From robotic sniffer dogs to urban space stations
November 2007
Kim Thomas
Natalie Jeremijenko’s work defies categorisation. She has an extraordinarily varied background, having studied a range of subjects including neuroscience, biochemistry, engineering and computer science. She is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London and has been a lecturer in Yale’s mechanical engineering department. Currently she is Director of the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, which takes a radically new approach to environmental problems.
So what is the Environmental Health Clinic? Natalie says that the most common approach to tackling global warming is a passive one built around the idea of consuming less: “The whole idea of building a social movement around environmentalism that is based on ‘Drive less, use less paper, turn off your lights’, is Calvinistic and moralistic. It’s a really uninteresting way of approaching it.”
By contrast, the clinic takes an active approach to environmental problems in which individuals are personally responsible for specific interventions. It’s modelled very closely on a health clinic, says Natalie: “The clinic treats environmental issues as they relate to health, and health issues as they relate to the environment. Environmental issues are now global enough to be newsworthy, but they’re not local enough to be actionable, so no-one can claim to address global warming because one’s efforts to do so would be at best marginal and at worst irrelevant.”
People come to the clinic with a local environmental issue that they’re concerned about, and walk away with a prescription to do something about it. Visitors to the clinic are known as ‘impatients’, says Natalie, because “they are people who are too impatient to wait for bureaucratic or legislative change.” Often these are teachers, students or community groups wanting to tackle a particular local problem such as pollution or poor indoor air quality. The ‘impatients’ are expected to collect data about their results and maintain a record of progress, and, in the same way that a patient might be referred on to a specialist, the impatients are often referred on to environmental organisations they can work with.
Some of the activities Natalie prescribes are ones she has developed in her years as an engineer, scientist and environmental activist. One ‘prescription’, called NoPark, is aimed at tackling pollution by optimising the use of roads where there are no-parking zones. Participants remove the asphalt from the gutter and plant greenery, such as mosses, grasses, and flowers, that can absorb carbon dioxide and other carbon waste. No-parking zones are often situated in areas where water collects, and the plants capture the oily run-off from the road before it runs into the river. They also replenish soil moisture that is important to nearby trees, and reduce the number of pools of standing water that attract mosquitoes. As Natalie says, the project turns the no-parking zone into “a micro-engineered landscape that remediates the local environmental conditions”.
Natalie’s ideas are often characterised by playfulness and a sense of fun – quite contrary to the often austere spirit of the environmentalist movement. Another prescription impatients might walk away with is that of releasing ‘feral’ robotic dogs. The US, says Natalie, is full of contaminated brownfield sites: 350 schools are located on or within half a mile of a contaminated site. The robotic dogs are a way of collecting data on this contamination and drawing public attention to it.
In the activity devised by Natalie, participants (usually students or groups of schoolchildren) remove the legs from the commercially available dogs, add wheels, and give them new ‘brains’ and new ‘noses’ that enable them to sniff out toxins. “We do a pack release of feral robotic dogs on the site of contamination, and we invite local politicians and other stakeholders to watch what the dogs do,” says Natalie.
Whenever there has been a release of the robotic dogs, it has been attended by local newspapers and television stations, and the dogs have collected data that can be collated and analysed. Instead of being a specialist scientific activity, the collection of data on contaminants becomes a universally accessible one: “The activity renders it legible to non-scientists who are equally exposed to these contaminants; a 2 year-old and 92 year-old can understand what’s going on.”
Her latest project, launched this month, is the ‘urban space station’, a kind of greenhouse that sits on top of an urban roof. “It takes advantage of the closed system design that has been developed for space stations,” says Natalie. “Space stations have to operate with very few resources; they have to recycle all their resources to survive.”
The urban space station works on the same principle. The plants in the space station use the CO2 produced by the building’s heating and air-conditioning to grow. In turn, they produce oxygen for the building’s inhabitants to breathe. It solves the problem all buildings have, which is that they have to take fresh air from the outside, increasing heating costs. And ‘fresh’ air, of course, is often not fresh at all, but full of pollutants. Natalie is currently eager to find UK schools that will adopt the space stations.
This is just a taste of the many inventive and imaginative projects Natalie has devised: others include solar awnings, robotic geese, and the One Tree project, in which she planted 100 genetically identical trees in different microclimates around the San Francisco Bay area, to pinpoint the impact the environment has on the development of the trees. She is passionate about the need to educate science and engineering students about the social context and impact of their disciplines: one project she gives her students requires them to follow one particular item, such as the American flag, through the manufacturing process, so that they both understand how things are made and learn to think about how to reduce the environmental impact of the process.
It’s impossible to talk to Natalie without feeling inspired and hopeful about the possibilities of environmentalism. Instead of the guilt-inducing message of many environmental activists, Natalie is keen to show that we can all make a difference and we can all be scientists. Some of us can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.