Earth's Innovators

Environmentalists aren't used to thinking of technology as an ally. After all, many of the most intractable ecological issues — global warming, persistent organic pollutants, nuclear waste — are direct consequences of human ingenuity. It's hard to avoid feeling that the planet would be far healthier if our tool-making talents had peaked with the flint ax.

But technology is an integral part of what it is to be human, and if it has gotten us into ecological predicaments, it's only fair that it should help get us out of them. That's where the six environmental innovators profiled below come in: Each tackles different problems using different tools, but what ties them together is an appreciation of the intrinsic beauty of systems that work simply and efficiently. Nature has been inventing such systems since the beginning of time. These technological pioneers are showing us that we can learn to do the same.

Natalie Jeremijenko
Engineer/Artist
Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts,
University of California at San Diego

Natalie Jeremijenko attributes her environmental ethos to having grown up in the "subtropical vividness" of Queensland, Australia, where tree frogs congregated around the rim of the toilet and geckos scampered across the walls. But it was her training as an engineer and scientist (she holds degrees in neuroscience and biochemistry, computer science and electrical engineering, as well as in history, art, and philosophy) that awakened her to the subversive potential of technology.

"The problem with technology," she says, "is that in general it's developed by people with resources for the benefit of those with resources. It's a profoundly conservative social force. Another interesting aspect is that it's too complex to control. Technology bites back, but its unintended consequences present an opportunity to redress the environmental crisis we're facing."

Consider, for example, robotic dogs — those high-tech toys that sell for a few hundred dollars and are programmed to bark the national anthem, walk in circles, or beg for plastic bones. Working with her visual arts students at the University of California at San Diego, Jeremijenko reengineered the toys into a "feral robotic dog pack," providing them with all-terrain wheels, noses that can sniff out toxics, and an ecological mission.

In March, a crowd of reporters, politicians, and bystanders watched the dogs patrol San Diego's Mission Bay landfill, a 115-acre former military and industrial dump site adjacent to SeaWorld, a public park, and the San Diego River. While the dogs didn't find the volatile organic compounds they had been programmed to sense, they did get eight television crews interested in the discussion.

"The dogs provide information in a way that's legible to diverse participants — scientists, grandmothers, schoolkids — anyone can tell what's going on," Jeremijenko says. The average citizen isn't likely to read a 400-page toxics report, she notes. "By making this public spectacle, you're giving people a license to have an opinion and to participate."

Reengineering the relationship between scientific "experts" and the rest of us is part of Jeremijenko's artistic mission. In the San Francisco Bay Area, she planted pairs of genetically identical walnut trees at diverse locations around the region, so that people could see living indicators of their own neighborhoods' environmental health and note that even clones can show marked differences. (Jeremijenko organized a bicycle tour of the various San Francisco sites last fall.)

Related creations include a particulate-sensing "Clear Skies" mask bicyclists can wear to find out what's in the air they breathe, a virtual tree that can be grown on a computer desktop (its rate of growth is determined by a CO2 meter plugged into the computer's serial port), and a "printer queue virus" that counts the number of pages consumed by a printer and spews out a cross section of a tree stump when it's used up a tree's worth.

But Jeremijenko is interested in something more radical than simply documenting ecological ills — she wants to "rescript" our interactions with the environment. For instance, she has proposed building interactive aquatic installations at polluted sites like San Diego's Mission Bay and New York's Hudson River. Her "amphibious architecture" designs would enable people to stand below the water's surface inside a flexible membrane and troll for floating garbage, or dispense fish food through one-way valves, perhaps introducing chelating agents that would help the fish clear their bodies of PCBs. The idea is to harness curiosity about nature and use it for environmental remediation.

"People want to interact with animals," she points out. "At every aquarium there's this sign that says, ÔDo not tap the glass' — and yet everyone does." Her inventions run counter to the usual environmental injunction to "leave no trace." "Here we are changing the whole damn climate, and we're supposed to tiptoe around these little cut-off areas that we're pretending are pristine," she argues. "The idea that we're not interfering is the one we have to get over."

Amy Smith
Instructor, The Edgerton Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Amy Smith likens her mind to an untidy dresser: "It has lots of open drawers with things falling out the edges, so that when you see something interesting, there's lots of different places you could put it." As an inventor, that allows her to make connections between a discovery in one field and a problem in another, or to apply a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem.

That might mean, for example, choosing a material similar to that used for helium balloons when designing containers for a solar water-disinfection project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last year Smith designed a new flow regulator for a Honduran water-chlorination system using a toilet valve, an IV drip, and a plastic gas can. Not only does her invention work, it's also being reproduced in neighboring villages.

Smith, who teaches at MIT, was given a MacArthur "genius award" last fall for her work designing appropriate technology for the developing world. Among her recent projects is a new kind of charcoal for use in Haiti. More than 90 percent of the country is now deforested, largely because rural Haitians cook with wood charcoal. The resulting winter floods kill thousands of people every year. Many more children die from respiratory infections from breathing indoor cooking fumes; breathing such contaminated air is, in fact, the world's leading cause of death for children under five.

Smith's solution is to make charcoal from a waste product called bagasseÑthe fibers that are left after the juice has been squeezed from sugar cane. After carbonizing the bagasse in a kiln built from a 55-gallon oil drum, she mixes it with a binder made from cassava root, then compacts it in a press invented by her students so that it has the density of wood charcoal but burns more cleanly.

Smith won't introduce her sugar-cane charcoal, however, until it burns as well as, or better than, wood charcoal. "It's always hard to ask people to make behavioral changes when you're asking them to use something that isn't as good," she explains. But she's close enough to her goal to allow herself to feel excited. The invention meets all of her criteria for appropriate technologyÑit's simple, cheap, and easy to produce and distribute. Most important, it meets a need.

Smith grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her mother taught junior high math; her father taught electrical engineering at MIT. She went to MIT as an undergraduate, then to rural Botswana as a Peace Corps volunteer, where she spent four years teaching secondary school and working in the regional beekeeping office. It was while she was in the Kalahari Desert that she hit upon the idea of applying her engineering know-how to the problems of the developing world. She went back to MIT for her master's degree and soon began winning awards for the simple functionality of her inventions.

"It's the way I was raised," she says. "If you see a problem and there's something you can do about it, then you do something about it. What I seem to do fairly well is simplify a design within certain constraints. And it's absolutely applicable for doing engineering design for developing countries, where the simpler you can make it, the better."

Ted Sargent
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Ted Sargent didn't set out to revolutionize solar technology. The 31-year-old nanotechnologist was working on creating a paintable infrared sensing material that could allow digital cameras to see in the dark or enable ultrafast fiber-optic communications. Then one day in the lab, a graduate student shone an infrared light on the material and watched it convert the energy from that light into electricity.

"That was the eureka moment — seeing that it had this property we hadn't even expected," Sargent recalls. Sargent, who is something of the boy wonder of nanotechnology (the science of building molecule-size devices), is mostly known for creating materials that can be used for fiber-optic communications. But when he realized the implications of his discovery, he started boning up on solar energy. "There's this huge opportunity," he says, "because half the energy that's coming from the sun and hitting the earth is in the infrared spectrum." That energy is untapped by today's solar collectors, which react only to light in the visible spectrum.

Scientists have long been trying to develop so-called plastic solar cells — a light, flexible film that would be cheaper to produce and easier to install than the expensive and cumbersome panels we have today. The problem is that the best plastic solar cells available capture only 6 percent of the sun's radiant energy, none of it in the infrared spectrum. Sargent's invention has the potential to capture up to 30 percent.

The secret is "quantum dots," particles made from semiconductor crystals that are a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) in size. They can be tuned to absorb particular colors of light and then stacked together to capture the broadest possible spectrum. They are so tiny that they can be dispersed in a solvent and then painted onto something else — a house, a car, even a sweater. Sargent imagines clothing that could be used to charge cell phones and laptops, solar building materials that could provide all the electricity needed in the home, and electric cars powered by a solar cell on the roof.

All of this is years away, but Sargent, whose idea of relaxing is to invite 12 people over for dinner and cook something he's never made before, is excited about the challenge. "I never thought of myself as an energy researcher until we fortuitously discovered this," he says. "Now I do."

Erin Gately
Environmental Product Steward, Hewlett-Packard
Vancouver, Washington

Erin Gately was working in the marketing department at Hewlett-Packard when she took a workplace class on voluntary simplicity designed by the Northwest Earth Institute. Over nine sessions in 1998, she and other HP employees discussed the materialism of our culture and its impact on the earth. Eventually, she decided to leave HP and find a job saving the planet. She took a leave of absence and asked Jeanne Roy, one of the institute's founders, for help finding environmental work.

To her surprise, Roy told Gately to stay put. "We need people who care about the environment to work in big companies," she explained.

Hewlett-Packard certainly qualifies as big. And computer products are some of the least sustainable goods on the market: Most have a life span of less than three years and contain so many toxic components that they are hard to recycle. Computers and other e-waste now make up almost as much of the municipal waste stream as disposable diapers; an estimated 70 percent of the toxic metals in U.S. landfills come from high-tech gadgets.

Even so, HP has a pretty good environmental track record. In 1992 the company launched an initiative called Design for the Environment, with the aim of creating products that use less energy and fewer materials and are easier to recycle. It makes computer monitors with recycled monitor glass, uses recycled plastic in five of its scanner models, and in 1997 began recycling its ink-jet printer cartridges. Gately became an environmental product steward, helping to further reduce the environmental impact of HP's ink-jet printers.

Gately's job was made easier by tough directives passed by the European Union that banned the use of heavy metals and other toxic substances in the production of electronic equipment, and set collection, recovery, and recycling targets for the equipment when discarded. The EU standards forced the electronics industry to rethink the way it makes its products, not just for the European market but worldwide. "What was considered interesting but not very marketable in 1992 is almost a necessity now," Gately says.

Gately's focus for the past few years has been the DeskJet 6540 printer. It was designed to snap together so that it could be easily disassembled for recycling. When the product-design team wanted to use plastic with a painted metallic finish, Gately persuaded them to use real metal instead because painted plastic isn't recyclable. The DeskJet 6540 has won awards for its eco-friendly design and for its printing performance.

What's encouraging to Gately is that HP has found that sustainability is good business. For example, eliminating an adhesive that made it hard to recycle ink-jet cartridges ended up saving the company $2.4 million over two years, while eliminating unnecessary packaging on printer cartridges reduced the production cost of each one by 17 cents. Last year HP received more than $6 billion in bid requests that required information about its commitment to social and environmental responsibility — far more than it received the year before. To Gately, the lesson is obvious: "The world is waking up."

Dave Biggs
Cofounder, Envision Sustainability Tools
Vancouver, British Columbia

Environmentalists often wish they could show people the consequences of their choices: the asthma and hurricanes that result from dependency on cars, the farmland paved over for subdivisions, the gridlock that ensues when public transit goes underfunded. Dave Biggs, cofounder of the Canadian company Envision Sustainability Tools, has found a way to do just that. It's called MetroQuest, and it's a computer simulation program that helps people decide what they want their region to look like 40 years from now.

"People are used to making short-term choices — what kind of car should I drive? What kind of house do I want to live in next?" he says. "But they're not thinking, 'If 6 million other people did this, what would be the cost to the things that I care about?'"

MetroQuest was inspired by the computer game SimCity, which invites players to plan the future of imaginary cities. Now in its fourth generation, MetroQuest has been used on four continents, largely by public agencies holding planning workshops. Participants make decisions about transportation and land-use policies, and the program uses real data to show what their region will look like if their plans are carried out.

For Biggs, an avid cyclist, hiker, and urban-policy wonk, the program reflects his belief that environmental issues are inextricably linked with social and economic ones. Sustainability, he argues, comes from creating a system that balances the three. "I'm attracted to systems that work well and that work efficiently, regardless of whether they're human or natural," he says. "I seek out beauty, and I see beauty in cities when they work well. But a lot of cities don't."

A typical MetroQuest workshop begins with a discussion of what participants want for the future. Not surprisingly, most people want everything: big, inexpensive houses with ample backyards, short commutes on uncongested streets, clean air, low taxes, and a winning baseball team. But what they find as they use MetroQuest is that some of these desires are mutually incompatible, particularly when population growth is factored in.

If they build inexpensive, single-family homes for a million people, for instance, they're going to end up building them on agricultural land. There goes the clean air, the short commute, the pastoral view, and all the jobs associated with farming. Faced with the results of their decisions, the participants then go back and begin fiddling with the variables until they arrive at a future they can live with.

The surprising result of MetroQuest is that workshop participants of all political stripes end up reaching consensus fairly easily, and that consensus tends to be far greener than many might have predicted. Instead of sprawling, car-oriented suburbs, people opt for dense urban corridors served by public transit — the kinds of places environmentalists are usually told are a political impossibility.

"People are amazingly well able to make a choice between two things," Biggs explains. "Would you like to live in a row house near transit, or would you like to live in your own house and breathe poorer air? Because that's the decision that's before us."

Jay Harman
CEO, Pax Scientific
San Rafael, California

Jay Harman doesn't usually sit in one place very long. He has worked as a naturalist with the Australian Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, founded one of Australia's largest technology companies, designed a pair of award- winning boats, started a boarding school to teach kids about the environment, sailed 27,000 miles on the Indian Ocean, and invented a noninvasive technology for measuring blood glucose and a method for encapsulating asbestos.

But when he spends time in nature, he moves very, very slowly. In the forest, he walks barefoot, off trail. "It can take me a couple of hours to go a hundred yards," he says. "Sometimes I just watch the ants."

Keeping nature unspoiled, he says, is "the only thing in life that interested me with any sort of power." He found the conservation work he did in Australia boundlessly frustrating: "I would work for two or three years on protecting an environment, and with a stroke of a pen, a politician would hand it over to bauxite mining," he recalls.

What was needed, he decided, was a different approach. "For me, the way to move forward was to try and develop technologies that actually assisted the environment, while also demonstrating to those people running the commercial world that they could make money," he says. "So I started examining the underlying principles in nature that give it sustainability."

Having spent a lot of his life watching water flow, both as a diver and as a sailor, one of those principles fairly leaped out at him. Liquids flow in a consistent pattern, a three-dimensional centripetal spiral. "You pull the plug in a bathtub, and you get a whirlpool," he explains. "The shape of that movement is common throughout everything, from the spiraling galaxies to the shape of your eyelash. And so what we did is reverse-engineer the whirlpool."

Harman's company, Pax Scientific, applied the spiraling geometric pattern of the whirlpool to the design of a domestic exhaust fan and created one that is half as noisy and three-quarters more energy-efficient. What he calls the "Pax streamlining principle" also applies to industrial mixers, automotive cooling systems, water pumps, even devices for circulating blood in the body. His company now leases its technology to the producers of a wide variety of industrial, commercial, and residential applications. His team of engineers is working on methods for applying spiraling geometry to wind turbines, aircraft fuselages, and marine propellers.

Increasing the efficiency of everyday technology is a huge boon for the environment, Harman points out. "If you use three-quarters less energy, then you have three-quarters less pollutants going into the atmosphere." He hopes that designs like his are also changing the way the world looks at nature. "Nature has already solved every problem humans face and have ever faced," he says. "If you see nature as our university, you're not going to burn down the university; you're going to protect it."