IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

166 Chapter 8
spills,’’ said Lieutenant Cris Aguirre, a hazardous materials technician and a
Smart Strip user from the Miami-Dade Fire Department in South Florida. 13 I
can imagine repurposing such a gadget so that it yells at me when I waste a
lot of energy, too.
Some inventive activists are already using environmental sensors as an
extension of human senses in a real-world context. The Digital Library for
Earth Systems Education (DLESE) involves teachers, students, and scientists
in a project to create a library of maps, images, data sets, visualizations, assessment
activities, and online courses. 14 In New York State’s Black Rock
Forest, a consortium of schools, colleges, and research institutions, participants
in DLESE, study topics ranging from tree rings to glacial geology, in
situ. The forest has been ‘‘instrumented’’ (their word) with environmental
sensors that continuously measure and record properties of the air, soil,
and water. The sensors sense the same phenomena as human senses, but
do so 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Interpretation of data is as important
in the project as collecting them. ‘‘Probably the most important insight
you can convey from real time data is that environmental factors
vary across both time and space,’’ says Kim Kastens at the forest’s Lamont-
Doherty Earth Observatory, a partner in the educational effort. ‘‘Thinking
about causes leads to questions like: why is it that air temperature goes up
and down on a 24 hour cycle? why is it that one site consistently has lower
relative humidity than the other?’’ Another educational tool used in the
Black Rock Forest work, Data Harvester, enables students to perceive the
ways that environmental data vary through time (by generating time
series graphs) and through space (by plotting the data on maps). 15
For the Australian engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko, our places are
so complex that robust understanding of them needs to develop from
approaching phenomena from many different angles, disciplines, and
points of view and trying to make sense of conflicting evidence. In her
project OneTree, Jeremijenko uses trees as a kind of electronic and biological
instrument, or ‘‘blogservatory.’’ Cloned trees that have been raised in
identical environmental conditions are planted in pairs throughout parks
and other public sites around the San Francisco Bay Area. ‘‘In the next 50–
100 years,’’ according to Jeremijenko, ‘‘they will continue to render the environmental
and social differences to which they are exposed. This is the
basis for a distributed data collection project that . . . provides a different
context for public discourse of global climate change than one that is based