The Future of Forestry AI Innovation, and Sustainable Practices with David Bengston

Episode Overview

Episode Topic

In this episode of Timber Talks, host Mindy sits down with David Bengston, an environmental futurist with the USDA Forest Service. The discussion delves into the fascinating world of futures research and its critical relevance to forestry and the forest-based sector. Bengston shares his unique journey into the field of futuring, explaining the role of a futurist and how exploring a range of possible, plausible, and preferable futures can significantly benefit long-term decision-making in forestry. The conversation touches on emerging technologies, innovative forestry practices, and the profound impact of strategic foresight on the future of natural resource management.

Lessons You’ll Learn

Listeners will gain insights into the practical applications of futures research within the forestry industry. David Bengston discusses how exploring a broad range of future scenarios can prepare organizations for potential disruptions, reduce reaction times to unforeseen events, and foster resilience. Additionally, the episode explores how innovative technologies, such as exoskeletons and artificial intelligence, are beginning to reshape forestry practices. Bengston also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a positive vision for the future, even in the face of climate challenges, by seeking out and focusing on positive signals of change that could lead to a sustainable and thriving forest sector.

About Our Guest

David Bengston is an environmental futurist with the USDA Forest Service, where he has spent decades conducting futures research, particularly focusing on strategic foresight in forestry. His journey into this unique field began in high school when he was inspired by his father’s membership in the World Future Society. Over the years, Bengston has combined his expertise in natural resource economics with his passion for futures research, eventually leading to his current role where he helps guide the Forest Service’s long-term planning efforts. His work emphasizes the exploration of possible futures to improve today’s decision-making processes, ensuring a sustainable future for forests and the environment.

Topics Covered

The episode covers a wide array of topics related to the intersection of futures research and forestry. Bengston explains what it means to be a futurist and the importance of exploring multiple future scenarios rather than trying to predict the future. The discussion includes specific examples of emerging technologies that could revolutionize forestry, such as exoskeletons, passenger drones, and wood-based nanomaterials. Bengston also introduces the concept of “Rip Van Winkle Futures,” a metaphor for understanding the rapid pace of change that can occur in just 20 years. The conversation concludes with a look at the potential for a “Coming Age of Wood,” where innovations in wood products could lead to increased demand for sustainable forestry practices.

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About the Guest: David Bengston

Episode Transcript

Mindy: Welcome to another episode of Forestry and Arboriculture timber talks, the podcast where we explore the latest trends, innovations and insights in forestry and agriculture. I’m your host, Mindy, and today we have a unique and esteemed guest with us. We are honored to welcome David Bengston, an environmental futurist, with the USDA Forest Service. David brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in futures research, focusing on strategic foresight and its relevance to forestry and the forest based sector. Welcome to the show, David.

David Bengston: Thank you very much, Mindy. Great to be here.

Mindy: David, could you call yourself a futurist? I’ve never met a futurist before. What is a futurist and how do they become one?

David Bengston: Well, most people haven’t met futurists, so don’t don’t feel bad about that. But. So how did I become a futurist? It’s kind of a story that goes way back because when I was in high school, believe it or not, early 1970s, my father was a member of the World Future Society, which was new back then. It was a new organization. Futures was just getting started in the late 60s and early 70s. And because he was a member, he was a businessman and he belonged to the World Future Society. And we got the futurist magazine every two months delivered to our house. And I would read that every issue, because it was I found out there was this whole world that was really intriguing to me. There were people who called themselves futurists. They some of them were consultants, some worked for big companies, some worked for the military, and they wrote interesting articles in this magazine And so then eventually when I went to when I was an undergraduate, I tried out a few majors, but I ended up developing my own individually designed degree in future studies because there was nowhere you could get a bachelor’s degree in future studies.

David Bengston: Today, there’s a few places where you can get graduate degrees in the future. And so I put together this program, and I was planning to go on to graduate school in future studies at the University of Houston, where they have a great program and still there today. But I got interested in economics instead because of a really outstanding economics professor and going to graduate school focusing on natural resource economics as a master’s student and then a PhD in forest economics. And I started working with some forest economists at the US Forest Service, where 40 years later, I still work. And so it’s been a just a great place. Great place for me. But about 15 years ago, I talked to my project leader and my director of our research station and said, I’d like to shift my research into futures, environmental futures work. And they were very supportive. They sent me down to Houston to take some courses there. And so I’ve been working in futures research ever since then.

Mindy: So could you tell us what a futurist does? Just kind of a general description.

David Bengston: The short answer is that futurists help people, help organizations explore a range of possible, plausible and preferable futures. That’s really the essence of it. And sometimes people are amazed if I when I tell them that futures or futuring, it’s really not about trying to predict the future because no one can predict the future. There’s too much fundamental uncertainty in the, you know, social and ecological systems that we live in. And so rather than trying to predict the future, which doesn’t work, exploring this range of possible, plausible and preferable futures is what futurists do. And the goal is to develop foresight, which is insight about how the future could unfold, what could be different about the future than the present, and then to use those insights to make better decisions and better planning today. So it’s very practical, and that’s why it’s practiced in so many companies, large companies, and every branch of the military, every intelligence agency does some future work. It’s kind of an interesting field with a unique set of methods. Horizon scanning, scenario planning. The Delphi method. Future wheel. Backcasting. Visioning. Those are all some of the tools and methods that futurists use. It’s kind of an invisible field, really, because what you see is just like the tip of the iceberg. And because if you’re a futurist, work in a corporate setting, what you do is probably confidential and the company doesn’t want it to get out. If you’re a futurist in the military, it’s classified and they don’t advertise that. So there’s really a lot of it that goes on, but not much of it is seen. So I’m happy to be part of a part of futures, where we publish everything we do, and it’s all out there and in the open, and its usefulness can be assessed that way.

Mindy: Okay. What practical benefits can futures offer to forestry and the forest sector?

David Bengston: Yeah, I think there are a lot of benefits and I view futures as kind of a a missing piece of the puzzle in forestry and related fields, because we have all these fields and disciplines that help us understand forests and forest ecosystems and help us to manage them sustainably. Forest ecology, all the different fields that feed into forestry. It’s a very multidisciplinary field, but futures is kind of like a missing piece of the puzzle because it provides a unique perspective exploring this wider range of possibilities. You know, futurists, rather foresters are used to these long term projections. 50 year projections in forestry are nothing because of the growing cycle of trees and the long term nature of forests. But they’re not used to Foresters, and folks who work in related fields are not used to thinking about this broader range of possibilities that could unfold because of all the disruptions and uncertainties that happen. And so, I mean, some of the benefits are one is creating a longer term perspective, which we typically have kind of a short term perspective on. A lot of things in planning futures can also help us explore fundamental uncertainties and surprises. Or wild cards is one of the terms for that. Um, these are low probability but high impact events that can really shape the future. And the recent pandemic was a wild card for many people or a type of wild card.

David Bengston: The experts knew that it was a big possibility, but most of us really were not thinking about a pandemic and how that could disrupt our lives. A futures can help us reduce reaction time when there’s some big change that happens because we’ve prepared for it. We’re built more resilience into our organization or whatever. Our business, we’ve kind of rehearsed the future by thinking about different scenarios and possibilities. And so that’s a useful benefit. It can also help anticipating unintended consequences or unanticipated consequences. And there’s a tool that I’ve used a lot called the futures wheel, which is like a structured brainstorming process. Um, brainstorm about the possible direct and indirect positive and negative impacts of some change. And so that really reveals the unanticipated consequences. Any type of change, a new technology, a new policy, it could be anything. And then finally, another benefit that I see is Futuring can help people think about and explore a preferred future, a positive vision for the future, which is really critical in any, any organization or for even for individuals. We need to have that positive vision of our personal future as well as organizations. If they don’t have a vision, then they’re just floundering. So those are those are some of the important benefits that I would mention.

Mindy: You recently published an article in the Journal of Forestry titled Emerging Signals of Change That Could Shape the Future of Forestry. Could you tell us about some of those signals of change?

David Bengston: Yeah, that was that was part of our horizon scanning work that we do in this small futures group that I’m part of. And horizon, it’s called the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning Project. And we’ve published a number of papers on this and had a number of products that Journal of Forestry paper was, was one of the recent products of this work. And so horizon scanning is one of the main tools and futures. It’s basically it’s a there’s different ways to approach it. But there’s it’s a systematic way to to look for signal emerging signals of change, new trends, new developments, disruptions, um, all types of signals, especially those signals that are coming from outside of the field that you work in. Because, you know, if you’re an arborist, if you’re a forester, you pretty much you have a pretty good feel for new things that are happening or coming up within your field. If if you’re good at your job, you do because you listen to podcasts like this and you read newsletters that you get in your inbox and magazines and journals and you talk to your professional colleagues, but you may not be aware of things, developments, new technologies that are happening externally in completely other fields. You know, like artificial intelligence. Maybe you’re not paying attention to that and how that could affect your work in a few years or however many years. Maybe sooner than that.

Mindy: Yeah. Yeah.

David Bengston: So horizon scanning, it’s a really useful tool for that. And so we have a team of volunteer scanners, really diverse team. Some of them work completely outside of forestry. Some of them are retired forestry professionals. And they search a broad range of um information sources looking for these signals that might be important. When they find something, they post it in a database that we have, and then we go into that database it has right now it has almost 4000 signals of change. Yeah. They’re not all unique. You know, many of them some of them are about the same signal. But we keep seeing the same signal. That tells us something that maybe this is increasing importance and it’s more likely to happen And so we go in and analyze the database and look for some key signals. And then so that Journal of Forestry article was an effort to do that. We identified 15 key signals of change that could shape the future of forestry. And so a couple of those I’ll just mention a couple of a few of them. Stop me if I’m going on too long here. But one interesting one is exoskeletons. Are you familiar with that?

Mindy: I know when an exoskeleton is, but I don’t know how it would apply to forestry, but. And some.

David Bengston: Some creatures have, you know, some like insects have exoskeletons. Yeah. But these are wearable devices that increase human strength and endurance. And there are.

Mindy: It’s like alien the alien movie had. Yes. Yeah. Had. Yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

David Bengston: Sigourney Weaver at the end of aliens. That was classic. Yeah. And so there are devices like that now. Not quite on that scale, but some of them are. You put them over your shoulders. And companies like Ford Motor has used a type of simple exoskeleton to help workers, in fact, in their factories who are doing repetitive movements. And it reduces injuries, reduces fatigue. The military is developing and has developed some exoskeletons to help soldiers carry heavier loads, run faster, all kinds of. You could have a super soldier because they have this exoskeleton suit which which provides a lot of assistance to them. And so I mean, in in natural resource fields, wildland firefighters could really use something like that. All the equipment that they haul around, loggers and arborists and the work that they do, this would relieve a lot of fatigue and help with injuries. Outdoor recreationists maybe. Search and rescue activities where you could cover more ground. Helping people with disabilities get out in the woods because they can wear an exoskeleton suit. And so there’s a lot of potential uses for it. That’s one emerging issue exoskeletons. Another is passenger drones, sometimes called VTOL vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And there are hundreds of them being developed by companies around the world. They’re being tested. Sometimes they they just carry one person. They can carry up to some of them up to six people.

David Bengston: They take off like a helicopter, but they’re much, much cheaper and much easier to operate than a helicopter is. And so they could provide access to people to remote areas for recreationists. They could be used in search and rescue. Again, firefighters rapid deployment to remote areas in a passenger drone of some kind. Something that could be here sooner than we think. Really. The another emerging issue is forests and other natural areas being increasingly integrated into the health care system. So forests as health care. And there’s all this research that shows that the incredible physical health benefits and mental health benefits of being in nature. And so there’s already in the US and in Canada, doctors can write prescriptions in some places and some instances for time spent in nature. And there’s a Park RX program. And so in the future, increasing integration, forest management and health care, I think are a possibility. And so maybe on every national forest or in every park, there’ll be a health care specialist who focuses on that. New jobs in forestry. Another emerging issue. And this is what I call robots in the woods. Physical jobs going remote. It’s like today there are a number of places where there are restaurants where the waiters and busboys or bus help to bust. Dishes are actually robots that are controlled by someone who is in a remote location.

David Bengston: They may be hundreds of miles away, and they basically all they do. They’re monitoring a whole fleet of these server robots in a restaurant. And if there’s a problem, if the robot gets stuck somewhere behind a booth, they then they intervene and help them out. Well, I mean, in a few years, there could be remote. Would workers in the woods, loggers and others. Arborists who are in these robots are controlled by a person who is in a remote location and is monitoring the work that they do in the woods. So that’s, um. That’s one there are lots of others. Lab grown wood or factory grown wood is one that you may have heard of. The genetic engineering of trees to mitigate climate change. Abrupt climate change is a wild card that I’m particularly interested in. You know, we’ve had climate change to date has been really gradual, but throughout geological history there have been many periods where the climate has changed very quickly. Sometimes just in a matter of a few years. The paleoclimatologists who study these ice cores, sometimes up to two miles long, from these big ice sheets and they can see what was in the atmosphere and what what the climate was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And so they know that these abrupt changes in the climate are possible. That would really disrupt.

David Bengston: So those are those are a few examples. But in this paper we go through 15 of them like that. Some are social in nature, like growing indigenous empowerment or increased climate migration, migrants leaving coastal areas or places where there are a lot of heat waves moving to the Midwest or around the Great Lakes, where it’s a little cooler. Some are new technologies. And so it’s it’s quite a range of of emerging signals of change that we talked about in that paper.

Mindy: Well, the, the park since you brought up, there’s a state park close to where I live, and it’s named after a gentleman who in the 1930s was sick. And he kept going to his physician. And the physician got to the point. I don’t know what else to tell you to do. So he told him to go out in the woods for 30 minutes a day, and then he just increased his time, increased his time. Then he developed an interest in becoming a naturalist. And so he became a naturalist in our area. And they named a state park after him. So that that park made me think about kind of the sometimes what is old is new again type of concept. How certain things circle back into our lives and prove to us that there are value to the woods or herbs or, you know, a menagerie or different things. So. Right.

David Bengston: Yeah. And there’s so much, so much research that backs that up nowadays is just incredible. The amount of of research that’s been done on this, the physical and mental health benefits are amazing, right?

Mindy: You know, not getting into a debate or anything. But we evolved with nature. And, you know, we they’ve done studies where they’ve hung petri dishes and trees and collect it, and it’s got good bacteria in it. And we need exposed to that good bacteria for our iune system. So, you know, we need nature to be a healthy species, is how I look at it. So you’ve written about the possibility of a coming age of the wood. A previous guest on Timber Talks, Jon Perlin, talked about his classic book on the important role of trees and wood throughout human history. But in this age of steel and concrete and silicon for electronics, how is a coming of age possible?

David Bengston: Yeah, coming age of wood is it’s a scenario that I’ve been interested in. And actually years ago I found a book with the title A Coming Age of Wood. It was published in 1949 and I grabbed it was in a giveaway table at the Forestry Library next door on campus here. And so that’s where I first saw that idea and started thinking about it. But the idea of this scenario is that there would be a large there are, in fact, a large number of new technologies, emerging technologies, innovations in wood products that really take off. And they could substitute for a large share of nonrenewable materials, less environmentally friendly materials like steel and concrete and others. And that could result in big increase in the use of wood based materials and other bio based materials as well. Not just wood cellulose, but other bio based materials throughout the global economy. That’s the idea of a coming age of wood. And it would obviously it could be trans, it would happen over decades, but it still could be really transformative for forestry. So some of the emerging innovations in wood products are ones like wood based nanomaterials. I don’t know how widely known those are, but there have been several. There are several pilot plants, including one that the Forest Service operates at the Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin, that produces wood based nanomaterials where you take wood fiber and you break it down to the nano level, which is one billionth of a meter, which is unimaginably small.

David Bengston: When you break things down to that scale, they have completely different properties. And so we think of wood as having certain properties. This is wood on steroids. I don’t know how to describe it, but um, so you can there are literally thousands of uses for these kind of nanomaterials computer chips, flexible computer displays, panels for cars, even replacement tendons, human tendons could be made out of any and all kinds of others. And so that’s one example. The tall wood buildings or ply scrapers made with, uh, cross-laminated timber. You may have other mass timber Technologies. That’s one of the innovations that could bring about this coming age of wood. We have one in Minneapolis here. I work in Saint Paul, but I live in Minneapolis and downtown Minneapolis has a tall wood building there. There are quite a few of them around the country and around the around the world, and they’re fire resistant. They’re as strong as structural steel. They greatly speed up the construction process. They have a much lower carbon footprint. So the tall wood buildings are really an interesting development. I think another one is, uh, transparent wood that could substitute for glass that produced using a process that chemically removes lignin from natural wood fibers. And so you end up with you can use it to produce clear windows or solar cells.

David Bengston: And so that kind of blows some people’s minds sometimes to think of glass made out of wood. There’s some fabric made from wood fibers that is being developed. There’s 3D printing using cellulose instead of the plastic polymers that are often used for 3D printing. There’s biodegradable electronics made from graphene from wood, in a process that some scientists at Rice University have created. This one sounds really wild, but believe it or not, nails made out of wood that are compressed with a resin so that they’re extremely hard and allows them to be driven into timber without drilling pilot holes with a with a nail gun. So even wooden nails driving into wood that’s. There are dozens and dozens of these kind of innovations in wood products that if they really were to take off, and the reason for them to take off is that there’s pressure to move away from these carbon intensive materials like steel and concrete, and to replace them with nature based, bio based materials as well. And so that could really increase the demand for wood and wood fiber. There would have to be massive reforestation and afforestation efforts to meet that demand, and better utilization of the wood that we have. So much of it is wasted. And so that’s the coming age of wood scenario.

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Mindy: I could also see there being a conflict between because in my area houses, apartment buildings. I mean they’re just popping up everywhere. And, you know, we’ve only got so much land and. There’s one area that’s been a forest for probably 50 years. And so they’re just taking the trees down to put another apartment building up so I can see where there could be a conflict of the we need to plant more, but we’re, you know, eating our land up with urban development.

David Bengston: A lot of challenges.

Mindy: Yeah. Yeah, a Lot of challenges. You wrote a blog post a few years ago about Rip Van Winkle Futures, which sounds intriguing. What’s that about? Yeah.

David Bengston: Rip van winkle, remember him? He was this character, Washington Irving, I think, was the author who in the early 1800s, mid 1800s, wrote this story about Rip Van Winkle. And for me, it’s kind of a metaphor or it’s a principle for understanding how much things can change, a principle for thinking about the future. And so Rip Van Winkle was this colonial era guy who kind of a slacker, and he goes off into the woods, into the mountains, and mysteriously falls asleep for 20 years. And then when he wakes up, he wakes up to a brand new world. So much has changed in 20 years. The main thing that’s changed for RIP is that there’s been a revolution. The American Revolution. King George the Third is no longer in power, and George Washington’s portrait is in the tavern in town instead of a portrait of the king. And so a lot has changed in 20 years. There was one of my mentors in the future, Earl Joseph, and he worked. He was a corporate futurist in the Twin Cities. He worked for, oh, it was Univac which became Sperry Univac, which became Unisys. Anyway, he was he worked for them and really creative guy. And he gave a lot of public talks as well. And he had this catchphrase that was sort of like that was almost anything is possible in 20 years.

David Bengston: And he meant that literally. And he had these examples of things like the Manhattan Project, which when it was being discussed in the scientific community. There were these world renowned physicists, some a few who said, this is impossible, it can never be done. You’re wasting your time and money during this war effort. You should be focusing on other things. And in just a few years it happened. And also the moon landing. In 1961, President Kennedy announced this audacious goal to put people on the moon by the end. Before the end of the decade, there was almost no space program. In 1961, virtually nothing. And with the limited technology and limited computing power they had then 1969 Apollo 11, it happened. And so there are there are a lot of examples like that of change that happens in less than 20 years, that can really could just really be remarkable. And so that’s Rip Van Winkle futures. And it’s something that gives me a little hope about positive change that can happen doesn’t always have to be positive. Change can be negative change as well. But. Right, right. But I like that as a principle for thinking about the future and for sort of expanding people’s what they’re willing to entertain about how the future could be different.

Mindy: And if we think about, like every I think about what my great grandmother saw in her lifetime, she saw the right for women to vote. She saw electricity. And it seems every generation it speeds up quicker and quicker. I think has changed my lifetime. And so, you know, I’m not always looking for the change. So I’m not always aware of the change. But when I think about how things used to be to how they are today, you know, like my dad still has a house phone and so, you know, he that’s what he wants. I’m fine with that. You know, just how quickly things change. And like when I saw drones first coming out, I told my husband, I’m going to have me one of those and and it’s going to be used in ag. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, Mark my word, it’s coming down the pike. And you know, so as soon as I was able to buy, I’ve got three drones, I bought my drones and started because that’s the technology and actually did a business competition for a wearable drone. And people looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, you know, I had all sorts of like, you could use it for tourism, that you could rent a wearable drone and it could take you out and use augmented reality and pop. You know, I just had this entire plan. And then using a wearable drone for either a senior citizen or a person who had autism and have a sensor on a doorway. And that way if they got out, the drone would automatically go up in the air and you would have some time that you could track them. That’s a lot better than what we’ve had in the past as far as people getting out and stuff, but it’s just amazing to me how quickly things change and all sorts of other arenas, like in education and using virtual classrooms and stuff and like us doing this. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago we couldn’t do this.

David Bengston: Yeah, it’s really so it’s really important to be willing to think about this broad range of possible and plausible futures that could develop, and by thinking about them, by developing scenarios for those futures, you can be better prepared for them and better decisions today.

Mindy: You and some of your Forest Service colleagues created a board game to get people thinking about forestry futures. That’s not something I would expect for government researchers to create. Tell us about this game and what you see. Its use How you would use it. Is it just for adults or could. Yeah, high.

David Bengston: Schoolers could definitely use it, but it’s not a kids game. It was a really fun project developing this board game. It’s called Impact Forestry Edition and but it was fun. But it’s also a serious, serious project because it’s part of a field called Serious Games, which is actually a big field that games that are designed to be both engaging and fun and entertaining, but also have a serious purpose, an educational purpose. And the thing is that people learn better when they’re having fun, that is, they can engage them and engage different parts of their brain and in ways that others sitting in a lecture just doesn’t have the same impact as playing a game when you’re learning the same principles or the same material. And so in gaming, serious games go way back in history to military Wargaming. That was really maybe the first kind of serious game. So in our game, each of the players has an avatar that they’re assigned. This is like a character from the future who has a job from the future, like a smart forest technician, nature epidemiologist, future generations, representative, jobs that don’t exist today. But in 20, 30 years they could. And so each of these characters then has a preferred future. And the goal of the game is to achieve your avatar’s preferred future before the other players achieve theirs. So there’s a little competition in there that some of these games that are cooperative.

David Bengston: Ours is a little bit more competitive amongst the players. And so part of the game involves these impact cards and wild cards or disruption cards that are taken straight out of our horizon scanning database. So they’re actual signals of change. And by integrating those into the gameplay, it helps people see that, wow, this is something that’s actually beginning to develop already. It’s not some pie in the sky thing that someone dreamed up, but it’s actually happening. And so that helps them think more broadly. And so we’ve used this game in workshops like Foresight workshops. We’ve used it before scenario planning exercises. And the idea is to get people primed to be thinking more creatively about the future. And it does seem to really work pretty well. We’ve gotten some good feedback from people on that. There’s also a print, and so we have physical board. I have one on my shelf behind me here, a boxed board game, but we also have a print and play version that I’m happy to send to anyone. Any of your listeners who are interested could email me and I could send you the PDF. You just print it out and you cut out all the cards and pieces. That’s a lot of cutting. And then it has the instruction booklet as well, and you can try it out and see if it’s useful.

Mindy: I was just kind of envisioning that I used to teach environmental science, and I would have used something like that for kids to explore future careers. Type of thing. What type of skill set would this type of person need for the future type of thing? So that’s why I brought up about high school. Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology being applied in almost every field today. How do you think I could affect forestry and the forest based sector in the future?

David Bengston: I think it has a potential to affect just about everything in forestry and in so many areas, because I can do a lot of things with really great efficiency and accuracy, including forestry. The tasks in forestry related fields so it could have a big impact. It’s beginning to have some impacts already. But so what? One thing about AI is that there are three types of AI that are usually distinguished. What we have today and all we have today is weak or narrow AI. And that’s artificial intelligence that does just one thing a single cognitive function like expert systems, speech recognition, looking for patterns in a big database. And so it does that one thing and it does it really well. So that’s narrow AI. Artificial general intelligence is AI that would match or exceed human performance across a whole broad range of abilities and cognitive tasks that we don’t have. There’s some AI researchers who think that we’ll never develop that. But again, a lot is possible in 20 years. And then the third type is artificial superintelligence, Intelligence, which is what’s kind of like out of science fiction and is pretty scary, that artificial intelligence that would exceed human performance in just in every area. And so that may never exist, but it’s a possibility. And so, I mean, it’s some of the applications of the AI that we have now in forestry are wildfire detection systems. You know, we used to have the fire lookout in a lookout tower scanning the horizon, looking for some on the distant ridgeline, some fire that maybe a lightning strike hit a single tree and is starting a fire.

David Bengston: Now I can do that. We still have in the Forest Service. There is still a very few human lookouts in remote areas, but it’s AI is replacing that and sensor technology that can identify fires early, assess their threat, pinpoint the exact location, estimate the speed and direction of spread of a fire and communicate all that to people who will then get the ball rolling. If there’s a need to suppress the fire. And here’s another one that sounds a little bit like Doctor Dolittle meets science fiction, but using AI to for interspecies communication. There are a number of teams of scientists around the world that are attempting to use AI and other advanced technologies to to make that a reality. And there’s all kinds of animal vocalization data that recording the sounds that animals make with the sensors, and then using AI to try and identify the patterns in that, and to understand and not to have a conversation with with a bear or something, but to understand what the animals are experiencing and feeling. And to it could have a big impact on wildlife management Rehabilitation of animals that have been injured. Things lots of. And it could really change human attitudes towards animals. So that’s kind of an interesting area to me that interspecies communication.

Mindy: As like forestry fires, if birds were doing a certain call that they knew signaled fire, that would be a use to them for that type of technology in forestry.

David Bengston: Yeah, that’s I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a good one.

Mindy: Well, I don’t think that’s any different. You know, the communication that trees have through their root system, you know, that’s a not a relatively new idea. But you know, how they how a grove of trees protect themselves, how they, you know, protect individuals. I have taught several different well, I’ve taught for a long time, but I used to run a community garden. And so this one gardener every year got the tomato hornworm on his tomato plant. And so I talked to him about how insects have better vision and they can see a week plan. And, you know, where were you getting your tomato plants. You might not want to continue to get them there because they the insects are telling you the weak plants. So just people understanding the information that nature has available to us, we just have to be able to translate. Finally, there’s a lot of pessimism about the future today, including climate despair or climate anxiety. When you look into your crystal ball, are you optimistic about the future?

David Bengston: Yes I am, I’m an optimist by nature, by my nature. But there is certainly a lot of pessimism out there, and I’ve seen this in students that I interact with, especially I’ve taught an environmental futures class several times.

David Bengston: Some of them are very, very pessimistic. And it’s challenging sometimes to be optimistic, I think to remain that, to retain that bit of hope and a positive vision. But one of the ways that I do this is to. And it gets back again to our horizon scanning project, which is intentionally paying, paying attention to both positive as well as the negative signals of change and seeking out the positive ones, because our natural inclination is to. There’s a thing called negativity bias that we pay a lot more attention to negative news and signals. And that’s the way our brains evolved to pay attention to threats in our environment. You know, maybe a large predator or something. And so we’re always on the outlook and paying much more attention to those negative signals. But if we make a conscious strategy to pay attention to positive developments that may be staring us right in the face, but we’re not thinking about them. And so in our horizon scanning database, we have scores of signals that could be really seeds of positive climate future. And so we also collect the negative signals. But it really does make a difference for me to think about all of those things that are some of them are technological developments. Some are like changing social attitudes. The youth climate movement, I find, is really inspiring. It’s around the world, young people that are standing up and promoting climate action and change. And so those are some of the types of signals that give me some hope and keep me optimistic.

Mindy: This time with the youth, you know, getting more interested and sort of trying to come up with some plans to try to improve the situation, kind of reminds me of the 60s, the flower children and, you know, they were environmentalist type of thing and it seems to be coming back around, but with a different twist to it. A lot of, um, negativity with that. You know, some people just throw their hands up and I personally can’t do anything, so I’m not going to work. You know, that type of thing. And I was in a graduate class and we went to kefir, which is a confined animal feedlot operation that was owned by Tyson. But they had talked a farmer into raising chickens. But that’s another story. And it’s in this community. It’s really sad what has happened. So we went to this, this world famous barbecue place, and we’re sitting there eating chicken, barbecue chicken. And, you know, ten minutes ago everybody was like, we’re gonna, you know, pick at Tyson and burn him down and all this stuff. And we’re sitting here having chicken with my vegetarian professor.

Mindy: And so I was like, you know, you need to speak with your dollar. You do have Tyson will change their how they raised, you know, whatever your issue is, if enough people speak with their dollar and say, we’re not going to support that, that type of behavior, they will change. You know, you do have you do have some individual power that you can take and versus throwing your hands up and going, I can’t, I can’t do anything. So that’s kind of been my experience with that, nobody got up from the table and walked away from the chicken. But I made my point, you know, so, you know, every single day you have a choice how you want to vote with your dollar. So I think for me that’s how I, I stay positive. You know, I can’t stop the urban development. I can’t you know, there’s a lot I can’t do. All I can do is manage my own space and my own behavior in what I choose to support. And, you know, maybe I’ll be a senator.

David Bengston: And I think knowing that, it just helps us to feel more empowered and that we can help bring about positive change and a positive future, just it’s not that we can’t control very much or everything, but we there’s a sense of empowerment in knowing that you can. There are actions you can take that will help move us in the right direction.

Mindy: Right. Well, I’m an avid recycler. And so we used to have recycling picked up and they did away with the program. But I do my part. I burn the fossil fuel to take it to the recycling center. But, you know, I control what I can control and what I can’t. You know, for a higher power, I guess you could say, versus sitting back and going, I can’t do anything. Well, thank you so much, David, for sharing your valuable insights and expertise today. It’s been an enlightening discussion, and I’m sure our listeners have gained a lot from it. For those who want to learn more about the USDA Forest Service and their work, visit their website at USDA Forest Service. Don’t forget to subscribe to Forestry and Arboriculture Timber Talk for more episodes featuring experts in the field. Until next time, take care and keep our forests thriving.