Up only. How DAOs and NFTs Can Expand Personhood For Trees

Transcript

thank you hello my name is James Beck I work at consensus I lead Communications and content we're hiring so if you want to talk to me after feel free but today I'm actually going to talk about something that has kind of nothing to do with consensus but a lot to do with political philosophy economics natural resources and a topic I'm really passionate about which is what you can see here Street trees so the title of the presentation is how can ethereum extend personhood to Natural Resources

so you know I submitted this talk last week and hardly a day goes by without a major international news story covering some sort of man-made or natural disaster and this was last week but um yeah this week we had over a hundred people in Germany die because of flooding there are enormous wildfires right now in California that are kicking up so much smoke and Haze that apparently yesterday in New York City the pollution levels sort of looked like uh you know when I used to live in China at 200 particular matters so it's you know every day we hear these intense stories of Natural Resources

destruction of widespread species loss and really these big problems that seem to call for big Solutions so what do we know what are these big Solutions typically we have elected or or in many cases unelected Representatives that go to the U.N they go to cope27 I believe it is they come up with proposals and they have disagreements and it leads to stalemate so which countries are most responsible who pays more who enforces the emissions reduction goals the enormity of the problem and often lacking a singular solution for a global treaty like the Paris Accord which came

out in 2015 here means that we end up looking outside of these transnational intergovernmental organizations so it may start with aviation industry or the steel industry setting exact targets it might actually happen between two countries like the US and China setting a bilateral agreement even better it could happen at a company level you know various companies in the US are setting CO2 emissions targets and then you even get smaller and smaller and it starts happening at perhaps an organization level or even a free association level but when I think about my own moral imperative to either write about this or even better

yet do something about it it kind of makes me feel powerless these are huge events happening all over the globe and they're often decided at events that many of us have to send a representative or have no say I also don't believe that individuals you know necessarily can impact major things I flew here that uses a lot of carbon I minted this essay as an nft that you know by some estimates uses a lot of carbon but at the same time it you know when you feel powerless I do think there are ways in which we can as individuals use Technologies like ethereum to create you know non-state non-privatized organizations

um so what I'm here to do today in this 20-minute talk I think it is um is convince you that there are ways of creating associations that resemble neither a state or a corporation or you know a private Market and then secondly that natural resources like Street trees or you know in the irrigation canal in New Mexico actually could be persons as in they could be given the rights that humans have and it sounds a little bit far off but bear with me I'll get to it um and so I'll tell you a little bit about my own story of actually understanding a

street tree map in New York City and they're they're one of the greatest common pool resources in my opinion and also how we can use ethereum not just as like a crowdfunding financial coordination mechanism but as a way of conferring rights to non-humans and natural resources so common pool resources um it's kind of cool that you hear this term thrown around a lot in ethereum because we talk about even funding open source protocols as you know a common pool resource what is a common pool resource it's something that no one owns but everyone benefits from and so Street trees are an amazing example but if you're using you know very clinical boring language of economics

you know Common pool resources refer to a core resource which provides a limited supply of extractable units and so this you know this is economics which means it's all about how humans can extract a resource and use it for their own life which you know you have to eat you have to cut down a tree to make a you know to make a house so there are reasons why common pool resources are the most regulated things on this planet um but the other thing about common pool resources is that this is a chart I made to sort of understand why a street tree is a common pool resource but something like a tree in a public park that's actually a

public good and then private trees or private goods and then something like a private park where people come together and Associate and pay dues that's called a toll good and yeah so you see these two things level of subtractability and difficulty of exclusion just very like simply the reason why Street trees are common pool resources is because they have both a high level of subtractability and the high difficulty of exclusion so put more simply that means you can't exclude anyone from benefiting from a street tree it provides shade it you know leads to less water runoff and erosion and it also you know sucks carbon from the air and pollution

however they're more likely to be ex you know extracted and what I mean by that is it's pretty easy for you know people to not care about trees throw trash in the tree bread have a dog pee on its bark or even you know someone's building a new apartment and they can just cut down the tree and replace it with something younger so that makes them both you know a good example of common pool resources you know maybe Street trees aren't your things so other examples are a feel for grazing sheep a river that everyone uses for irrigating crops there are a lot of examples of common pool resources I think actually Kevin owaki was giving a talk and he would argue that open source

funding is a common pool resource um and you know when we talk about common pool resources we we hear this phrase which I think is actually a bit harmful but tragedy the commons so it was first came up like 200 years ago this guy named uh he was a British Economist William Forster Lloyd but more about a hundred years later it was more popularized by Garrett Hardin and he wrote a book about tragedy the commons that came out in 1968 the idea is that when humans act in their own self-interest they become uncoordinated and when humans are uncoordinated you have the depletion of Natural Resources which affects all of

us so I actually think that his thinking was highly influenced by Thomas Hobbes the idea that everyone there's you know all humans and he uses the word man all men are self-interested and only act in competition with each other and because of that you need something called the Leviathan which in modern text is like a government or a supranational organization something that can sort of hold together humans and make sure that we're not uncoordinated but I think these actually end up being both Concepts and they reduce the way we think about human coordination so there's other ones like prisoners

dilemma there's more positive ones like the logic of collective action you hear them a lot in political science but one of my favorite thinkers who has both been almost attributed with the term tragedy to the commons but actually critiqued it is Eleanor Ostrom so she wrote governing The Commons in 1990 she ended up winning the Nobel prize in economics the first woman to do so by 2009 and she passed away in 2012 and so one of my professors in undergrad was her student and worked on a lot of manuscripts together and when I was finishing my thesis it was really poor timing because she passed away that same

day so it sort of I reread her book often and I'm really happy to see that you know people in crypto are starting to read governing the comments because I think there's incredible models and ideas that actually relate to a lot of things outside of Natural Resources but you know one of the things that I thought was interesting about this book is that we often think there's these two sides there's either a public you know Leviathan or a public government or private you know winner take all laissez-faire capitalism she actually came up with this idea that both of those sides have been successful moderately and very unsuccessful in

governing common pool resources and she uses a bunch of examples and different game theory techniques to show that actually self-governing institutions which are a combination of public and private are you know have a longer history of successfully managing common pool resources and especially natural resources and she says that actually like neither the state nor the market is uniformly successful in enabling individuals to sustain long-term productive use of natural resource systems and she actually you know sought out to prove it so it's pretty hard to read but this is one of her game theories where she uses an example of a common pool of

resource as in a sheep's field where you have different sheep herders they all need to use the field and they have either two options they can have a centralized government decide who gets which resource and you know uses the field at what time and pays what amount for use of the field or you end up having a free market laissez-faire capitalist system in which all the sheep herders essentially can do whatever they want on the field and you know even kill each other if they want or come into non-cooperation which is one of her terms here and uh and so in both instances you know for the government or the centralized entity to manage the um the sheep field

it ends up costing sheep herders more and they were a little bit less effective because they were trying to govern from the outside in the instance of you know the private free market capitalism you ended up having them depleting and harming the grazing field or depleting the common pool resource to the point where no one benefited because then they were all you know every single sheep herder was struggling so what she did was she came up with this new idea and this is just like the very basic model of it where individuals come up with what she calls these Cooperative strategies but really what they do is they come into agreement in these self-enforced contracts and she uses the term self-enforced contracts and so in this case you can imagine if

someone decides to agree with you know herder one and hurt or to agree they'll come into a binding contract all right I'll let you use the field at this point you use the field at that point and they you know rotate and it's all consent based meaning if they decide they don't like the contract they can get out of the contract and it also relies on third-party arbitrators to make sure that people are you know in holding up their end in the bargain this is very theoretical and it's game theory and you know she proves it with math that is a little bit beyond me but the examples she uses in her book governing comments are actually more interesting so all sort all around the world common pool resources like irrigation systems

um there's irrigation systems in Spain and Nepal that have actually modeled these you know Collective self-governing contract agreements where they're not relying on a nation-state nor are they relying on private privatization of resources and so there's examples of like Mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan there are Fisheries in both the United States and Maine but also in Indonesia that have been using these types of arrangements for a long time but you know I'm reading this book this book is now 30 years old and I keep thinking to myself we're still talking about common pool resources in a very economic lens it's about extraction and

it's about using something for human benefit and so there's this growing Trend that's actually you know people call it environmental personhood but the whole idea is how do you confer rights to non-human entities um and it sounds a little bit wild but there's actually indigenous communities around the world that already do this they recognize nature with personhood they don't think of nature as commodity over which property rights should be exercised which is an important thing and it also interesting flips agency meaning the question of governance over a common pool resource isn't necessarily how can we save forests it's how can we give the

agency for forests to save themselves here's actually this is you know this is one of the first examples but I think earlier in Ecuador in 2016 they granted a framework for giving personhood to all sorts of Natural Resources but I think this one is interesting so this is the biggest mountain in New Zealand Mount taranaki um correct me if I'm saying that wrong but the Maori tribe is essentially reveres it and it now has the legal personhood as a human would so what it means according to the treaty is that you know if someone abuses or harms the mountain it has the same legal rights as

harming the entire Maori tribe so far it hasn't come into any disputes but it's a powerful example and what it started doing was giving inspiration to other countries around the world to do the same so you know in 2019 Bangladesh gave every single one of its rivers the same legal rights as a person it's basically a sign this National River commission to do the suing on behalf of indiv or on behalf of the entity and the you know the way that they would sue is that you've actually harmed a living entity because right now you know suing on behalf of a natural resource is kind of like suing on behalf of property damage not damage to human

life and then in the same year also in 2019 a small city in Ohio called Toledo decided let's create this big lake which borders the United States and Canada let's give it legal status as an entity and it lasted for all of like six months or a year by 2020 the courts overturned it and they overturned it for a few reasons for one a farmer sued the new law saying that he has no way of guaranteeing that the fertilizer and chemicals he uses in his crops won't end up in the river or in the you know Watershed which ends up in the lake so there's no way for him to guarantee that he could actually not

pollute the river there was also a bit of like legal power struggle the state of Ohio said citizens of Toledo this small City actually don't have rights to decide environmental um management that's up for the state and the federal government to do so and really though when you think about this both cases previous rivers in Bangladesh and also this mountain it still comes down to a similar problem that Eleanor Ostrom was describing you have you know a living a natural resource with personhood and with legal rights but who enforces it you still have to have a human suing on behalf of

a natural resource that's pretty unsustainable um and in the case of Bangladesh their rivers are at the very end of a huge series of rivers throughout Asia starting in the Tibetan plateau in China winding through India if their rivers are polluted are they going to sue India are they going to sue China it's sort of symbolic but doesn't really have a lot of legal teeth and then the third problem is it's very expensive uh to you know go against large corporations and continually using you know trade litigation Finance to raise money to do these long protracted legal battles so what would Ostrom say you know we still think about

enforcement like I said as something that a third party does against you know two people that are harmed or a natural resource that's harmed but using her idea of this self-enforcement contract game and then given that she was writing that book in 1990 she had no idea I mean the world hadn't come up with the idea of decentralized permission ledgers like ethereum or South self-executing smart contracts oracle's monitoring natural resources or even decentralized autonomous organizations what would she think about that in regards to her self-enforcing contract game and finally what ways in which you know when we think about representing a

natural resource as a person what are the different ways in which you could do so on ethereum whether through a contract or an address so I'm going back to my idea that all of these you know intense weather events and climate change stories make me feel pretty powerless so what I end up doing is thinking what's something that's very much a part of my everyday life that matters so I love this New York City street tree map um and I thought let me start local what about how do you assign rights to a street tree in New York City I don't know if any of you are you know big fans but I I was talking to someone

earlier today and apparently Paris is going to start increasing the number of Street trees and the reason why is that their benefits are numerous they lower the temperature by you know 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average in the summertime they directly sequester carbon and pollution they also have like really deep root systems so you think about the London plains that skirt the sen River those root systems help prevent erosion but also when you have an intense thunderstorm they you know help with storm water runoff and finally they even do things like increased property value of houses around it so you know Street trees the benefits are numerous

when you know you think about New York City where I live we have literally enormous amounts of pollution coming in from the fires happening in California in the west it's going to be the 700 000 Street trees that are the things directly sequestering all that Ash pollution and subsequent carbon it's also going to be those tree trees that hopefully mitigate the damages from the next downpour that causes a flood and floods our subway system so one day I was walking um I was walking home and I was looking at a tree and you know I like like going on walks but I don't consider myself an expert of trees and saw that you know it was like looks like an oak but I wanted to know specifically

what type of Oak so I was researching and found this open source map that the New York City Parks Department keeps it's called the New York City street tree map you can go on that website every you know there have been two different tree censuses and volunteers walk around and they basically have you know measured the distance between trees they measure its diameter at breast height to give a general sense of its age and they also use geographic information systems GIS data to do like map overlays and figure out the canopy cover so that's how you can sort of determine how much carbon sequestering and pollution that it's picking up

and it's incredible they actually found there's like every tree has an ID now there's 689 000 trees and there's 234 species which is incredible like who would have thought New York City has such Rich biological life and what it ended up doing though was I I started zooming into these various trees and eat you know you can go down to this level of Street and each dot represents the age and the size of the tree and the colors represent species and if you click on one of the trees you can see like okay here I live on Gates Avenue what is this tree in front of me um uh yeah it'll tell you it'll give the ID number the trunk and diameter the

closest address there's a Google map image of it but what it also does is it comes up with ecological benefits so this is the collective benefits of all 689 000 trees but you know here's what we're talking about energy conserved from you know the cost of not having to heat your apartment as or cool your apartment as much because of the trees carbon dioxide reduced air pollutants all of this the New York City Parks Department estimates that all of these annual benefits of Street trees is about 102 million dollars but this is just well I'll tell you but it sort of made me sad to realize there's actually nothing that they're doing with this data it's just sort of

data for data's sake for tree Fanatics and there's actually no you know they're not using this to enforce anything um yeah so if I mean if you're curious a little bit about how they came up with that value I dug into the data a little bit but there's you know a U.S it's like a foundation that creates this tool called itree and it uses a number of different like geographic information systems overlay maps to determine like canopy cover and it's pretty complex but it's at the end of the day it's an estimate and it's a formula that they use to determine it

but the formula is still pretty interesting and you can see that a very small young ginkgo tree that has a diameter of about five inches is going to end up being about they'll probably estimate around 30 of value to the city each year whereas an enormous 200 year old tree like the ones we see out here in Paris along the sun those are probably closer to 800 to a thousand dollars of benefits and so you can kind of see if you're cutting down a or if you're you know building a new apartment and you need to cut down a tree to access electrical lines and you replace it with a small tree you're actually reducing the amount of ecological benefit or of value to the city from the ecological benefits of

trees so um this is my slides from last week so I'm actually going to get into this idea um so all of this value makes me think oh my God it's it's unused there's ways that this people should be leveraging this as collateral as a way of enforcing certain behaviors in the city around Street trees and so there's this thing in conservation called payments for economic services p p e s for short and it's actually there's a researcher at Oxford this guy named Daniel oberhauser who actually used ethereum for a PES payment scheme um and so I found this study and he's

using it with like a bunch of navibian community groups that work on conservation and he used ethereum to come up with this thing called Wildlife credits um and it's a payment scheme that some conservancies are testing out but essentially what it does is it does direct payments to either a group or an individual for certain actions in this case it's for you know people if they spot wildlife in this certain Corridor and are you know maintaining the habitat in these migration corridors they get automatic payments so you go onto the site you say look I just saw a herd of elephants pass through this morning even though they ate my watermelon patch and I want to kill them I didn't pay me

and so PES is kind of an interesting new model for conservation and the fact that this guy at Oxford is using ethereum directly means that people are already seeing kind of the power of self-executing contracts but also micropayments and not having to manage it with all the paperwork and overhead that you would normally imagine any sort of payment scheme and so it had me thinking look what if each Street Tree in New York City according to that map was associated with the token you can imagine uh Ginkgo with a 15 inch trunk diameter something that's probably like 100 years old is worth 310 dollars annually as the tree ages the value of the tree increases as more care is given

so using the PES model of conversion payments would be issued to people living next to the tree based on its current value you could also associate the tree to issue value to people living next to it based on its current value what I mean is you could set up a PES mechanism in which trees themselves are issuing value based on how they increase in value over time it's pretty simple a tree doesn't need much mostly they get water from you know rain you do need to pick up trash because those leech into the soil and you will start noticing trees that are treated well grow in about five years much more than a tree that has an impacted root

bed or has a lot of trash and people not picking up after their dogs so you can imagine there's like five to ten year incentivization plans in which the value of the tree ends up paying out more to a neighborhood that's taking care of the tree Bend foreign and then um you know I I was thinking more about like well this sounds like a lot of work and it still has a there's no trustless aspect to it you still rely on a human to report directly and you're relying on this map which the street tree map gets updated I think annually but still it you know not not as detailed as a way that you might want an oracle to look for that data um yeah so I ended up coming across this

really cool I guess it's like a technological Art Association I haven't met anyone but maybe there's someone from Terra zero here at this conference they came up with uh well they've come up with a lot of different white papers and ideas around conferring rights to as they put it non-living entities and they you know in one of their artist statements on the website say they're using ethereum and Dao's to quote create technologically augmented ecosystems that are more resilient and able to act within a predetermined set of rules in the economic spheres as agents in their own right so it's quite related to what I'm talking about but what was very cool was this so this is

um this came out in 2018 it's at um it's at a art gallery it's called the shingle Pavilion it's in Berlin and essentially it's a bonsai tree and so the bonsai tree which is in the Latin name a premna microfila so it's called pren Uh typo my bad but it's pramna Damon that's that's the name of the project but also you know the idea and what this does is there's a web interface where using sensors on the bonsai tree itself the sensors determine whether or not the water or you know the bonsai tree is running out of water it's determining because this is indoors whether or not the light has enough

electricity so you have to pay to keep the light on essentially or if it has too much light in which you'd want to turn the light off and finally because it's a bonsai tree and bonsai trees love you know their root their leaves and branches getting trimmed it says like okay there's one more trimming left um but you know you can add trimmings and have so essentially it's uh it's this tree with agency because of the sensors but it has human operators and the ways in which the tree indicates when the human operators get involved is someone using this web interface connects their metamask wallet and sends eth to do a certain action whether

that's continue the camera server on the tree or even just you know pay for the electricity or pay for water it's pretty far out but I thought it was an awesome idea of you know non-human agency actually tested out and if you think about it for New York City street trees this is completely unrealistic you couldn't attach sensors and data to all 689 000 trees um so you kind of have to rely on incomplete imperfect information like the map itself which already includes GIS data and has Associated values already with it

um but again like when you talk about this large movement of conferring rights and personhood to Natural Resources you realize that the primary lack and limitation right now is the inability to Levy damages without a human being the conduit it also means that it's harder to incentivize preservation or enforce regulation you still have humans suing on the behalf of these natural resources you still rely on the courts or governments as mediators and you need to find all of this financial capital for litigation which itself is a finite resource so I guess this is a call I have I've minted this as an essay on

mirror you can donate to the essay or or you know get it collected as an nft I don't know why anyone would want to do that except for the fact that mirror has these cool things called split contracts where I've decided to split some of the money to the Terra zero art project and organization they came up with that awesome Bonsai project and I want them to come up with more and more of these ideas but then seventy percent of the money is actually going to go to uh Japanese elkova in Brooklyn id4677977 meaning you're you know sending money to a tree itself and what is that money going to do it's going to pay for mulch it's going to pay for watering it's going to pay for uh upkeep

but this is just the start this is really experimental and I think even some of the tech to do this on ethereum is still quite Limited in experimental and expensive it cost me about forty dollars to just mint these uh mint the nft in the splits contract but I do think with tools like mirror you have the ability to quickly spin up a dow issue you know a crowd fund and then you know give everyone who donates to the crowdfund associated tokens and I would love to talk to anyone who has an interest in submitting a tree that's very dear to them meaning a street tree that is where they live into that they can attach it to an address which is part of this uh you

know crowd fund everyone will get Associated uh Street tree tokens but yeah it's it's something that's being built um I want to thank you uh so much for your time you can so yeah the essay is at jamesbeck.mira.xyz you can follow me on Twitter or email me if you want to talk more about it and you know I also want to thank the organizers at etcc I was here in March 2020 it was it's always one of my favorite conferences and really high quality talks but it's tough to have anything during covet and I think they've done an incredible job so thanks to all the all the people here and also the community this community is great

so if I think I'm out of time but if anyone has questions you can probably just reach me after