Bridging Tech and Nature: A Personal Quest to Amplify Conservation with Innovation
A mentor once told me:
“Give up your desire to save the world…and just do your small part.”
Hearing that advice cracked something wide open for me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that my “desire to save the world” was exactly what was stopping me from doing anything.
My experience is in complex technology. My desire had been to save the natural world. Now, my small part is at the intersection of the two.
I studied and worked for over a decade on complex systems of hardware, firmware, and software. I validated these systems to make them functional and useful for so many applications. But which of those applications really aligned with my values?
I was still fascinated by computers, circuit boards, and problem-solving, but I couldn't get behind all of the myriad ways that that technology got consumed and used. Some useful, but many inane, and some that just seemed plain wrong.
I couldn't sit back and watch our fish populations get extirpated, our forests get mercilessly clear-cut and our bird populations dwindle. There’s so much good work happening, protecting our biodiversity. Here’s my small part, at the intersection of technology and conservation.
How can technology help us to be more connected to place, not less?
How can technology help us to be more awake and less ambivalent to the realities of climate change, habitat loss and mass extinction?
How can advanced technologies be applied cost-effectively for non-profit use?
There are great studies and new applications of drones and artificial intelligence coming out of academia. Many of these are still too new, too difficult to apply, and too expensive to be applied to conservation. But some are not.
Image by Octave Zangs
ForeSight brings these technologies within reach. To leverage sufficiently advanced technology to non-profit organizations that previously thought these were out of reach.
I’m Nick Wagner and ForeSight Drone Services is my small part. In 2018, ForeSight Drones started serving land-trusts, watershed councils, and non-profits in the Pacific Northwest.
Together, we can make monitoring more effective, story-telling more engaging, and elevate our impacts.