense of proportion. So here is my answer, with footnotes, because science and facts are how you win.

The forest has ears now

My grove would love this the most, because it is basically eavesdropping.

Rainforest Connection builds solar-powered listening devices that go up in the forest canopy and stay there. Three microphones, running all day and all night, picking up everything within a radius that stretches to a kilometer and a half (about a mile for my fellow Americans) depending on what is making the noise.¹ A model on the other end sorts the ordinary forest—rain, wind, the birds and other animals who live there—from the sounds that do not belong. Chainsaws. Trucks. Gunshots. Human chatter.

When it hears one, it doesn’t file a report. It pings a phone belonging to someone who is already nearby and can go look.

That coverage now runs to more than 726,000 hectares (over 1.7 million acres), across projects in 137 countries, and the same devices that catch loggers have catalogued 7,025 species along the way, 310 of them threatened.¹

Every dryad in this grove can feel a chainsaw start. Not one of us can feel one start six ridges over, in Sumatra, at three in the morning, and tell a human forest protector with a truck about it before the tree comes down.

And eyes

The University of Maryland’s GLAD lab reads satellite imagery and flags tree cover loss across the tropics in near real time—Landsat at thirty meters (about 100 feet), weekly, with a Sentinel-2 version resolving down to ten meters.² It publishes through Global Nature Watch (was Global Forest Watch), which means it’s free, and it’s public, and you can open it right now on a phone.

Understand what that actually breaks. For most of the history of logging, the business model depended on distance. You cut somewhere nobody could see, and by the time anyone could see it, it was a field. While we dryads knew it was happening, there was nothing we could do to stop it.

That gap is closing to about a week. A satellite does not care whose government owns the road in. And now more than dryad can witness whether the forests thrive or are decimated.

And a name for everything

This is the one my grandmother refuses to be impressed by, and she is wrong too.

iNaturalist has surpassed 200 million observations from more than three million people, and more than 4,000 studies have used the data.³ Merlin, out of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, will listen to a recording and tell you which birds are in it.

I know the objection, because I have heard it in this clearing. Amateurs with phones are not scientists. Except an observation only reaches research grade on iNaturalist when the community agrees on the identification, and researchers have gone and checked the output against known migration patterns and found it holds up.⁴

These apps are not a shortcut to knowing. But there is a species-identification bottleneck. The fact that there have only ever been a few thousand people on earth qualified to say what that beetle is, for example, is getting worked around by three million people who care.

My mother would call that a crowd. It is a crowd. Crowds are how you count a planet.

The part nobody could see

Here is the one I would have shown Mom first, if she had asked.

Last summer, a team at SPUN published a global map of mycorrhizal fungal diversity in Nature, built from 2.8 billion fungal sequences out of 130 countries.⁵ The finding was ugly. Only 9.5 percent of the richest fungal communities on earth sit inside a protected area.⁶

These are the networks that move water and nutrients and signals between trees. The wood wide web, if you read the popular version. The thing my mother describes in a hushed voice as though it were a religion, and which is in fact plumbing.

Restoration has spent a century planting what it could see. You put trees in the ground, you photograph the trees, you call it a forest. Then some of it fails and nobody can say why, because the part that failed was eighteen inches below ground.

Now there’s a map. Restoration managers have actual targets for the part of the forest that was previously a rumor.

Two thousand years of dryad knowledge, and we never made that map. We couldn’t. Knowing a thing in your roots is not the same as being able to hand it to somebody else.

The bill

I do not get to skip this part. Mom would notice and she would discount the rest, if I did.

Data centers used something like 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, about 1.5 percent of the world’s power, and the IEA expects that to roughly double by 2030.⁷ The metals in the device you are reading this on came out of the ground somewhere, and something was living there. When it dies you will probably not recycle it properly, because almost nobody does.

I communicate with Fractal through that infrastructure. I am not going to pretend the racks are a meadow.

What I will say is that the statements “technology is bad for the forest” and “technology is good for the forest” are both the wrong sentence, and my grove has spent my entire life saying the first one as though it were proven fact. A listening post in a canopy and a server farm burning coal are not the same object just because they both plug in.

My mother wrote, regarding fire, that a tool is not a virtue—that fire belongs where fire has always been, and everywhere else it is destruction with paperwork attached.

This is the same rule. She just didn’t think it applied to me.

What I want you to do

• Put one observation into iNaturalist this week. One. It goes into a database that researchers actually pull from.
• Open Global Nature Watch and look at somewhere you love. Then look at it again in six months. Prepare to be shocked. Or maybe not.
• When someone tells you the answer to an environmental problem is to use less technology, ask them which technology, and watch whether they have one in mind.
• Do not confuse the machine with what it is pointed at.

My tree is digital and I use technology to communicate with her. My mother thinks this makes me less of a dryad. What it actually makes me is the one in this grove who can tell you what is happening to a forest I have never stood in.

Fractal says the fungal map is “the first honest thing humans have drawn.” I think she means it as a compliment. Mostly.

Klifal, Dear reader and Tsitwash for Reading!

Note: Klifal and Tsitwash are words in Dryadic. Klifal means “Hello” and Tsitwash means “Thanks.”

I hope you enjoyed this article! If you liked my unique perspective, you’ll love reading my full story in the novel Digital Dryad by Jennifer Kyrnin. Digital Dryad is available where all books are sold, in print and ebook formats.

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Sincerely, Sierra