WEBVTT

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(Forest noises)

NOTE Paragraph

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In the summer of 2011,

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as a tourist,

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I visited the rainforests of Borneo
for the very first time,

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and as you might imagine,

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it was the overwhelming sounds
of the forest that struck me the most.

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There's this constant cacophony of noise.

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Some things actually do stick out.

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For example, this here is a big bird,
a rhinoceros hornbill.

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This buzzing is a cicada.

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This is a family of gibbons.

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It's actually singing to each other
over a great distance.

NOTE Paragraph

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The place where this was recorded
was in fact a gibbon reserve,

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which is why you can hear so many of them,

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but in fact,

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the most important noise that was coming
out of the forest that time

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was one that I didn't notice,

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and in fact, nobody there
had actually noticed it.

NOTE Paragraph

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So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve.

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They spend most of their time
rehabilitating gibbons,

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but they also have
to spend a lot of their time

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protecting their area from illegal logging
that takes place on the side,

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and so if we take the sound of the forest

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and we actually turn down the gibbons,
the insects, and the rest,

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in the background, the entire time,
in recordings you heard,

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was the sound of a chainsaw
at great distance.

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They had three full time guards
who were posted around this sanctuary

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whose job was in fact
to guard against illegal logging,

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and one day, we went walking,
again as tourists, out into the forest,

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and within five minutes' walk,

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we stumbled upon somebody
who was just sawing a tree down,

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five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters
from the ranger station.

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They hadn't been able
to hear the chainsaws,

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because as you heard,
the forest is very, very loud.

NOTE Paragraph

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It struck me as quite unacceptable,

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right, that in this modern time,

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just a few hundred meters
away from a ranger station,

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in a sanctuary,

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that in fact no one could hear
someone who had a chainsaw fired up.

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I mean, it sounds impossible,

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but in fact, it was quite true.

NOTE Paragraph

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So how do we stop illegal logging?

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It's really tempting, as an engineer,
always to come up with a high-tech,

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super-crazy high-tech solution,

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but in fact, you're in the rainforest.

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It has to be simple,
it has to be scalable,

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and so in fact, what we also noticed
while were there was that

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everything we needed was already there.

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We could build a system
that would allow us to stop this

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using what's already there.

NOTE Paragraph

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Who was there? What was 
already in the forest?

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Well, we had people.

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We had this group there that was 
dedicated, three full-time guards,

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that was dedicated to go and stop it,

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but they just needed to know
what was happening out in the forest.

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The real surprise, this is the big one,

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was that there was connectivity
out in the forest.

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There was cell phone service
way out in the middle of nowhere.

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We're talking hundreds of kilometers
from the nearest road,

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there's certainly no electricity,
but they had very good cell phone service,

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these people in the towns
were on Facebook all the time,

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they're surfing the web on their phones,

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and this sort of got me thinking
that in fact it would be possible

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to use the sounds of the forest,

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pick up the sounds 
of chainsaws programmatically,

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because people can't hear them,

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and send an alert.

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But you have to have a device
to go up in the trees.

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So if we can use some device
to listen to the sounds of the forest,

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connect to the cell phone
network that's there,

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and send an alert to people on the ground,

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perhaps we could have a solution
to this issue for them.

NOTE Paragraph

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But in fact, let's take a moment
to talk about saving the rainforest,

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because it's something that we've
definitely all heard about forever.

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People in my generation
have heard about saving the rainforest

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since we were kids,

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and it seems that the message
has never changed.

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We've got to save the rainforest,
it's super urgent,

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this many football fields
have been destroyed yesterday,

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and yet here we are today,
about half of the rainforest remains,

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and we have potentially more urgent 
problems like climate change.

NOTE Paragraph

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But in fact, this is the little-known fact
that I didn't realize at the time,

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deforestation accounts 
for more greenhouse gas

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than all of the world's planes,
trains, cars, trucks, and ships combined.

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It's the second-highest contributor
to climate change.

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Also, according to Interpol,

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as much as 90 percent of the logging
that takes place in the rainforest

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is illegal logging,

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like the illegal logging that we saw.

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So if we can help people in the forest
enforce the rules that are there,

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then in fact we could eat heavily
into this 17 percent

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and potentially have a major impact
in the short term.

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It might just be the cheapest,
fastest way to fight climate change.

NOTE Paragraph

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And so here's the system that we imagine.

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It looks super high tech.

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The moment a sound of a chainsaw
is heard in the forest,

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the device picks up the sound
of the chainsaw,

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sends an alert through the standard
GSM network that's already there

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to a ranger in the field

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who can in fact show up in real time
and stop the logging.

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It's no more about going out
and finding a tree that's been cut.

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It's not about seeing a tree from
a satellite area that's been clear cut,

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it's about real time intervention.

NOTE Paragraph

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So I said it was the cheapest
and fastest way to do it,

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but in fact, actually, as you saw,
they weren't able to do it,

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so it may not be so cheap and fast.

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But if the devices in the trees
were actually cell phones,

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it could be pretty cheap.

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Cell phones are thrown away
by the hundreds of millions

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every year,

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hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone,

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not counting the rest of the world,
which of course we should do,

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but in fact, cell phones are great.

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They're full of sensors.

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They can listen
to the sounds of the forest.

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We do have to protect them.

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We have to put them in this box
that you see here,

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and we do have to power them.

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Powering them is one of the greater
engineering challenges

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that we had to deal with,

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because powering a cell phone
under a tree canopy,

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any sort of solar power
under a tree canopy,

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was an as-yet-unsolved problem,

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and that's this unique
solar panel design that you see here,

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which in fact is built also from recycled
byproducts of industrial process.

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These are strips that are cut down.

NOTE Paragraph

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So this is me putting it all together

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in my parents' garage, actually.

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Thanks very much to them
for allowing me to do that.

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As you can see,
this is a device up in a tree.

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What you can see from here, perhaps,
is that they are pretty well obscured

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up in the tree canopy at a distance.

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That's important, because although
they are able to hear chainsaw noises

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up to a kilometer in the distance,

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allowing them to cover
about three square kilometers,

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if someone were to take them,
it would make the area unprotected.

NOTE Paragraph

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So does it actually work?

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Well, to test it,
we took it back to Indonesia,

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not the same place, but another place,

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to another gibbon reserve

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that was threatened daily
by illegal logging.

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On the very second day, it picked up
illegal chainsaw noises.

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We were able to get a real time alert.

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I got an email on my phone.

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Actually, we had just climbed the tree.
Everyone had just gotten back down.

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All these guys are smoking cigarettes,

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and then I get an email,
and they all quiet down,

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and in fact you can hear the chainsaw

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really, really faint in the background,

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but no one had noticed it 
until that moment.

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And so then we took off
to actually stop these loggers.

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I was pretty nervous.

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This is the moment where we've actually
arrived close to where the loggers are.

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This is the moment where you can see
where I'm actually regretting, perhaps,

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the entire endeavor.

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I'm not really sure what's on
the other side of this hill.

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That guy's much braver than I am.

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But he went, and I had to go, walking up,

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and in fact, he made it over the hill,

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and interrupted the loggers in the act.

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For them, it was such a surprise

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-- they had never, ever
been interrupted before --

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that it was such an impressive
event for them,

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that we've heard from our partners
they have not been back since.

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They were, in fact, great guys.

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They showed us how
the entire operation works,

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and what they really convinced us
on the spot was that

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if you can show up
in real time and stop people,

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it's enough of a deterrent

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they won't come back.

NOTE Paragraph

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So --

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Thank you. (Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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Word of this spread, possibly
because we told a lot of people,

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and in fact, then some really
amazing stuff started to happen.

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People from around the world
started to send us emails, phone calls.

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What we saw was that people
throughout Asia,

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people throughout Africa,
people throughout South America,

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they told us that they could use it too,

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and what's important, what we'd found

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that we thought might be exceptional,

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in the forest there was
pretty good cell phone service.

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That was not exceptional, we were told,

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and that particularly is on the periphery
of the forests that are most under threat.

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And then something really amazing happened

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which was that people started sending us
there own old cell phones.

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So in fact what we have now is a system

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where we can use people on the ground,
people who are already there,

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who can both improve
and use the existing connectivity,

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and we're using old cell phones
that are being sent to us

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by people from around the world

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that want their phones to be doing
something else in their afterlife,

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so to speak.

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And if the rest of the device
can be completely recycled,

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then we believe it's
an entirely up-cycle device.

NOTE Paragraph

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So again, this didn't come
because of any high-tech solution.

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It just came from using
what's already there,

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and I'm thoroughly convinced
that if it's not phones,

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that there's always
going to be enough there

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that you can build similar solutions

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that can be very effective
in new contexts.

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you very much.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)