A new startup, Tehanu, represents a revolutionary approach to conservation that allows nature to “pay for its own survival.” If you’re anything like me, the phrase “a new startup” chills you to the bone. But let’s hear them out.
CEO and founder Jonathan Ledgard developed the concept of “interspecies money” years ago. Observing the current biodiversity crisis of unprecedented natural decline, Ledgard diagnosed what he believes is the heart of the issue. The global market economy has underestimated the monetary value of nature.
His solution is to develop a technology that allows animals, trees, microbes, etc., to possess digital currency. This currency will then be spent for them, buying conservation efforts. The allocation and spending will not be decided by the account holders themselves but by AI.
Tehanu first focused on one animal species, the gorilla, but plans to expand to all forms of life. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Tehanu N°1
His proposal is no longer theoretical. Starting in 2024, Tehanu tested out its proposal on a mountain gorilla family in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
Human ascendancy has not been kind to the gorilla, one of our closest living relatives. Poaching and habitat loss have devastated their numbers. Thanks to intensive conservation efforts, mountain gorilla populations have increased in recent years, but there are still only about 1,000 left in the wild. Over half of them live in the Virunga range, where Volcanoes National Park is located.
Under the name Tehanu No1, the startup’s first project began by scraping known databases for all known information about the mountain gorilla. This was used to develop an AI model, which built profiles for specific gorillas using facial recognition.
The ‘Gorilla Tracker’ is intended to help track individual gorillas and monitor populations using facial recognition. They report an accuracy of 93%. Photo: Hasso Plattner Institute
Once the individual gorillas are identified, that identity was linked to a digital wallet. Money, which comes from existing conservation funding, was allocated to each gorilla. The AI then spent that money on behalf of the gorilla.
Tehanu refers to the spending part as an extension of the ‘gig economy.’ The program creates green jobs, where local people complete conservation tasks and are then paid. These tasks could include planting trees, setting up cameras, granting priority access to watering holes, or whatever else the AI decides the gorilla (or later species) prefers.
The startup’s founders see their system as a way to create jobs in the poorest and more biodiverse regions. Nature stewardship will be directly, monetarily incentivized.
A family of mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park served as the unwitting test subjects for ‘interspecies money.’ Photo: Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda
‘I am, therefore I own’
In his essay proposing interspecies money, Ledgard described a theoretical giraffe as “the identity that allows the transfer [of funds] to happen: I am, therefore I own.”
The AI decides to “pay” the giraffe, meaning it earmarks a certain amount of money. The same AI later decides to spend the earmarked money to hire giraffe bodyguards (a real use case proposed by Ledgard) without the giraffe’s involvement in any part of the process.
This is not necessarily a criticism — the giraffe is probably not the most qualified to understand complex environmental science and conservation decisions. But is an LLM (Large Language Module) qualified, either?
The problem with computers
“A computer can never be held accountable,” argued a now much-quoted 1979 IBM Training Manual. “Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
Then there is that fascinating irony. Can the drive for eternal and exponential economic growth, which got us into this situation in the first place, really be harnessed to undo its own damage? For many climate activists, obsessive wealth-building is incompatible with any real solution to climate change and biodiversity loss.
“We are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy,” wrote author and professor of climate justice Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything. “We need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”
Ledgard seems to agree that the economic system is the problem. His solution is not to change the system, but to broaden it. We cannot seem to care for anything that doesn’t profit us. Therefore, the mountain gorilla, the croaking frog, the willow tree, and the microbial goo must be imbued with monetary value.
