DATE: 17-11-24
TIME: 20:58
TEXT: SAM HARDING
INTERVIEW: SAM HARDING + MANGA NGCOBO
DESIGNERS: YUSUF S. BOZKURT
IMAGE COUNT: 1
TAGS: X
When R. Buckminster Fuller published his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, all the way back in 1968, he was essentially outlining a new kind of bank account— one belonging to the planet itself. Held in a trust by its crew of terrestrial inhabitants, this account would reflect the balance of Earth’s energy ‘savings’, spanning billions of years in solar conservation all the way up to humanity’s industrialised spree of fossil fuel extraction, spelling out in both dollars and common sense how each gallon of petroleum burned represents a net loss against its astronomical production costs. An architect, inventor and pioneer of systems theory, Fuller’s ideas extol the efficiency and resourcefulness of working with what we already have, drawing optimism from the regenerative capacities of nature and the limitless potential of an interconnected planet.
Interspecies Money, the latest combination of science and fiction by author and technologist Jonathan Ledgard, is a striking update to Fuller’s global yet grounded form of futurism, expanding the economics of environmentalism towards a profound integration of the natural world into the market ecosystems that have so far decimated it. Working from a deft reframing of the ways that nature already provides trillion-dollar services beyond its mere availability as an exploitable resource— from clean water, carbon-sequestering, crop pollination, healthy soil, shade, shelter, pharmaceuticals and the control of zoonotic pathogens— Interspecies Money is an intervention at the most vulnerable points of overlap between the built and natural worlds, where both humans and animals survive at the margins of the Anthropocene.
It entails the creation of a bank for non-human life forms, one with its own digital currency, the “Life Mark”, which can be assigned to individual creatures in the wild, allowing them to fund their own conservation and underwriting their ability to express simple preferences for improved life-outcomes. At the same time, the value of this currency will be distributed to the communities that cohabit these regions, where extreme poverty and the climate crisis are destructively intertwined. Not only will animals with interspecies wallets be able to pay their human neighbours for the preservation and sustainability of their surroundings, in a mutually beneficial dynamic that will lay the groundwork for a natural economy of green entrepreneurialism, but they will also fund the collection of wildlife data that in many ways is at the beating heart of this project. Because for all its various applications, Interspecies Money is ultimately an assertion of the importance of recording and discovering the natural life that has otherwise held little-to-zero place in our economic or digital memory.
That, and kicking off a revolutionary shift in our relationship with the natural world.
The imaginative leaps that Interspecies Money provokes are made both possible and pressing by technologies that already exist today, from the digital twins and facial-recognition software that constitute its implementation, to Artificial Intelligence, which will prove an essential third-party to translating the masses of natural information that it will generate. Ledgard has spoken about the ways that current AI amplifies anthropocentrism, both in its application and in terms of the data that it is fed, where the only way to ensure its investment in the continuation of complex biotic life is by directing it towards the natural world, sparking another layer of 21st century ethics when it comes to the ways that humanity co-exists with other forms of intelligence on this planet.
At the end of the day, Interspecies Money is not an all-encompassing panacea to the problems that it poses. Instead it is a kind of roadmap to a world without roads; a scalable model that fleshes out the contradictions of assigning a market value to biodiversity, while at the same time setting the stage for a cascade of new relationships spanning the infinite variety of life on earth.
Ledgard is a prolific and writer and thinker;a former correspondent for the Economist who has followed the path of fiction into a wide array of bleeding-edge enterprises— from Red Line, a series of Drone Ports for the delivery of blood and other cargo in disconnected regions of Africa, developed in collaboration with the British architect Norman Foster, to his work with AI and the architecture of emerging economies.
TWIST spoke to him about all of the above. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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TWIST: I want to start with some broad strokes about futurism, and the kind of frames, problems and solutions that surround your thinking on the globe?
JONATHAN LEDGARD: I wouldn’t say I’m a deep futurist. Most of my thinking is about six or seven years out; just over the investment cycle, slightly beyond the venture capitalists. And in broad terms we’re talking about how to deal with the climate and biodiversity emergency. That’s num- ber one. Number two is the civilisational weight of the planet, where the energy of the human species will be shifting from the North towards the Equator. Africa will be taken much more seriously than it presently is. I don’t think India has the capacity to be a rival to China, but it will definitely be in a completely different headspace in terms of creativity, particularly pertaining to decisions that humans take around their communities. Those are the broadest things that we have to keep circling, and they’re always going to interlace. So you have architects not just designing buildings, or sustainable buildings, but actually starting to think about the bio-economy— in terms of the entire food chain or life-cycle of a building, village or town.
If you were going to look at two trends, one is that things are going to get a lot more biological. And two is that things are going to have to get more equitable. If they don’t get more equitable then we’re kind of screwed. There’s no viable endgame at that point. There’s the world-spiralling political risk, the ecological risk, the security risk and so-on. And coming very hard from left-field, like a high powered locomotive, is the arrival of Artificial Intelligence and related platform technologies, in terms of bio-tech, especially in genetics. I tend to think of that as something which has to be slightly separate from these other two brackets.
TWIST: In terms of nature and its ‘existence-valuation’, as something that seems both cynical and self-evident, how important is the language used when it comes to threading the needle between a substrate of finance and the cultivation of a gaze that is empathetic, rather than computational?
JONATHAN: Especially in the architectural discussion, it’s very tenuous, because you have capital-intensive projects on land which is very expensive. Often we’re talking about significant architects building trophy structures, and how those structures sit within a larger urban fabric. But landscape architecture is the poor relative and doesn’t really get enough capital pushed into it. If we think about biodiversity and attention towards life itself, in landscape architecture that’s even less considered. We’re not used to the idea of finding a way to value any form of nature which is not on our own personal property. We’ve constructed our society in a way that makes that quite difficult to do. So what I’ve found quite useful is to think about human attention, and empathy. If we think about value as a form of attention and a form of empathy which rises from the attention or focus which you give it, then that is a useful starting point.
Interspecies Money is really focused at the end of the road, focused on the poorest communities which are really struggling for basic shelter and survival. And then there’s the other extreme, if you go all the way to Buckminster Fuller and a hyper-engineered future. But the wonder of our age is that you have to move seamlessly between these extremes. And there’s a lot of tension there. But many people in your generation intuitively understand that nature has a civilisational value way beyond any commercial price point. Your generation of architects and designers will be building in entirely much more regenerative ways. I was just talking to an MIT group who are producing low-income housing from mycelial-framed shells. You take invasive plants, you chop them up and then you add in some magic potion, and then you end up with the mycelial fabric from which you can build a fairly robust low-income house. There will be thousands and thousands of examples like that, and somehow we need to get to a point where we’re able to work with nature in a way that is good for nature and for a density of life around us. It has been shown that most humans are biophilic. They appreciate birdsong and the sound of the insects and the plants and grasses and things like that. Somehow that needs to be woven in.
TWIST: To push into that tension on the architectural debate regarding the interaction between the built world and the natural world, it seems to me that over the past five years there has been an attempt to ‘greenify’ cities or to incorporate nature into architecture. And it seems as though a lot of the more popular models or the models that get the most airtime are failing in legitimately weaving nature into architecture. So there are all these tropes of green architecture such as bringing greenhouses into cities and having these beautiful renderings of these green towers. On one hand there is a legitimate effort which is quite complex in terms of weaving these two logics of nature and the built world, but the prevailing models are kind of polluting the discourse for lack of a better word. How do you feel that kind of obstacle could be overcome?
JONATHAN: To me it’s almost diversionary, although not in terms of established architecture studios. Their projects are mostly in rich countries, and there is this bias towards the starchitect. The Saudi Neom project is probably the most egregious example. It’s just insanity. There’s no other word for that project. But it’s not really where our headspace should be. Your generation should be saying— let’s look at, for example, Kinshasa in the DRC. Kinshasa, maybe it has 10 million people, maybe it’s 8 million, maybe it’s 12 million. We don’t know! But it’s a big city, and we certainly know that it’s going to double in size over the next couple of decades. We also know that the Congo will rake in large amounts of money for its heavy metals and other commodities. So with Kinshasa we’d say— this is a river city, it has some end-of-colonial architecture and it has become this incredible failing urban fabric. Should it have cars? What should its energy system be? What should the biodiversity be within Kinshasa? What is the access to water and energy for 90% of people in that city? What’s it going to look like in the year 2040? And we can repeat that across a hundred large to mega-cities such as Lagos, or across India and Bangladesh.
I think that the architectural design, natural sustainability discussion should be focused on these emergent cities. The secondary towns, with populations of two or three hundred thousand, ones that nobody has ever really heard of— with one road in and one road out, seventy percent youth unemployment and climate change coming down the track. Should they have cars? What’s the role of plastic there? How should they handle waste? What would a three-story building look like? What kind of materials should it be made out of? These are really basic questions and at the moment they’re not being asked with sufficient urgency or imagination. And the net result is that when you go to such a town, what you see is a trading culture where the local bigwigs go to Shenzhen with their shopping lists and buy crap, expensive materials, and just dump that on the local markets. Cement, metal windows, plastic, even furniture, air conditioning units. The whole ecosystem is catastrophic.
TWIST: Could you expand on that quickly, why exactly your focus has been on these secondary urban spaces, and perhaps to put it crudely, why do you think it’s important that we consider these seemingly less consequential cities?
JONATHAN: The soft, lame response is that I’m a provincial guy. I’m from the North of Scotland, from the Shetland Islands which is the most remote, wild bit of the UK. So maybe I’m more sensitised to people who live at the end of the road. But the fundamental reasons are that we live in a world which is very well-distributed on the digital level— and obviously those complex digital networks that we’re laying down will continue to densify and become more close-knit— but physically we’re not matching that in any way. We’re asking people to live in a distributed future on an unfair playing field. The second point is that most people live in these towns. And they will continue to live in these towns and their surrounding villages. The third reason is that I think we can build a far more sustainable, more beautiful, richer, more ecologically viable future by building better in people’s local communities. I remember in the mid-2000s we started to get the first economic reports from Nigeria, from Lagos, that young men who were moving into Lagos were poorer in their healthcare, education and life outcomes than kids who stayed in rural areas. And unfortunately that trend is continuing. It’s really difficult here in Africa, and I just don’t think the big cities are going to produce the quality of life that young people need and deserve. If we think about architecture, design, ecology, community, security, gender equity, all of these issues are twisted together— and we know that we could do a lot better, and for relatively small financial inputs, in these smaller towns.
And the final point is that generally, the colonial regimes were quite extractive in the way they built their transport infrastructure. Most former colonial countries that I’m thinking of have one seaport, maybe an inland city, and all the secondary towns are only connected via one main road going across the country. I know this very well from the work I did around cargo drones, where
we were studying possible drone routes between these secondary towns. There was tremendous opportunity there because it was only 120 km to fly for the drone, versus 8 hours by road— because there’s only one road and and it’s not going over a mountain. I had a Kenyan friend who came with me to Prague a few years ago, and in Prague they’ve built a motorway under the city, which has sucked out all the cars from the city’s historic centre. And my friend reflected that he had never been in a tunnel before. It was almost unbelievable. We started thinking about this and unpacking it, and we realised that in the whole central band of Africa, there are barely any tunnels! And so secondary towns in emerging economies are much more poorly connected to the network than they are in more developed industrial countries. And that makes it even more imperative that we think more imaginatively about what they can look like. Asking these almost Sesame Street-style questions. Should this town have cars? Maybe not? But that actually excites me, and it’s why I like thinking about these towns, and the villages beyond those towns, where people are mostly living off what they can grow. That's a completely different relationship to nature compared to someone living in Birmingham or Amsterdam. I won’t say better or worse, just different. My view is that if we inverted the Neom model and imagined a line, as the Saudi’s call it— an African line— and made it say, 800 kilometres long and Afro-futurist and made with sustainable materials. Where would you rather live? I’d much rather live inthe African one. It’s going to be beautiful, right? A lot of soil, a lot of water, shade, insects, birds and kids running around, and it's going to be— life. So I am optimistic. But somehow we have to break the supply chain question. That seems to be one of the fundamental problems, that until we create different supply chains, these models will be hard to grow at scale.
TWIST: Your approach is definitely at odds with the main hegemonic push, be it the Belt and Road initiative, in Africa from China. The infrastructural model where they’re building more roads and forgetting those Sesame Street questions. It’s seen as a given for development, and you’re saying the opposite.
JONATHAN: The idea that you build these economies as if they’re going to be South Korea in 1976 is just madness. Every day I meet young people who’ve managed to get through a university here in Africa, and they’ve got zero chance of getting a job. Zero. Because their parents are poor and they don’t have the social relationships to get a government job, and even if they hand out their CV, it’s not the case that even the university students are finding jobs. So imagine the kids that are less fortunate and didn’t finish their education, what is going to happen to them? Unemployment and under-employment will be the primary condition of most of these emerging economies. And therefore we need to be realistic about the price point at which young people are going to be able to enter the economy. What resources are available to them? What is the public space that is available to them? How do they function in those communities? A lot of young men don’t have enough money to get married, so they might impregnate their girlfriend and then what? Young women holding up a world, again. We need a different paradigm, and obviously as a middle-aged white British guy, I’m not the one who’s going to be running with the posters down the street. It’s going to be your generation, and preferably young Africans themselves who are carrying this. All I can do is add a tiny bit of imagination to that discussion and get people to be a little bit more ambitious about the way they build.
If we follow through the logic of what I’m saying, then we get to a a space which is probably the most profound bit of this discussion. Which is that if you’re unemployed or under-employed— Ok you have a high degree of social capital and you have some family that work and you can hawk some goods and survive, right? And watch Arsenal every Saturday and it keeps you ticking. But basically you have a lot of brain time. A huge amount of brain time. Sixty or seventy percent of brain time is just free. And to me, what we do with that massive redundant brain time that you see in these economies is the question. On the one hand it makes me incredibly hopeful, because you can imagine so many different futures there. But in my experience with radical Islam— I think we will see a rise in pan-Africa terrorist groups when climate change comes down. Essentially we need people to be engaged in their lives and have ownership of their lives in a much more meaningful way than they currently do. And to get back to the point about secondary towns, this kind of vision is much more attainable in those towns than it is in the large cities where
it’s kind of dog-eat-dog and land prices are through the roof and bank loans are very expensive.
TWIST: On the one hand Interspecies Money exists in this rich imaginative space where digital networks can reframe abundance, reframe currency along the lines of information and attention, especially in contrast to poorer physical conditions. But narrowed down to its practical implementation, how has it been playing out within the pilot scheme so far?
JONATHAN: Well we’re right at the beginning so it’s too early to say. But really [it’s a matter of] extending the equity we’ve previously been talking about, when it comes to people living in smaller towns and villages in poorer bits of the planet— continuing that equity discussion to the end of the road and into the forest: “Hey, I am another form of earth intelligence and I would like to persist on the planet. And I would like to be registered in the book of life in such a way that in 100 years time I might still be here.” In terms of the practical pilot, we made an agreement with the government of Rwanda to give digital twins to an extended family of mountain gorillas. Every year Rwanda gives the right to name some of their newborn gorillas to various people, like King Charles and Beyoncé and so on. And they very kindly gave us the right to name one of the gorillas this year. So this baby will be the first animal to get an interspecies wallet, and then her extended family will get their own digital twins. They will pay for the first genomic assay of the species, because the genome of the Mountain gorilla has not been correctly constructed yet. They’re also going to pay for their environmental DNA. E-DNA is one of those emergent, completely mind-blowing technologies. Whatever life form you are on the planet, a blackbird, a caterpillar, you are shedding your DNA wherever you go. And if you took a water sample in a given area, and you extract the DNA which has been accumulated in that water sample, then you can determine all of the species in that area. These gorillas will pay for the E-DNA testing around their bit of rainforest. They will be able to show the world all the birds and plants and insects and microbial life forms that they are cohabiting with. And they will pay for their veterinary care as well. But of course not every species can be a mountain gorilla. They’re the Tom Cruise
of the animal world. But they can be a role model which will allow other species to hold some identity, and hold some financial value on that identity.
TWIST: Taking that idea of celebrity even further, extending it to the way that nature as an image already exists within our systems of representation across fashion, culture, branding and tourism, I’m really interested in the levels of symbolism here, when it comes to opening up new forms of currency and exchange between these worlds. An example within this frame might be, what does Amazon the company owe to Amazon the rainforest, if the name itself can have a value placed on it?
JONATHAN: You’re right. And I tend to think that the storytelling element is just the beginning of where we’re going in this direction. And you see this already with, say, books about mycelial life or microbial life that people are starting. Artists are experimenting with the sounds of plants, like my friend Tomas Saraceno, who makes whole orchestras with spiders. I think we’re moving into a space where our relationship with other species is going to be profoundly more interesting than it has been. And that’s going to have big implications on how we eat animals as well. A lot of people who are very supportive of Interspecies Money are those who come from an animal rights or a vegan perspective. They believe that if you can show how we comprehend a wild animal at a higher level, that if we can show compassion towards them and get interested in their lives, that this will directly make it harder for the industrial farming of livestock animals. And there will definitely be a pushback in that space. But I also think all of these questions are probably multigenerational. They’re probably not even going to be in your lifetime. But it’s a direction of travel.
TWIST: In the context of Artificial Intelligence being used to, for example, further mechanise the industrial slaughter of livestock, you’ve spoken about training AI to recognise and value the existence of natural organisms. By Darwinian extension do you see this as a way of also protecting ourselves from the very same logic we’re asking AI to apply to livestock?
JONATHAN: That’s what makes the conversation so exciting and terrifying and intellectually demanding. The moment that humans are starting to pay attention to and comprehend other species at a much higher level than they previously were is also the moment that we are spinning up an entirely new species, an entirely new form of intelligence, which we don’t understand at all. In fact we have a much better chance of understanding an elephant than we’ll ever have of understanding an AI, even though we’ve engineered them. And so weirdly we might end
up having more solidarity with other biological lifeforms, having much more in common with them than we previously realised.
TWIST: Where it’s also thanks to AI that we might be able to process the reality of those other life forms as well.
JONATHAN: It is maddening. And I actually think we’ll see, probably within a decade, groups in society, highly distributed groups, from a girl in Shanghai to a guy in Toronto, who adopt, as it were, a species. Saying— OK, the giraffe is a species that I really care about, and I’m actually going to get in the headspace of that species, and direct some of my personal resources towards protecting that species. And I think those relationships will become richer and more meaningful in ways we probably can’t quite imagine right now.
Obviously if we go back to the beginning of time, humans have had very rich relationships with other species, so we’re not reinventing the wheel here. What’s different is that you can sit on the Tube in London and your Instagram feed can involve a real-time interaction with another species. And there’s something quite intimate there. Maybe it’s not the whole species, but it’s this particular community in this particular space that you tune into and is part of your social media feed. But at a quietly intimate level. You might listen to it while you go to sleep. You might reach out to it when you’re feeling stressed. And because we’ve done such a cataclysmic job of protecting other species, where 97 percent of biomass on the planet is human or livestock now, whereas when I was born, which was not that long ago, it was fifty percent. So there are not actually that many free-living wild animals out there. And so they all become rock
stars in a way. It will be human attentionality, filtered through machines, directed at a relatively small number of species. That could be the beginning of a regenerative cycle. I think we can turn the wheel and spin it around the other way.
TWIST: I’m interested in the giraffe as the recurring figure in your work. Where did that come from?
JONATHAN: My first novel was about giraffes, and that was entirely coincidental. I met a former secret police officer who told me a story about how the secret police had shot dead the largest herd of giraffes ever assembled in captivity. I thought it couldn’t possibly be true. But I picked giraffes because they’re a simple example, in my opinion, as we move forwards with Interspecies Money or similar approaches, we’re always going to be moving towards trees, plants, insects, even microbial life. That’s where most of the value will be because that’s where most of the complexity is. But if you think about the totemic, charismatic species, humans are not ready to jump straight to insects. They need to go through polar bears. You’re much more likely to have a tattoo of a polar bear than a termite, although termites are much more important for the planet.
TWIST: At the start of Ways of Being by James Bridle, they are talking about training their self- driving car to initiate a cross-pollination between kinds of intelligences, where they learns from it and it learns from them. This poses a threat to the notion of human-exceptionalism and opens new ways of learning and being, previously unima ined. I wonder, specifically because you use the word imagination a lot, how imagination can be sort of used or weaponised against the malaise of a market-driven world. How do we communicate the effectiveness of something that doesn’t necessarily have an end-goal, but where we’re starting to learn some of the processes and relationships that, in a way, belong in the realm of imagination at the moment?
JONATHAN: For me its a balance between profound efforts of imagination in terms of rethinking what is possible, but at the same time being very pragmatic about how imagination without scale is not very useful in the modern context. We have a very short time frame to turn these human living systems around. For example Sudan has just collapsed. Ethiopia is very close to collapsing as a nation state. And that’s just my neck of the woods. So the imagination has to happen in a way that is affordable and is not going to get blocked by large commercial or political interests. Going back to basics, I think is very useful. There’s a lot of things, in terms of our energy systems, the materials we use in our day-to-day life, that we’re not really asking very basic questions about. That’s where I think there’s tremendous opportunity. We would be a lot further along in these discussions if Buckminster Fuller was a household name, or people like him who have done the joined-up thinking around energy, around society, around architecture and so on. And I personally think architects have done a pretty shitty job. Maybe a bit rude, but when you go to the Venice biennale, it’s pretty much a love-in. That’s not entirely fair, there are small architectural practices that do very high-quality work in their communities. But somehow as an entirety, as a profession, we can say they completely failed with cities in the emerging economy. Where is the public space? Where are the local materials? Why is everything built like a Chinese skyscraper? I think the architecture and design professions in general have to hold their hands up and admit that so far we’ve pretty much failed. I was just in Kampala, in Uganda, and that was a very beautiful city which had every potential of being one of the great, most beautiful cities in the world. And now its failing as a metropolis. But this doesn’t always have to be the case. If you look at Joseph Bazalgette, in London, he managed to completely remake the Thames. People walk up and down the Thames every day on their way to work thanks to the sewers and bridges that he built. That’s what I’m trying to say— that imagination is only so good if actually applies to the lives of large numbers of people who really don’t have that much capital available to them.