TRENDS
16
Topher White assembles
Guardians using discarded
smartphones.
The reserve was small; he wasn’t far from
the ranger station. Still, the three full-time
guards were unable to keep a constant eye
over a square mile of forest, making smallscale
logging a tempting proposition for many
living nearby.
An inveterate engineer, White is the kind of
person who, even in the rainforest, happened
to have some electrical components and an
old phone on hand “just for fun.” So he hacked
together a rudimentary listening station and
demonstrated it for the rangers. They liked it
enough that White headed back a year later to
set up a permanent system.
This proved its value in just 48 hours, when
White received a GPS alert for chainsaw
sounds on the other side of the reserve and
headed out with rangers to investigate. They
arrived at the location within minutes to find a
small group of men from the local village chopping
down trees. This unexpectedly rapid response
was enough to send a message, White
says: “You can’t log here anymore, because if
you do, you will get caught.”
Since then, White has raised more than
$160,000 on Kickstarter to create conservation
non-profit Rainforest Connection. The
organization has now launched hundreds of
smartphone “Guardians” in remote regions of
forests all over the world, expanding monitoring
capacities for local conservation groups
from the Tembé tribe of the Brazilian Amazon
to Peruvian government rangers in the Alto
Mayo. Together, the efforts have protected
more than 100 square miles of forest.
CREATING THE GUARDIANS
While the operation has scaled, the Guardians
are still built on the same smartphone
bases. For one thing, it’s a small contribution
to reducing the impact of the 350,000 or so
phones discarded daily in the U.S. alone. For
another, “it’s actually a great little computer
to write software for,” White explains. “It
has all the sensors that we need, and it can
connect to the cellular networks. Building
something like that from scratch would be
very hard.”
Instead, discarded smartphones are repackaged
into a box with a powerful microphone,
a battery reserve, and a solar panel specially
designed to maximize the energy from the sun
flecks that make it through the tree canopy.
The Guardian contraption is then placed
around 150 feet up a tree, accessing cell towers
up to 12 miles away and detecting sounds
more than a mile away.
Still, the innovative project faces its own
set of challenges. “It feels like launching a satellite
to me,” White says. “The Guardians are
in places that are so inaccessible, and they’re
PHOTOS BY BEN VON WONG