Joycelyn Longdon on natural connection and AI

We all know the feeling – the one you get when you fling open the tent flap in the early morning to reveal a glistening, dewy field. Or a chorus of birds breaking out from the treetops in sudden, glorious celebration of flight. The perspective bending view from a cliff top, or the expanse of sea reaching out to an unknown horizon. The majesty of nature is one that we occasionally catch a glimpse of, humbling us momentarily, allowing us to feel small but held, feet grounded on the earth, air pumping through our body, part of a whole. This is natural connection. 

In her so-named new book, Natural Connection, author Joycelyn Longdon makes an urgent call for us to make these rare sensations of majesty more like daily occurrences. Actually, for them to become our every waking thought, and to shape our every decision. She argues that the way modern life has relegated nature to the odd off-duty moment has created a crisis, one that is responsible for environmental and societal collapse. “Our natural connection – cultural, historical, interpersonal and ecological – is inhibited or nurtured by the roots of our relationships with each other and the living world,” she writes. “In order to usher in a safe, thriving and abundant future, we must move away from our obsession with individualism, guilt, perfectionism and saviourism towards an existence of interconnectedness, interdependence, diversity and kinship.” 

Big stuff, but before you consider a move to Montana, Joycelyn suggests that these considerations are not about travelling to far-flung places – far from it. A Londoner of Ghanaian heritage, currently pursuing a PhD in artificial intelligence and environmental science at Cambridge, Joycelyn is living proof that these considerations are simply a switch in the head, as opposed to where you live. “As a young person I spent so much time thinking that environmentalism wasn't for me because of this false idea that that meant living in the countryside, or being rich or Western or white,” she shares over Zoom from her university home. “Everything around us is nature.This laptop I'm speaking to you on is nature. We are communing with and through nature right now. Everything we touch starts in the soil. For me, that's what a natural connection is. It's an acknowledgement that our bodies, our clothes, our technology, everything, is of and from the earth. Not this kind of colonial idea of a pristine wilderness.”

The prisms through which Joycelyn views climate, justice and nature make for excellent perspective. Growing up a young black girl in London, she won a place to read astrophysics at Cambridge, a subject she admits is “seemingly disconnected from earthbound work. But I have always been curious about how the world works, what it means to be human and how astoundingly beautiful this planet is. Through technology and understanding our place in the universe, it was clear to me that I want to do work that is rooted in the earth, and connected to real issues on this planet.” 

The racial justice work Joycelyn did as she was growing up began to intersect with her concerns about climate. On trips back to Ghana to visit family she began to make connections with her ancestors, witnessing first-hand the impact of legacy colonialism. She began a social media account, Climate in Colour, which quickly gained a following, and Joycelyn found a hungry audience. “I am a spiritual person and a lot of the decisions I make don't feel necessarily intentional. I just follow where I feel I'm being led.” When a programme focusing on the application of AI to environmental risk came up at Cambridge, “I thought, I know what it says on the tin, but that does strike two of the things that I want to do, STEM and the environment. And I'm going to bring in the justice anyway. It felt like I was being given a springboard to explore how I could bring together these three things – ecology, justice and technology.”

While pursuing her PhD and her activism, Joycelyn has also found time to synthesise her thoughts into a book. Natural Connection is a fantastic read, at once invoking the wondrous awe of the natural world while revealing how marginalised communities and ancient wisdom can help us create a lower-impact future. She reminds us that environmental action is a shared goal, telling stories of the ordinary people who paved the way for today’s movement, such as the Chipko women of India – the original ‘tree huggers’, who pioneered direct action in their communities to combat deforestation – and Nigeria’s Ogoni 9, who fought the threat of fossil fuel extraction in the Delta region. 

For her PhD programme, she chose to focus on the conservation technology of bioacoustics, working with forest communities in Ghana. “Bio acoustics is not inherently technological, it's been done forever. I mean, we just walk in forests and listen and it's an ecological practice. It was formalised by ecologists in the 1920s going into the forest and listening, because you can't always see species. Forests are noisy places and that noise is really important.” Her work uses machine learning to understand the health of the forest through species patterns. ”The increasing use of AI in conservation is very interesting and useful. You get a better understanding of what is driving species populations and species loss, but also what conservation actions actually support regeneration.” 

Working with AI, she is alive to the risks and opportunities. “What are the justice implications? How do they shift the way that people live within forests? What does it mean to extract data from forests? How does that link to colonial approaches to data extraction, mineral extraction? How does the way the technologies are deployed replicate the colonial history of conservation which is rooted in a disconnection of local people from their land?” She reels off for starters. “This is not just about critique, but also about imagining better, imagining different. The community I work with [in Ghana] appropriate this technology, they take this technology into their own hands. And together we explore the ways in which this technology can allow them to interact with their forest.”

All the forest reserves in Ghana were demarcated under British colonial rule, and those systems remain, “which means a lot of policing, a lot of militarisation, and a lot of restriction of communities. Many people are actually completely disconnected from the forest even though they live there, because they're fearful of being arrested or policed. And so actually the sound has been a cathartic and liberating way to interact with this forest, that they're surrounded by but not necessarily connected to. It has shifted the commission and the people who were policing it, opening up ways for people to be more embedded in the forest. The sensors are theirs, they put them where they want based on community discussion. A lot of my work is sitting in circles figuring out what we want to do, how we want to do it, telling stories about the forest, about species in the forest, about the history of the forest.”
 
Five years of working with this community (and witnessing destruction – there is a heartbreaking chapter in the book in which Joycelyn describes the devastation caused by a recent illegal gold mine) has shaped “the way I think about environmentalism, capitalism and community building. In global north spaces there's sometimes a disconnect between knowing what it is people on the front lines feel and think, and what moves them. Being able to be a listener, to work in service of communities that are on the front lines has been an incredible experience. It's been kind of emotional.” 

Articulate, passionate, urgent and joyful, Natural Connection is a book that chronicles emotions (with chapters on rage, joy, grief and care), laying out a pathway for individuals, families, small communities, businesses, governments and nations to think again about our reciprocal and integrated relationship with each other and the world around us. “Every year that I go to Ghana I visit the slave castles as a kind of pilgrimage, to pay respects to my ancestors who were stripped from their land, stripped from the forests that I work in today. Our communities continue to make music. They continue to make art. They continue to love. They continue to make us, whilst facing the most unimaginable pain and grief and rage and abuse and oppression.”

“The indigenous scholar Carl White talks about the exceptionalism of the climate crisis,” Joycelyn continues. “That for indigenous communities, for marginalised communities, they have seen the ends of worlds before, and yet they still held joy. The earth presents us with abundance of beauty and joy every day. And if we are the earth, then we should also channel that, right? Our joy doesn't negate our commitment. Our rage doesn't negate our joy. As someone said to me at a book signing recently, we're all just trying to figure out how to live well within terrible systems.”

Particularly inspiring is Joycelyn’s evocation of ancient wisdom. Her net casts back into history, as well as forward into the technology of the future. She tells the story of the living root bridges in the Meghalaya region of north east India, crafted by the local Khasi people since 100BC. To make these bridges, the aerial roots of rubber trees are trained on bamboo poles across rivers and canyons, and can take 30 years to grow. The kind of long-term infrastructure planning that present governments can only dream of. What’s more, these root bridges are beautiful structures, embodying the art of craft and technology. 

However, the interference of hydro-electric dam projects and illegal coke mining threaten their existence. Local activist MorningStar Khongthaw is trying to reconnect his community back to the technology of building these root bridges.“How they build is how they imagine the future,” he says.

Joycelyn explains: “They are building for the world they imagine in 25 years: in these bridges, the future and the past is held at the same time. And that's how I look at technology. Technology is about craft. Craft is something ancestral that used to be a way of communicating data. We'd write stories, we'd write information through weaving on looms and all different technologies. So then, how do we have that craft at the centre of everything we are making for the future? How are we creating intergenerational relationships where we can hear stories, share stories across cultures, across generations, so we can figure out how to make new ways of being in this world? Because it's not just a crisis of carbon, it's not just a crisis of science, it's a crisis of connection. We talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about human intelligence, but plant intelligence is mind-blowing.That is nature's technology.”

As Joycelyn concludes powerfully in the book: “We forget that our small world is but a node in an infinitely beautiful and complex network.”

Natural Connection: What Indigenous Wisdom and Marginalised People Teach Us About Environmental Action by Joycelyn Longdon is out now.