Keep wildlife alive in faux, real realms
When Apple unveiled its Vision Pro headset last year, it was the $3 trillion company’s first foray into spatial computing — a new world of mixed reality, where the user’s physical surroundings are superimposed with interactive screens while also being a screen.
Of the first batch of applications available to Vision Pro users, one caught my attention. “Encounter Dinosaurs” immerses users in a neo-Jurassic landscape that “lets you come face-to-face” with prehistoric creatures. Moving around in your physical surroundings, you may find yourself followed by the curious gaze of a rajasaurus.
That the app provides a wonderous experience is no doubt. But as a conservationist, I worry this technology may also be a portal into our future — one when the creatures we currently coinhabit this planet with are reduced to a collection of interactive pixels in headsets. It’s not such a far-fetched idea.
We are losing vertebrates faster than in any other epoch in history. Meanwhile, as our natural world shrinks, our appetite for consumerism grows. Vision Pro headsets, for example, are available for two-day shipping to virtually any corner of the country. Analysts expect sales of around 400,000 Vision Pro headsets in 2024 to produce for Apple “relatively immaterial” revenue of $1.4 billion.
That depiction, too, is tough for me to swallow. A comprehensive study I coauthored in 2018 estimated a nearly identical amount of money is required annually to safeguard Africa’s wildlife adequately. Our research determined that an infusion of at least $1.2 billion (adjusted for inflation, about $1.47 billion) would result in sufficient staffing and conservation of 90% of Africa’s nearly 300 protected areas — for a whole year.
Allocating these hard numbers to nature has been a longstanding puzzle for conservationists. Wild landscapes are of immeasurable value to humanity. Whether it is the carbon storage of the African savannah or water filtration of the Sierra Nevada, what the ecosystem provides is inherently priceless. The fundamental challenge facing conservationists is that this value has not yet been harnessed by traditional financial markets, meaning that decisions are routinely taken, the world over, to convert natural habitats into degraded lands, resulting in the catastrophic loss of biodiversity — and often for the most modest of returns.
It’s short-term gain for long-term pain. The physical components of an ecosystem are, like any piece of complex technology hardware, interconnected and indispensable. But the African savannah isn’t composed of micro-OLED displays or M2 chips, making line-item cost calculations uniquely difficult. Instead, for our study, my co-authors and I used the lion as the critical component of our calculations. The African lion is an umbrella species that, as its ecosystems’ apex predator, serves as an effective proxy for the overall health of Africa’s expansive protected areas. Lion numbers are dwindling.
Through our conversations with park officials and conservationists and an audit of government and donor funding, our financial models found that the current amount of capital allocated to the protected areas in our study (spanning 23 countries throughout Africa) — around $381 million — fell far short of what was required. Such a shortfall means that protection for lions and the vast flora and fauna in the African landscape are perilously underfunded, and their populations are at risk of continued deterioration. The ramifications extend far beyond nature alone; already struggling, wildlife tourism-dependent communities and state economies bear the brunt of this funding shortfall.
This situation presents a stark, mixed reality of a different kind, one in which $1.4 billion — described as “immaterial” to a single company’s revenue projections — could literally alter the trajectory of not just a single species or ecosystem, but of an entire continent.
It’s a juxtaposition that may seem dystopian but also offers a reason for hope. The requisite funding to protect African wildlife is — almost unconscionably — within reach. As things stand, less than 2% of charitable donations are allocated toward so-called “environmental causes” — a catchall category that includes conservation and climate-related organizations. Americans give about half a trillion dollars to charitable causes each year. If just 0.3% of that total were earmarked for Africa’s protected areas, they could support three to four times more wild lions than the current continental population. That has the potential to secure the ecosystems that lions encompass, allowing for conservation gains for many other species and boosting African livelihoods, communities and economies.
Financially and ecologically speaking, it would be a high return on investment.
Apple’s Vision Pro certainly isn’t the enemy of wildlife conservation, and African communities aren’t imploring Americans to exchange their computing devices for charitable donations. Our foil is the seeming apathy of Western donors — and we can’t allow spatial computing to perpetuate ignorance of the problem via blind escapism.
That said, the optimist in me believes this technology — like so many others — can be harnessed for good. Modern innovations are helping governments and communities monitor wildlife populations, track their movement, and through Generative AI, perhaps even one day, communicate with them. I hope that spatial computing will one day serve as an invaluable platform in which fieldbased conservationists can showcase the raw emotion and breathtaking splendor of a lion in its natural habitat to a captive audience of at-home conservationists around the globe.
But the endgame can’t be entertainment alone. Adequately addressing the wildlife conservation crisis demands a greater paradigm shift. Humanity must refocus our collective vision on preserving the precious reality we have left. That means funding it accordingly.