Regulating robotaxis

Climate change and

the digital divide
No entry: The immigration
app and the border crisis
Volume 126 July/August
Number 4 2023

All
Access
Making technology work for everyone
 A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The Green
Future
Index 2023
The Green Future Index 2023 is the third edition KEY
of the comparative ranking of 76 nations and
territories on their ability to develop a sustainable, Green leaders
low-carbon future. It measures the degree to The greening middle
which economies are pivoting toward clean energy, Climate laggards
industry, agriculture, and society through investment Climate abstainers
in renewables, innovation, and green policy.
Countries that have gone up
The index ranks the “green” performance of in the ranking since last year
countries and territories across five pillars: Countries that have retained
the same ranking as last year
• Carbon emissions • Clean innovation
Countries that have gone down
• Energy transition • Climate policy in the ranking since last year
• Green society

Overall top 10
Rank Rank Rank Rank
2023 2022 Territory Score/10 2023 2022 Territory Score/10
Q Iceland’s government is working to
streamline the construction of wind farms
1 1 Iceland ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.69 6 3 Netherlands ................. 6.22 and will put forth new legislation to that
effect in 2023.
2 6 Finland ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.68 7 4 United Kingdom .......... 6.12 Q Luxembourg is the only country with
significant movement toward the Green
3 5 Norway...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.37 8 10 South Korea ................. 6.00 Leaders: it showed considerable state
resolve in decarbonizing its economy.
4 2 Denmark ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.34 9 7 France .......................... 5.99
Q South Korea’s 2022 carbon neutrality spend-
ing nearly doubled to W12t (U.S. $9.2b), and
5 9 Sweden ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.33 10 13 Spain ............................ 5.92
it adopted the Carbon Neutrality Act.

Scan the QR code to experience the interactive index, view the data,
and download the full report or visit technologyreview.com/gfi
 A DV E R T I S E M E N T

OVER ALL R ANKINGS

While the index ranks 76 countries, this map only features a selection of the overall data.

Green society top 10

Rank Rank Rank Rank
2023 2022 Territory Score/10 2023 2022 Territory Score/10
Q Ireland’s score reflects its world-leading
progress in reforestation.
1 3 Ireland ....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.64 6 5 United States ............... 6.81
Q Three Asian economies—South Korea,
Singapore, and Taiwan—have strong
2 1 South Korea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.37 7 7 Taiwan .......................... 6.80 government resolve to define sustainability
targets and coordinate outcomes with
3 4 Germany ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.14 8 9 Czech Republic ........... 6.79 civil society.

Q EU members collectively benefit from its

4 2 Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.06 9 12 Sweden ........................ 6.76
policy resolutions to speed up low-carbon
societal and economic activities.
5 11 Denmark ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.82 10 6 Iceland ......................... 6.74

The Green Future Index 2023 was produced in association with

Premier partner Gold partner Silver partner Interested in partnering with us? Contact:
insights@technologyreview.com
02
“Imagining that
technology alone
can liberate us is
a bit shortsighted
and, in some ways,
disabling.”
–p. 42
Front
THE DOWNLOAD
7 Giving all countries a say on
solar geoengineering; blimps
make a comeback; lawyers in
the metaverse; creating com-
ics for the visually impaired;
an app for immigrant victims
of wage theft; forest bathing,
digital-style; what to do about
robotaxis.
EXPLAINED
20 How can heat pumps combat
climate change?
We’re entering the era
of the heat pump. Here’s
a guide to how they work.
By Casey Crownhart
PROFILE
22 Mapping to save the world
Molly Burhans is using GIS
tools to map the Catholic
Church’s global landholdings–
and fight climate change.
By Whitney Bauck
Contents
The accessibility issue Back
26 Introduction: The future is disabled 70 An unnatural world
We need to take steps toward a more inclusive Three books that grapple
with the role of humans in
future—one that we all can inhabit.
restoring natural ecosystems.
BY ASHLEY SHEW , GUEST EDITOR
By Matthew Ponsford
28 Getting in touch with images 76 Lithography’s long journey
The technologies that pro-
At the New York Public Library, blind educator
duce today’s chips are among
Chancey Fleet is working to make images accessible humankind’s most complex
to everyone. BY CHANCEY FLEET inventions. By Chris Miller
36 Connecting climate change FIELD NOTES
and the digital divide 84 The forgotten history
of highway photologs
Monica Sanders has spent her career advocating for
Decades before Google
more equitable disaster policies. She believes broad- Street View, state government
band access needs to be a part of that conversation. vans were photographing
BY COLLEEN HAGERTY each mile of roadway.
By Jon Keegan
42 Still finding their voice PUZZLE
For decades, assistive communication devices were
88 AI did not make this
available only to a small fraction of non-speaking crossword
people. The iPad should have revolutionized access. By John-Clark Levin
What happened? BY JULIE KIM
50 The border lottery
COVER: MELINDA PODOR/GETTY IMAGES
An app was meant to streamline immigration at the
border. It may be making things worse. BY LORENA RÍOS
62 Sonifying the sky
Astronomers and other scientists are exploring
ways to make data more accessible through sound.
BY COREY S . POWELL
 We made 3 organizations, 3 cultures, 3 ERP systems
and 3000 applications work in unison.

www.technologyreview.com/thecloudhub
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 07

Picture two theoretical futures: one in which nations coun-

teract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the

The stratosphere, and another where the world continues heating up.
There are big differences between the two, but a lot of smaller,
more subtle changes too. 

Download
Take malaria, for example—the sixth-largest killer in low-
income countries.  
By 2070, the overall risk of malaria transmission ends up
roughly the same in the two worlds. But in the hypothetical
geoengineered version of Earth, the threat of the disease has
shifted on the map. In that scenario, millions fewer people in
East Africa live in danger of a potentially deadly mosquito bite.
Solar geoengineering But across West Africa, 100 million more do. 
Those findings, published in Nature last year, underscored
could alter the entire the complex trade-offs that could accompany any decisions
about solar geoengineering, the highly controversial notion of
planet. These groups trying to curb global warming by reflecting more sunlight back
into space. And they raise incredibly difficult questions about
want every nation to who should get to determine how or whether the world ever
uses tools that alter the entire climate system, in ways that may
have a say.  benefit many but also create new dangers for some.
“It’s not really eradicating the risk—it’s redistributing the
risk from one place to another,” says Mohammed Mofizur
Nonprofits and academic groups are Rahman, a scientist focused on climate change and health at the
working to help climate-vulnerable regions Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was part of
take part in the high-stakes global debate an international team of researchers that used computer mod-
over a risky approach to climate change. els to explore these future worlds. The research project, based
at Bangladesh’s International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease
By James Temple

At a Degrees Initiative
workshop, Babatunde
Abiodun, a professor
at the University of
Cape Town, presents
research exploring the
potential impact of solar
geoengineering on African
river basins.
COURTESY OF DEGREES INITIATIVE
08 The Download
Is solar geoengineering okay to use if it helps most
countries but has calamitous effects in some?
Research, was funded by the Degrees
Initiative, a 13-year-old UK-based non-
profit whose mission is to help people in
the poorer, hotter countries that face the
highest climate risks participate directly
in the global discussion over solar geo-
engineering and study the effects it could
have on their regions.
“If it works well to reduce risks, then
they have got the most to gain,” says
Andy Parker, chief executive officer of
the Degrees Initiative. “If it goes wrong
or is rejected prematurely, they’ve got the
most to lose.”
The organization, which announced
in February that it would fund 15 more
research projects, is the most high-profile
part of a growing effort to ensure that peo-
ple in low-income nations have more of
a voice in the dialogue over solar geoen-
gineering. But critics of geoengineering
research argue that whatever the stated
goals, such efforts validate the development
and eventual use of a climate intervention
that they insist is too risky to even consider.  What is clear is that to date, this con-
“It’s become more and more legiti-
mized as a potential option in the future,
and building knowledge networks around
this topic is expanding that lobbying effort
as far as I can tell,” says Jennie Stephens,
a professor of sustainability science and
policy at Northeastern University.
A moral obligation
Climate change will exact the steepest
toll on the hottest and poorest parts of
the world, because higher temperatures
in those areas threaten to push conditions
beyond what’s sustainable for crops or safe
for humans and animals. These regions
also often lack the resources to counteract
the dangers of extreme heat waves, rising
ocean levels, droughts, flooding, and more
through climate adaptation measures like
desalination plants, seawalls, or even air
conditioners.
Numerous modeling studies suggest
that geoengineering techniques such as
spraying particles into the stratosphere or
brightening coastal clouds could reduce
global temperatures.  The organization that would become the
But planetary averages say little about
the complex, contradictory, overlapping,
and sometimes unpredictable ways in
which regional climate conditions interact
with ecosystems, economies, infrastruc-
ture, emergency response systems, and
more. Some studies have highlighted the
potential for negative side effects, includ-
ing sharp decreases in monsoon rainfall in
certain areas, which could have life-and-
death implications for food production.
These tensions raise a host of thorny
questions: What’s the right average global
temperature? Is solar geoengineering okay
to use if it helps most countries but has
calamitous effects in some? What body
gets to say whether it’s okay to pull the
trigger on a technology that could alter
the entire climate? What constitutes an
acceptable global consensus on a ques-
tion of such profound weight?
versation and the research that informs
it have been dominated by voices and
scientists in well-to-do nations.  tions in South Africa, Andean glaciers
That isn’t to say that emerging econ-
omies have been passive actors, waiting
around for workshop invitations or fund-
ing from nonprofits based in the Western
world. Researchers in China have been the
fourth-most-prolific producers of papers
on solar geoengineering since 2009, and
scientists in India have generated dozens
as well, according to an analysis by Jinnah.
But about 80% of the research over
that time has been done by scientists in
high-income nations, primarily in the US
and Europe. That concentration creates
real concerns over whether the field is
probing the most relevant and pressing
The developing world can’t be easily lumped together
as a prospective winner or loser from solar
geoengineering.
questions for the regions with the most
at stake, and whether the collective find-
ings will be perceived as representative
and legitimate. 
Degrees
Degrees Initiative was founded in 2010 as
a partnership between the Environmental
Defense Fund, the Royal Society, and the
World Academy of Sciences. It was orig-
inally conceived as a one-year project to
draft a report on how solar geoengineer-
ing research should be governed, but the
mission then evolved into helping bring
climate-vulnerable nations into that con-
versation. Degrees began partnering with
local organizations to host workshops in
countries including India, China, Pakistan,
and Ethiopia in the hope of sharing knowl-
edge and establishing relationships.
In 2018, the group launched the
Degrees Modeling Fund (originally the
Decimals Fund) to help support research
by scientists in these vulnerable nations.
The fund has now awarded nearly $2 mil-
lion in grants to researchers in 21 develop-
ing nations who are exploring these sorts
of issues. Among other projects, research-
ers are studying the potential impact of
solar geoengineering on drought condi-
in Chile, and summer monsoon rainfall
in India. 
The organization, which has a staff of
eight, provides grants of up to $75,000,
and teams up researchers in low-income
nations with established experts in these
topics. All the projects rely on data from
existing climate and geoengineering
models to explore questions of regional
interest. The organization does not fund
outdoor solar geoengineering experiments.
Rahman of the Potsdam Institute isn’t
in favor of using solar geoengineering.
But he says it’s crucial for researchers in
developing countries to study the issue

themselves and explore questions that
could have huge local implications but
might not occur to scientists in the US or
EU. He notes that the malaria study, which
involved researchers from Georgetown,
Rutgers, the University of Cape Town, and
other institutions, underscored the point
that the developing world can’t be easily
lumped together as a prospective winner
or loser from solar geoengineering.
“There are trade-offs,” Rahman says.
Countries need to know what they are and
“who will sacrifice.”
Understanding benefits
and risks
Northeastern’s Stephens argues that
organizations shouldn’t support or fund
research at all. She believes such efforts
are inherently pro-geoengineering and
create a slippery slope. “This is a really
dangerous technology that I don’t think
we should be perpetuating and expand-
ing funding and research in,” she says.
“The more you fund something and do
research on it, the more likely it is that it
will be used.”
Parker strongly disagrees with what
he calls the “daft, spurious idea” that sup-
porting research will inevitably lead to
using solar geoengineering. He notes that
a variety of studies on other proposals to
counteract climate change have had the
opposite effect: interest in ideas like fer-
tilizing carbon-sucking phytoplankton and
making deserts or other surfaces more
reflective waned after research showed
they could be less effective or more dan-
gerous than hoped.  fictional explorations. We may not get an invisibility
“If climate scientists in West Africa
want to understand what this might mean
for their region, then facilitating them is a
good thing,” he says. “I don’t think it will
lead to nations in West Africa wanting to
do solar geoengineering; I think it will
allow them to understand and argue for
COURTESY OF THE PUBLISHERS
their interests when it comes to questions
of whether we want to use it or not.” Q
James Temple is MIT Technology Review’s
senior editor for energy. To read his full
story, visit www.technologyreview.com.
The Download 09
Book reviews
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should
We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought
This Through?
By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press, 2023)
Since society’s problems often feel intractable, it’s
understandable that starting life anew somewhere
far, far away sounds appealing. But that fantasy is so
much further from realization than we think, argues
this wife-and-husband team persuasively, pointing
out that as yet “literally no one has been to space for
longer than 437 days in a row.”
The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and
Forgotten Promise of the Phage
By Tom Ireland (Norton, 2023)
Phages are our invisible allies, writes science journal-
ist Tom Ireland. These teeny viruses infect bacteria,
and they are the most abundant biological entities on
the planet. Phage therapies that kill disease-causing
bacteria have been largely abandoned since they were
discovered over 100 years—but they could help us
defeat antibiotic-resistant bugs.
Invisibility: The History and Science of How
Not to Be Seen
By Gregory J. Gbur (Yale University Press, 2023)
Invisibility was a trope in fiction long before scientists
started to toy with the possibility. Gbur, a physicist
and professor at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte, weaves the story of our evolving under-
standing of light and materials with some of those
cloak soon, but there are other applications in sight.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the
Future of Our Planet
By Ben Goldfarb (Norton, 2023)
“We treat the attrition of lives on the road like the
attrition of lives in war,” lamented the writer Barry
Lopez. In his investigation of how humans have
wreaked havoc on the natural world, conservation
journalist Goldfarb asks why we continue to do so—
and how we might chart a different path. Q
10 The Download

The big blimp boom

Lighter-than-air vehicles aim to deliver
more sustainable transport.
By Rebecca Heilweil

Floating is the new flying, at least according to a handful of

companies focused on building futuristic blimps, airships, and
hot-air balloons. 
Lighter-than-air vehicles (or LTAs) depend on the same
basic physics that creates bubbles in water. They’re filled with
extremely light gas, like helium, which allows them to achieve
lift and hover in the air without burning fuel. They’ve never been
particularly popular: they’re big and comparatively slow, and
they have faced safety concerns ever since the 1937 Hindenburg
disaster, which left 36 people dead.
Still, some companies say modern LTAs can be extremely
safe. They argue that these aircraft can play a critical role in
cutting down on carbon emissions associated with transporta-
tion, especially for moving people and things that don’t need
to travel very quickly. 
In May, the somewhat secretive Sergey Brin–backed company Flying Whales’ airships parts to humanitarian aid
LTA Research, which has been working on airships since 2016, could potentially haul packages. Image courtesy
everything from rocket of Flying Whales.
announced that it’s ready to unveil its first, the Pathfinder 1. The
French company Flying Whales is developing an airship that’s
lifted by helium and can haul up to 60 tons of cargo. The vehicle routes. Powered by internal combustion, the Hybrid Air vehicle
is controlled with a hybrid-electric propulsion system, though also takes advantage of tech found in lighter-than-air vehicles
the company plans to eventually transition to hydrogen fuel by using helium to create buoyancy. Though its top speed is just
cells, which will make its aircraft fully electric. Flying Whales 130 kilometers per hour, the company says its aircraft can com-
has already partnered with aerospace companies to determine pete with airplanes on shorter routes, in part because of quicker
whether it could eventually transport rocket parts. takeoff and landing times. Another fundamental difference is
A startup called Sceye is building a helium-powered vehi- that “you can take off on land from anywhere reasonably flat,”
cle that can hover in the stratosphere, high enough to rival the says CEO Tom Grundy. “In particular, areas that are not well
capabilities of some satellites in low Earth orbit. Because Sceye’s served by existing transport.”
LTA can stay in the same place for an extended period, the com- These startups will have to overcome long-standing safety
pany wants to use it to beam broadband directly down to smart- concerns, and LTA vehicles may be more difficult to fly in bad
phones in less-connected regions. Sceye says its systems could weather, says James Flaten, a University of Minnesota professor
be used to track greenhouse-gas emissions and monitor natural of aerospace mechanics. Still, most of the vehicles used today
disasters; the company is also working with New Mexico and use helium, not hydrogen—the flammable gas that brought the
the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor air quality.  Hindenburg down. LTAs can also be designed so even if they
“The best way to think of us is as a geostationary platform did tear, they would leak very slowly, says Grundy. 
superimposed on the surface of the planet,” says Sceye’s CEO, It’s still early days for the big blimp boom. Though it’s secured
Mikkel Vestergaard. Any additional power that the vehicle might some initial contracts, Hybrid Air Vehicles has only built a proto-
COURTESY OF FLYING WHALES

need is supplied by solar panels during the day and a lithium- type, and its plans for a new 1,200-worker factory in the United
sulfur battery during the night.  Kingdom are just taking shape—the company eventually wants
Some of these next-generation LTAs might even be used for to build 24 aircraft a year. Sceye says its 13th flight will take
human transportation. Hybrid Air Vehicles, a British company place later in 2023.
that’s raised more than £100 million ($125 million), plans to use For now, most LTA technology is still on the ground. On the
its Airlander 10 ship to transport people on less-served and rural flip side, though, there’s nowhere to go but up. Q

Job titles of the future:
Metaverse
Lawyer
By Amanda Smith
Lot #651 on Somnium Space belongs to
Zannes Law, a Toronto-based law firm. In
this seven-level metaverse office, principal
lawyer Madaline Zannes conducts private
consultations with clients, meets people
wandering in with legal questions, hosts
COURTESY OF MADALINE ZANNES
Madaline Zannes at her metaverse
office (top) and IRL (above).
conferences, and gives guest lectures.
Zannes says that her metaverse office
allows for a more immersive, imaginative
client experience. She hired a custom
metaverse builder to create the space from
scratch—with breakout rooms, presenta-
tion stages, offices to rent, an art gallery,
and a rooftop bar.
The Somnium Space office was
Zannes’s first in the metaverse, but the
firm now has multiple properties on other
platforms, including a penthouse suite in
Spatial’s version of New Caledonia.
Qualifications needed: Technically, none;
the metaverse isn’t an actual jurisdiction.
There’s no “metaverse law,” and it’s not
an area that lawyers can be licensed
in—at least not yet. But those with a law
degree can use the technology to stand
out. “What’s most important is having an
open mind,” says Zannes.
Current challenge: Law doesn’t move as
quickly as technology does, and lawyers are
limited to the jurisdictions where they’re
licensed to practice. At the same time,
Zannes says, there are “bad actors” who
attempt to offer legal services in virtual
spaces without any sort of certification.
The Download 11
Some go as far as to keep their identity
hidden from clients.
To help address the problem, this
year Zannes and her team created the
international Metaverse Bar Association,
which aims to provide a registry of veri-
fied licensed lawyers who work in Web3.
Job perk: It’s a fun and more engaging way
to meet clients remotely, as opposed to a
flat, 2D Zoom interaction. “We can do our
meeting while walking through the build-
ing. We can chat at our NFT gallery, at the
rooftop bar, or in my office,” Zannes says.
“There are more ways to find common
ground and spend quality time together.”
There’s an area in the main office called
Quantum Leap where clients can review
the portfolio of Zannes’s metaverse prop-
erties to explore. She even provides her
clients with a private link so they can hang
out in the metaverse and use the space
whenever they want.
Commercial prospects: Zannes says her
“satellite offices” in the metaverse are
great exposure for the firm. She also reaps
monetary benefits from owning property
in the metaverse by renting out the space,
just as a landlord does IRL. Q
12 The Download
 The Download 13

Nick Sousanis is the author of Unflattening and a profes- Emily Beitiks is the interim director of the Longmore In-
sor of comics studies at San Francisco State University. stitute on Disability at San Francisco State University.
14 The Download
according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Overburdened government attorneys
The big often fail to prosecute it. A significant
amount of this theft targets immigrants,
payback both legal and undocumented, in part
because of communication barriers and
their perceived lack of power or legal
Reclamo, an app designed recourse. Reclamo doesn’t collect immi-
to help immigrant workers gration information, because it’s irrele-
reclaim stolen wages, vant for its purposes: both the federal Fair
may radically alter access Labor Standards Act and laws in many
states say that undocumented immigrants,
to legal services. who make up a substantial portion of the
By Patrick Sisson affected population, can claim the same
protections as any other worker.
As Rodrigo Camarena sees it, you can hail The precarious situation these work-
a car and order food on your smartphone; ers face is not just coincidental, says
why shouldn’t it also help you exercise Michelle Franco, an Ohio State professor
your rights?  with Mexican roots who studies issues of
Reclamo, a new web app created by race and class in landscape architecture, a
Justicia Lab, the nonprofit innovation business that relies heavily on immigrant
incubator that Camarena directs, helps labor. “The actual profits and the func-
documented and undocumented immi- tionality of these industries is completely
grant workers who have experienced wage dependent on that precarity,” she says.
theft. By clicking through questions in Reclamo evolved out of frustrations
English or Spanish with the help of a over the treatment of immigrants during
worker advocate, users can assemble case the Trump administration. Justicia staff
details, review their rights, and ultimately couldn’t create tech to change federal
produce finished legal claims that can be laws, but after coming across articles on
filed instantly. A process that would oth- wage theft in 2017, they realized there
erwise take multiple meetings with an were other ways to help. Rounds of user
attorney can now be done within an hour. testing, interviews with community justice
The tool launched last October with organizers and workers, and other research
beta testing in New York that focused on helped shape the app’s form and function.
the construction industry, a sector iden- Workers access the web app at a resource
tified as particularly rife with abuse, and center or with a community organizer, so
helped recover $1 million in lost wages— there’s someone to help with follow-up
more than double what it cost to build. In and offer additional legal guidance. The
mid-May, it was expanded in a bid to give final results of the process include both a
workers in businesses from manufactur- legal claim and a letter to send employers,
ing to housecleaning more leverage with which has been found to be the fastest way
their employers. to recover money.
“By building an independent, nonprofit, Rodman Serrano, a community orga-
digital legal tool for advocates to share and nizer for Make the Road New York, an
use together, we’re really leveling the play- immigrant services group on Long Island,
ing field for folks that are typically used started using Reclamo earlier this year
to technology being used against them,” and has already received confirmation
Camarena says. that cases are being reviewed. Before, he
Wage theft—in which employers skimp says, it was difficult for mistreated work-
on overtime or regular pay, and sometimes ers to find time away from work to meet
simply fail to pay at all—costs US work- with lawyers, call hotlines, or identify
ers approximately $50 billion annually, the right government officials to contact.
Immigrant construction workers face so
many economic challenges—including
low wages, high rent and medical bills,
and limited job options for those without
documentation—that any missed income
can be devastating. 
Now those filing claims via Reclamo
stand to gain some legal protection in the
immigration system as well as help with
recovering their pay. In January, the Biden
administration declared that noncitizens
involved in labor disputes will be eligible
for deferred action, temporarily protecting
them from deportation. 
By empowering everyday workers to
file complaints and access legal help with-
out a lawyer, the app addresses a signif-
icant societal gap: 92% of low-income
Americans don’t receive adequate legal
help for civil matters. It’s also part of a
push for alternative legal services that has
some in the legal world feeling anxious
about their roles and, ultimately, their jobs.
The so-called access to justice move-
ment aims to help average citizens get legal
aid without the need to find, book, and
pay a lawyer. Courts in Alaska and New
York have ruled that paralegals, students,
advocacy groups, and people without
law degrees can provide certain services
that used to require attorneys, which are
expensive and in short supply. Some view
AI and chatbots, with their ever-evolving
ability to handle complex conversations,
as another route to expanding legal ser-
vices; advocates and activists want to
harness this technology to handle intake
interviews and collect information. 
Camarena hopes Reclamo ultimately
makes legal aid more commonplace and
frees up overburdened lawyers to focus
on complicated suits and class actions. He
also believes that the data Reclamo will
gather can help target repeat offenders,
influence policymakers, and eventually
become a training set for more advanced
technology, expanding the app’s reach. 
“We’re not going to meet that gap [in
legal access] unless we think outside of
the traditional service models,” he says.
“There’s no reason why we can’t train an
AI on the logic we’ve created.” Q
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16 The Download

“Forest bathing” When a group of

Czech scientists
version of it in
VR, participants
compared the ef- experienced
could work in fects of experi-
encing a forest
the same level
of relaxation

digital realms too near Prague and a

digital scanned
in both environ-
ments.

IMAGE BY LUKÁŠ HEJTMÁNEK

Researchers explore whether
virtual forests might elicit the
same physiological responses as
real ones
By Charlie Metcalfe
The Japanese concept of “forest bathing,” or shinrin-
yoku (森林浴), has long been acclaimed for its sup-
posed health benefits. Hundreds of scientific studies
world where as many as 5 billion people might live
in urban environments by 2030.
Some scientists believe that virtual reality could
offer a remedy. VR has already been used to help
distract children undergoing medical procedures,
and icy virtual landscapes have alleviated the pain
of burn victims. Could virtual forests elicit the same
physiological responses as real ones?
A group of scientists at the Czech University of
Life Sciences—a psychologist in collaboration with
LUKÁŠ HEJTMÁNEK

suggest that it can improve mental health and cogni- researchers in the forestry department—has tested
tive performance, reduce blood pressure, and even the hypothesis by taking a group of 15 people into
treat depression and anxiety. Yet forests can be hard the Roztocký háj nature reserve near Prague for
to reach or, for some, completely inaccessible in a 30-minute bathing sessions. They then used laser
 The Download 17

scanners to develop a virtual twin of the same area

of forest, enhanced with audio recordings. Twenty
participants, including 10 who visited the real forest,
spent 30 minutes in the virtual forest. Questionnaires
assessing the participants’ emotional states revealed
no significant difference between the two experiences,
Op-Ed
according to the results, published in November in
Frontiers in Virtual Reality. As Martin Hůla, the for-
estry researcher leading the project, explained, “I
was aware that the forest was not real. However, the
experience was immersive, and it was easy for me to Robotaxis are here.
forget that I was in an experimental room.”
Another group of scientists investigated virtual for- It’s time to decide what
est bathing in a recent paper published in the journal
Forests. This time, the scientists developed a game to do about them.
for the participants to play, based on real methods
of guided outdoor forest therapy. The tasks included
Crucial decisions about driverless taxis are
taking photos with a virtual camera, collecting various
items, and taking part in a simple fitness program being made in relative obscurity. Why?
designed to give the players a sense of adventure. By Benjamin Schneider
The eight people involved in the study found that
their overall depression, anger, and fatigue decreased In some San Francisco neighborhoods, at certain hours of the
after they played the game.  night, it seems as if one in 10 cars on the road has no driver
Science is still divided on the mechanisms behind behind the wheel.
forest bathing itself. Some lend credence to the “bio- These are not experimental test vehicles, and this is not a
philia” theory, popularized by Edward O. Wilson drill. Many of San Francisco’s ghostly driverless cars are com-
in the 1980s, which suggests that humans require mercial robotaxis, directly competing with taxis, Uber and Lyft,
interaction with nature because we are part of it our- and public transit. They are a real, albeit still marginal, part of
selves. Another, called “attention restoration theory,” the city’s transportation system. And the companies that operate
suggests that natural environments like forests offer them, Cruise and Waymo, appear poised to continue expanding
people opportunities to recover from the tiring tasks their services in San Francisco, Austin, Phoenix, and perhaps
of everyday life. Both theories might also apply in even Los Angeles in the coming months.
virtual forests.
There are limitations, of course. Since computer
processing power is finite, virtual forests have physi-
cal boundaries. Some of the participants in the Czech
study said they felt caged when they encountered the
invisible forest wall. Power constraints also mean the
computer is not perfect at rendering small details like
mushrooms or insects. Nor can virtual environments
mimic every sensory experience of a real forest, like
the smell of damp leaves. One paper suggested that
this problem could be solved by spreading leaves
across the floor of the participation room. Duplicating
other sensations, like the feel of wind, would prove
more complicated.
Virtual environments can also cause cyber-
sickness, which happens when your eyes perceive
STEVEN M. JOHNSON

motion while your body does not. Psychologists,

forestry experts, and computer scientists hope that
further research with larger groups of participants
will help to overcome these limitations. Q
18 The Download
I spent the past year covering robotaxis for the San Francisco
Examiner and have taken nearly a dozen rides in Cruise driv-
erless cars over the past few months. During my reporting, I’ve
been struck by the lack of urgency in the public discourse about
robotaxis. I’ve come to believe that most people, including many
powerful decision makers, are not aware of how quickly this
industry is advancing, or how severe the near-term labor and
transportation impacts could be.
Hugely important decisions about robotaxis are being made
in relative obscurity by appointed agencies like the California
Public Utilities Commission. Legal frameworks remain woe-
fully inadequate: in the Golden State, cities have no regulatory
authority over the robotaxis that ply their streets, and police
legally cannot cite them for moving violations.
It’s high time for the public and its elected representatives to
play a more active role in shaping the future of this new technol-
ogy. Like it or not, robotaxis are here. Now comes the difficult
work of deciding what to do about them.
After years of false promises, it’s now widely acknowledged
that the dream of owning your very own sleep/gaming/makeup
mobility pod remains years, if not decades, away. Tesla’s mis-
leadingly named Autopilot system, the closest thing to auton-
omous driving in a mass-market car, is under investigation by
both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and
the Justice Department.
Media coverage of robotaxis has been rightfully skeptical.
Journalists (myself included) have highlighted strange robo-
behavior, concerning software failures, and Cruise and Waymo’s
lack of transparency about their data. Cruise’s driverless vehicles,
in particular, have shown an alarming tendency to inexplicably
stop in the middle of the road, blocking traffic for extended peri-
ods of time. San Francisco officials have documented at least 92
such incidents in just six months, including three that disrupted
emergency responders.
These critical stories, though important, obscure the general
trend, which has been moving steadily in the robotaxi industry’s
favor. Over the past few years, Cruise and Waymo have cleared
several major regulatory hurdles, expanded into new markets,
and racked up over a million relatively uneventful, truly driver-
less miles each in major American cities.
Robotaxis are operationally quite different from personally
owned autonomous vehicles, and they are in a much better posi-
tion for commercial deployment. They can be unleashed within
a strictly limited area where they’re well trained; their use can
be closely monitored by the company that designed them; and
they can immediately be pulled off the road in bad weather or
if there’s another issue.
Unfortunately, there is no standard, government-approved
framework for evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles. In
a paper on its first million “rider-only” miles, Waymo had two
police-reportable crashes (with no injuries) and 18 minor con-
tact events, about half of which involved a human driver hitting
a stationary Waymo. The company cautions against direct com-
parisons with human drivers because there are rarely analogous
data sets. Cruise, on the other hand, claims that its robotaxis
experienced 53% fewer collisions than the typical human ride-
hail driver in San Francisco in their first million driverless miles,
and 73% fewer collisions with a meaningful risk of injury.
Unfortunately, there is no standard,
government-approved framework for
evaluating the safety of autonomous
vehicles.
While not perfect, my most recent Cruise ride, in April, was
sufficiently close to the experience of riding with a responsible
human driver that I momentarily forgot I was in a robotaxi. The
mere fact that these vehicles are programmed to follow traffic
laws and the speed limit automatically makes them feel like safer
drivers than a large percentage of humans on the road.
It remains to be seen whether robotaxis are ready for deploy-
ment on a significant scale, or what the metric for determining
readiness would even be. But barring a significant shift in momen-
tum, like an economic shock, a horrific tragedy, or a dramatic
political pivot, robotaxis are positioned to continue their roll.
This is enough to warrant a broader discussion of how they will
change cities and society.
Cruise and Waymo are close to being authorized to provide
all-day commercial robotaxi service throughout virtually all of
San Francisco. That could immediately have a considerable
economic impact on the city’s taxi and ride-hail drivers. The
same goes for every other city where Cruise and Waymo set up
shop. The prospect of automating professional drivers out of
existence is not theoretical anymore. It’s a very real possibility
in the near future.
Robotaxis also have huge immediate-term implications for
transportation policy. This technology could make automotive
transportation so cheap and easy that people decide to make
more trips by car, increasing congestion and undermining public
transportation. Traffic could be made even worse, San Francisco
officials fear, by the many robotaxis double-parking as they await
passengers, lacking the situational awareness of where and for
how long it’s appropriate to stop.
The emergence of robotaxis adds urgency to fraught questions
in labor and transportation policy that will need to be addressed
sooner or later. Should workers be protected from displacement,
or be somehow compensated if they are displaced? Should cars
have free rein in the most congested, transit-accessible parts of
cities? Should electric vehicles continue to be exempt from the
gas taxes that pay for road maintenance?
As technology accelerates, public policy should accelerate
along with it. But in order to keep up, the public needs to have
a clear-eyed view of just how quickly the future could arrive. Q
 A DV E R T I S E M E N T

The Blue Technology Barometer 2022/23

The Blue Technology Barometer is a ranking of The index ranks the “blue” performance of countries
66 coastal countries and territories on their progress and territories across four pillars:
and commitment toward protecting ocean sustain-
ability. It measures the degree to which economies • Ocean environment • Technology innovation
are prioritizing the protection of ocean health. • Marine activity • Policy and regulation

Leaders
Challengers
Strivers

Countries that have gone up

in the ranking since last year
Countries that have retained
the same ranking as last year
Countries that have gone down
in the ranking since last year While the index ranks 66 countries, this map only features a selection of the overall data.

Overall top 10 Scan the QR code to expe-

Rank Rank Rank Rank rience the interactive index,
2022 2021 Territory Score/10 2022 2021 Territory Score/10
view the data, and down-
1 1 United Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . 7.73 6 7 France .......................... 7.02
load the full report or visit
technologyreview.com/btb
2 2 Germany .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.66 7 8 Sweden ........................ 6.96

3 3 Denmark ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.26 8 6 Norway......................... 6.84

4 5 Finland ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.09 9 11 Japan ........................... 6.63

5 4 United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.08 10 13 Netherlands ................. 6.53

The Blue Technology Barometer 2022/23

was produced in partnership with Interested in partnering with us? Contact:
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20 Explained
How can
heat pumps
help combat
climate change?
By Casey Crownhart
e’re entering the era of the heat
W pump. The concept behind these
devices is simple: powered by
electricity, they move heat around to either
cool or heat buildings. It’s an old idea that’s
only getting better with time—new mod-
els are more efficient and better able to
handle cold weather.
How does a heat pump work?
The hero in a heat pump is the refrig-
erant—a fluid that moves in a circuit,
soaking up and releasing heat as it goes.
Refrigerants have low boiling and freezing
points, so they’ll be liquid even at very cold
temperatures. That’s the state a refrigerant
is in at the start of its journey through a
heat pump, at temperatures typically below
-15 °F (-25 °C). Then the refrigerant passes
through a heat exchanger, soaking up heat
from the outside air and transforming from
a liquid to a gas.  and Maine in the US. And about 60%
The gas goes through a compressor,
which squeezes it into a smaller volume,
heating it up. The now-hot refrigerant then
passes through another heat exchanger,
where it releases heat into the room it’s
warming up and starts condensing back
into a liquid. Finally, it passes through an
expansion valve, releasing the pressure
and cooling down. Now it’s ready to soak
up more heat from outside again.
™ A fan draws ambient air from
the outside into an evaporator,
which contains liquid refrigerant.
Outside air
Illustration by Franziska Barczyk
Do heat pumps work
in the cold?
The claim that heat pumps don’t work well
in really cold weather is often repeated by
fossil-fuel companies, which have a com-
peting product to sell.
There’s a kernel of truth here—heat
pumps can be less efficient in extreme cold.
As the temperature difference between
inside and outside increases, a heat pump
will have to work harder to gather heat from
outside air and disperse it into a room.
But refrigerants are better at sucking up
heat and less harmful for the planet than
they used to be, and compressors and heat
exchangers are getting better too. 
And even if heat pumps aren’t running
at peak efficiency in colder climates, “they
work everywhere,” says Sam Calisch, head
of special projects at Rewiring America.
There are heat pumps running in Alaska
Heat pumps can
put out three to
of buildings in Norway are heated with four times as much
heat pumps, along with 40% in Sweden
and Finland.
energy in the form
of heat as they’re
How do heat pumps help using in electricity.
with climate change?
Heat pumps run using electricity from the
grid, so their climate impact depends on
the extent to which the local grid is pow-
ered by renewables. The current electricity
 Explained 21

š The liquid refrigerant

absorbs the air’s heat and › The vapor enters a compressor,
where its pressure and tem-
evaporates into a vapor. perature are increased.

Compressor œ The compressed vapor enters a

condenser, where heat passes into the
home’s heating and hot water systems.
Evaporator Condenser

Heat distribution

Expansion valve  An expansion valve lowers the

pressure of the refrigerant and
the cycle begins again.

mix means heat pumps are already better
for the climate than burning natural gas
or oil for heat, says Yannick Monschauer,
an energy analyst at the International
Energy Agency.  same amount of electricity.
Their real climate superpower is their
efficiency. Heat pumps today can reach
300% to 400% efficiency or even higher,
meaning they’re putting out three to four
times as much energy in the form of heat
as they’re using in electricity. That’s much
higher than electric heaters, which trans-
form energy from electricity into heat. Heat
pumps instead use electricity to gather
heat and move it around. It’s a subtle dif-
ference, but it means a heat pump can
return significantly more heat using the
What else should I know if
I’m considering a heat pump?  tional rebates for low- and moderate-
Up-front costs for heat pumps are high:
purchasing and installing a single unit
today can cost between $3,000 and $6,000,
and larger homes often require multiple
units. But over their lifetime, heat pumps
can be cheaper to buy and operate than
other systems, especially if they’re used
to both heat and cool a home. 
Over 30 countries have incentive pro-
grams for heat pumps. In the US, the
Inflation Reduction Act offers a 30% tax
credit on the purchase price, with addi-
income households. For some households,
the funding could cover 100% of the
cost.
Casey Crownhart is a climate
reporter at MIT Technology Review.
22 Profile
Mapping to
save the world
Molly Burhans is using GIS tools to map the Catholic Church’s global
landholdings—and fight climate change.
By Whitney Bauck | Portrait by Isabel Magowan
W
hen Molly
Burhans first
started try-
ing to map
the Catholic
Church’s
global prop-
erty holdings so the land could be put to
work fighting climate change, the idea
seemed so obvious to her that she was sure
someone else must be doing it already.
Burhans, a cartographer, was then an
ecological-design grad student who had
recently been introduced to geographic
information system (GIS) mapping. But
she was also a devout Catholic who liked
spending time with nuns. It was on a visit
to a monastery with a vast, underutilized
lawn that she started thinking about how
much land the church owns, and what an
impact that land could make on the cli-
mate if managed responsibly.
“The Catholic Church is the largest
nongovernmental provider of health care,
largest nongovernmental provider of edu-
cation, and second-largest network of
humanitarian aid—only surpassed if you
include all the member organizations of
the UN put together—in the world,” she
says, fingering a necklace that portrays her
confirmation saint, the medieval polymath
Hildegard of Bingen. “I was like, ‘They
must have the largest conservation net-
work in the world. I’m gonna go find out
who is running that.’”  a kind of super-map.
What she found instead, when she
began her work in 2014, was that not only
did the church have no such network,
but most of the parishes she contacted
didn’t even have records of what land they
owned—a function of the institution’s age
and decentralization. The problem went
all the way to the top: when Burhans man-
aged to score an audience at the Vatican
to seek access to records that would help
her flesh out the maps she’d begun build-
ing using public data, with help from Yale
student volunteers, she found that none of
the Vatican’s own maps had been updated
since 1901.
That’s the gap Burhans, who is now 33,
has been trying to fill with her organization
GoodLands, she tells me from an empty
auditorium in the architecture building at
Columbia University, where we met and
where she now teaches. She uses the GIS
program ArcMap and machine learning
to map the church’s holdings, categorize
them by type, and suggest responsible
land management practices. Though no
one knows exactly how much land the
global church owns, some estimates have
put it at 177 million acres worldwide. GIS
is so powerful in part because of how it
brings together different kinds of data:
instead of having separate maps for an
area’s property values, watersheds, own-
ership boundaries, soil types, Indigenous
lands, tree cover, and endangered-species
habitats, ArcMap allows GoodLands to
bring all that information and more into
 
“The interconnection between human
activity and the planet is one area where
24 Profile
mapping and analytics are helping to solve
the challenges posed by climate change,”
says Jack Dangermond, founder and pres-
ident of Esri, a prominent GIS company.
Burhans’s work is remarkable, he says, for
how it “applies these technologies to more
sustainable land management.”
To use mapping information in service
of conservation, GoodLands starts by
identifying what land a particular diocese
might own, assigns the site to a category
(hospital, university, or retreat center;
urban and flat or rural and mountain-
ous), and then uses machine learning to
suggest responsible land management
options, giving the priests or abbesses or
other decision-makers a starting point as
they try to discern what might be right for
their community.
In practice, the decisions GoodLands
assists with might be as straightforward
as deciding where to plant trees: if a dio-
cese wants to help reforest its region with
limited funds, GoodLands can use GIS
maps to help leaders understand their
holdings and make suggestions about
where to focus for maximal environmental
benefit. “If you plant 500 trees in a subur-
ban parish that already has a lot of forest
canopy, you’re going to have magnitudes
less impact than if you plant 15 trees on
an urban parish that has no urban forest
canopy around it,” Burhans says.  out how to “love in a society where you
Since GoodLands was founded in
2015, Burhans’s efforts have earned her
the attention of the pope and the World
Economic Forum, and a host of laurels
that include the UN’s Young Champion
of the Earth award, an Ashoka Fellowship,
and the Sierra Club’s EarthCare award.
“Looking at the world not as countries,
but as institutions—she was the only one
who had done that,” says Carl Steinitz, a
Harvard professor emeritus of landscape
architecture and planning. “It’s a big idea
for a big institution from a very young,
intellectually aggressive investigator, with
an enormous potential payoff globally,
both to the Vatican and to society at large.”
“My vision initially was ‘I’m going to
help dioceses map their land and find
conservation [opportunities],’” says
Burhans, “‘And we’re going to start build-
ing a park system like the National Parks,
but the Catholic Parks.’”
urhans was born to a computer
B science professor and a molec-
ular oncology researcher, and
the languages of science and
data analysis formed the backdrop of
her childhood. A visual thinker from an
early age, she played in Photoshop and
Dreamweaver; by 14, she was designing
science graphics that were published
alongside her father’s academic papers.
It was spending time with her dad’s
research on aging in naked mole rats,
and contemplating the idea that science
might someday slow or even reverse the
aging process, that drew her to religion:
“I believe we’re put here in love, and I
believe in some intentional being behind
it.” That being, she believed, was God.
After spending two years studying
ancient Greek so she could translate the
Nicene Creed, one of the oldest articula-
tions of Christian faith, Burhans began to
embrace Catholicism, which she’d been
introduced to as a child before her family
stopped attending mass around the time
she turned seven.
Her life mission soon became figuring
cannot do pretty much anything without
harming people.” That question led her
to travel through Guatemala painting
murals for six months and volunteering
in soup kitchens before returning to her
hometown of Buffalo, New York, to grad-
uate from Canisius College, where she
studied philosophy and dance.  woman in the Catholic Church, where
Back in Buffalo, she hung out with
punks, squatters, and freegans who were
living in (and in some cases refurbishing)
the city’s many empty lots and abandoned
buildings and eating discarded food out of
dumpsters. It was there that she began to
see what she calls “the power of property.”
Around this time, Burhans cofounded
her first venture, a worker-owned indoor
aquaponic vertical farm called Gro-Op,
started in an old industrial space to pro-
vide fresh fish and produce to people liv-
ing in a food desert. Though Burhans is no
longer involved, Gro-Op is still growing
tilapia and greens for Buffalo residents. 
She carried these experiences into a
master’s program in ecological design at
the Conway School in Massachusetts. It
was there that she was first introduced to
GIS, which she remembers as “one of the
best days” of her life. “It was like some-
body had taken the way my mind works
and put it into software,” she says. She
graduated in 2015 and started GoodLands
with $7,000 of student loan money, taking
on early projects pro bono as she tried
to help Catholic leadership understand
the potential of what she was offering. 
And GoodLands had a lot to offer. By
combining maps of Catholic land and
public school districts, for example, it
has helped Catholic organizations figure
out where a new school could best meet
local educational needs. Its services have
helped religious orders understand their
options for conservation on their prop-
erty and could in the future help relief
organizations figure out where best to
disburse disaster aid, by combining data
about where the church has a presence
and where the greatest need is. 
The work Burhans is undertaking is
perhaps even more challenging politically
than it is technically, says Steinitz. “You
have to do an awful lot of digging. You
have to deal with places that don’t have
maps; you have places that don’t have
property definitions. I mean, try doing this
in Central Africa,” he says. Plus, he adds,
she’s “totally the outsider” as a young
older men sit at the top of the hierarchy.
Still, she has gained recognition at
those levels. Not long after Burhans began
trying to map the church, Pope Francis
released his landmark encyclical on the
environment, Laudato Si’, which has
been dubbed “the most important doc-
ument about climate change in the past
decade” by the climate activist and writer
Bill McKibben. Francis has earned the

moniker “the climate pope” in the years
since for his leadership on the subject
both inside the church and on the global
stage, having spoken urgently about the
need for climate action to world leaders
“We need to at the UN and beyond.
So it was with a strong sense of shared
have policy values around “care for our common
home” that Burhans sought official
coming out of Vatican approval for her work. And in
2018, after she’d made multiple visits to
[the Vatican]. Rome, the pope approved her request to
start a cartography institute. The budget
I shouldn’t offered was too small to be feasible, but
had Burhans accepted it, she would’ve
be the been the first woman to head up an insti-
tute of any kind at the Vatican.
one-woman
G
oodLands has always operated
National on a limited budget, and its
history is full of moments of
Geospatial economic precarity followed
by what a good Catholic might call provi-
Intelligence dence. In the early days, when Burhans’s
student software license was about to
Agency of run out, Dangermond heard about her
and donated about $3 million worth of
the Catholic his company’s software (followed by an
invitation for her to come manage a team
Church.” as a visiting researcher at Esri when she
was just 26). When she was so broke on
a trip to Rome that she worried she was
going to have to sleep on the street before
a Vatican meeting where she’d be speak-
ing among prime ministers and digni-
taries, a Vatican staff person invited her
to stay at the Domus Sanctae Marthae,
where Pope Francis lives.
The level of international recognition
she’s garnered means she almost certainly
could’ve gotten a “real job” at a big tech
company at any point along the way. But
Burhans’s aspirations have been shaped
by the stories of nuns and religious figures
like Dorothy Day—people who embraced
“voluntary poverty.”
For all her willingness to live on beans
and rice, though, she could use another
act of providence: on the day she was
going to the UN to receive its most pres-
tigious environmental award, she had to
Profile 25
lay off her staff of 10 when the organiza-
tion’s funding unexpectedly fell through.
Since then, GoodLands has gone back to
being just “the Molly show,” with no other
employees to help shoulder the work-
load—which, combined with a spate of
deaths in Burhans’s family and her own
battles with long covid and injuries from
a Vespa accident, has slowed her down
considerably over the last couple of years.  
Even so, demand for GoodLands’s ser-
vices hasn’t subsided: the organization
has “over $14 million worth of projects in
our pipeline” at the moment, she says. But
without some capital up front to rehire a
team to help her, there’s no way to start
making progress on all those projects,
and Burhans is not willing to take on
any investors who might compromise
her mission by looking for a quick return. 
Burhans is hopeful that she’ll get her
team up and running again. Once she
gets over that hurdle, she plans to turn
GoodLands from a nonprofit into a for-
profit consultancy that can work with
both Catholic and secular organizations
looking to use their land for good. 
She’s also recently rekindled the once-
dead dream of setting up a cartography
institute for the Vatican. Burhans believes
in the church’s immense potential to spur
climate action, especially under the direc-
tion of this climate-conscious pope. “We
need to have policy coming out of there,”
she says. “I shouldn’t be the one-woman
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
of the Catholic Church.”
Whatever her path looks like from
here, Burhans wants to make the Vatican’s
commitment to climate action a reality
that’s embedded in every plot of land the
church owns.  
“The vision that is so much bigger than
me is this,” she says. “Let’s see Catholic
conservation reach the same scale as
Catholic health care in the next century,
as the largest global network the world
has ever seen.”
Whitney Bauck is a climate and
environment reporter based in
Brooklyn, New York.
26
We need to take steps toward a more inclusive future—
disa
The future is
“Technology,” wrote the late historian of technology Melvin
Kranzberg Jr., “is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” It’s an
observation that often doesn’t stick with people as they think
about technologies related to accessibility. So many of our domi-
nant stories about technologies for disability, access, and mobility
paint them as objects of empowerment or heroic, life-changing
panaceas for social ill. In this issue, we take Kranzberg’s assess-
ment to heart with articles that speak to technological ambiguity
and against popular narratives about these approaches.
As a multiply disabled person, I too can sometimes get caught
up in the commercialized hype-y hopefulness around promised
tech: a newly made leg that fits just right, or a promising new
drug for my autoimmune issues, or even a new app that could
issue the right reminders to keep me on task. But the benefits
of good devices, apps, and technologies can often be tempo-
rary or lopsided or require my constant investment, care, and
attention to make them work with me. Most of the bugginess
and time-suckiness of new tech is never talked about in media
coverage about assistive and accessible technologies: we’re
told that some humanitarian engineering or rehabilitation team
(what heroes!) is working on the problem—the problem being
described as people who don’t fit a particular mold. The Cyborg
Jillian Weise, my favorite cyborg poet, writes—in the voice of men
positioned as engineers/therapists/“helpers” in a dream—“Don’t
you like it. / Don’t you laud us. / Don’t you god us.”  While reading this issue, I’ve been thinking about how equity
These men (and they are mostly men) typically aren’t the ones
who have to live with what they created; they aren’t the people
who are positioned as objects, obstacles, and inconveniences. For
people intended to use the technology, not all advancements are
as desirable as they might seem. There’s much more ambigu-
ity in use—neither good nor bad, nor neutral!—once you move
away from the hype. 
Often when developing accessibility tech, people assume lev-
els of access to technology that don’t exist. They fail to take into
account places where lack of internet access is a continuing bar-
rier, where not everyone has smartphones to use a required app,
where good devices are touted but not easy to afford or get. Projects
often are not properly centered on the communities they serve,
or fail to understand that these communities may pursue their
own desires rather than those reflected in the dominant culture. 
In this issue of MIT Technology Review, you’ll read important
stories of ongoing issues around accessibility. On page 50, Lorena
Ríos describes traveling to Ciudad Juárez, at the Mexico-US border,
to explore a US Customs and Border Protection app for asylum
seekers. Chancey Fleet (page 28) shares with us her work at the
New York Public Library on expanding the blind community’s
access to images and design. Colleen Hagerty (page 36) profiles
law professor Monica Sanders, who is working to highlight issues
of internet accessibility in planning for climate disaster. Corey S.
Powell (page 62) discusses ongoing work on “sonification” projects
in astronomy, while Julie Kim (page 42) explores the landscape
around access to effective assistive communication technologies. 
and flexibility of use are basic principles of universal design. One
thing that stood out for me in Ríos’s story about CBP One, the app
for asylum seekers, is how the limit to one app and pathway has
 27

one that we all can inhabit. By Ashley Shew, guest editor

bled
hurt those most in need of asylum, for whom access is severely
constrained by those technological limits. The stories on data
sonification and tactile images exemplify the necessity of direc-
tion from disabled people to enrich our educational, scientific,
and everyday pursuits. 
I’ve been writing a book on the stories we tell about technol-
ogy and the stories we tell about disability, which explores what
accounts of disability-related technology get wrong
by centering helpers over users. We see this with
projects like exoskeletons pitched as devices to
help people walk again, or interventions that seek
“Normal”
leaves a lot
With environmental racism, we already see higher rates of asthma
and other chronic conditions (and this will continue). In the
long tail of long covid, we should expect long-term changes in a
large segment of the population, similar to what we’ve seen with
post-polio syndrome and with shingles following chicken pox. 
So often we’ve been sold the promise of futures that work
to eliminate disability via eugenic projects, gene editing, and
therapies designed to move people toward perfect
speech or gait. There is often a focus on cure or
rehabilitation as a prerequisite for participation;
a focus on “solutions” for individuals, rather than
to normalize autistic behavior. All this is done
without listening to what the real experts say they
of people infrastructure to enable diverse communities.
There’s a certain unfair “boot-strappiness” imposed
want. So many forces frame marginalized people as out, and it on individuals who are often at the mercy of larger
problems and seek to control, categorize, or police isn’t, by itself, systems of exclusion. We ask for people to bend
us—or require us to take particular routes to be
“worthy” of access in the eyes of a dominant culture. 
an inherent themselves in time and space to fit a vision of wor-
thiness, of goodness, of productivity and moral and
But “normal” leaves a lot of people out, and it good. physical uprightness, that is absolutely the oppo-
isn’t, by itself, an inherent good. We often devalue site of inclusive, inventive, and open. 
the creativity and intelligence of people outside that frame rather We need more ways to be. Part of that involves looking to alter-
than appreciating them as creators, tinkerers, and knowers. We native ways of sensing, processing, moving, understanding, and
need more ways to exist than the narrow confines of ableism communicating, and seeing those ways as good and worthwhile.
and white supremacy allow.  Opening ourselves up to all-access thinking and disabled exper-
As the title of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s provoca- tise will mean a more livable world—one that we all can inhabit.
tive book has it, the future is disabled. Making space for disabled
people and disabled futures is necessary to truly face what lies Ashley Shew, an associate professor in the Department
of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and
before us. With climate change, for example, we should expect author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs
changing disease patterns (more tick-borne diseases like Lyme). Improvement (2023), is guest editor of this issue.
Getting

At the New York Public

Library, blind educator
Chancey Fleet is
working to make images
accessible to everyone.
in

By
Chancey Fleet

touch

with

Photographs by
Beth Perkins

images
The author with her guide dog,
Ellie, at the New York Public
Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille
and Talking Book Library.
30
I
n 2020, in the midst of pandemic
lockdown, my husband and I bought
a house in Brooklyn and decided to
reimagine and rebuild the interior.  to content, it’s likely that a few things come
We began talking through our ideas
about how to arrange each detail,
from an open kitchen to bathroom
fixtures, but before long we realized that
imprecise language was slowing us down
and annoying us both. So my husband
taught me a few key architectural symbols
(like the one that shows which way a door
will swing) and started printing floor plans.
Soon I was drawing my own concepts, iter-
ating on his and working toward a shared
vision of the home we eventually designed.
It’s a commonplace story, except for
one key factor: I’m blind, and I’ve made
it my mission to ensure that blind New
Yorkers (including me) can create and
explore images. The equipment I used to
make our floor plans and my subsequent
drawings—a high-tech graphics embosser
and a simple tactile “blackboard”—is part
of the Dimensions Lab at the New York
Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille
and Talking Book Library, a place where
anyone (blind, sighted, or somewhere in
between) can learn to make tactile graphics
and 3D models that blind and low-vision
people can perceive by touch. As the assis-
tive technology coordinator at the library, I
help patrons use accessible tech to pursue
their goals: job hunting, reading printed
mail with computer vision, using wayfind-
ing apps to travel independently, and more. 
Working with images isn’t in the job
description for most access technolo-
gists like me, but I believe it should be. I
dream of a day when checking out a street
map, perusing tattoo designs, or making
a seating chart are just as convenient and
commonplace for blind folks as for our
sighted counterparts.  convenient and commonplace for
When we talk about graphics and images,
the assumption that they will be experienced
visually is implicit in the language we use.
We refer to the visual arts, visual aids, and
data visualizations; we conflate the world of
images with the sense of vision as a means
of perception. Our predominantly sighted
culture centers and disseminates spatial
representations that are meant for, and rely
upon, vision as a pathway to understanding.
If you think about blind people’s access
to mind: the development and evolution of
braille, the availability of text-to-speech and
braille output for onscreen content, and the
need for accessible websites and apps that
conform to guidelines for screen-reading
software. While these technologies form
a bedrock of access crucial to information
literacy for blind and low-vision people,
they primarily address one specific type
of information: text.
In an era when lectures, business presen-
tations, news, and entertainment are almost
always delivered with rich, often interactive
visuals, those of us who are blind usually find
ourselves relegated to a text-only experience.
Although alt text—the description of images
online—allows content authors to describe
important visuals, the adage that “a picture
is worth a thousand words” falls flat when
only words are available. It’s important to
experience a stock chart, a circuit diagram,
or a map as intended—that is to say, as an
image. Textual descriptions of items like
these, if they contain all the information in
the original image, are painfully verbose and
frequently fail to deliver pertinent insights
with the precision of an image.
I dream of a day when checking out
a street map, perusing tattoo designs,
or making a seating chart are just as
blind folks as for our sighted counterparts.
The power of images to convey informa-
tion precisely and concisely through spatial
representation, however, isn’t inherently
visual at all. For blind readers, learners,
and creators, tactile graphics—images
rendered legible by touch—open up the
world of spatial communication.
Tactile graphics
As a blind tech educator, it’s my job—
and my passion—to introduce blind and
low-vision library patrons to tools that
help them move through daily life with
autonomy and ease. Our team of blind and
sighted staff and volunteers runs group
workshops and individual appointments
that aim to give everyone the confidence to
print existing graphics or make their own.  
In 2016, a blind patron new to New York
City called me up with a simple request: he
wanted a map of the five boroughs, showing
their shapes, relative locations, and sizes.
I answered this inquiry with some leads
to braille textbook publishers who make
maps, but I soon started to wonder: What
should blind people do when they want a
tactile graphic that doesn’t yet exist? Why
had I seen more tactile graphics as a child,
in textbooks, than at any other time since?
What would need to happen to create a
straightforward path, navigable by any
 31

Blind and visually impaired patrons

work with various tactile graphics
at the New York Public Library’s
Dimensions Lab.
32

blind or low-vision person, between feeling which quickly (and loudly) punches dots of specialized thin plastic sheet with a copy of
curious about a given image and having a eight distinct heights onto paper or card- the material below, whether that’s hard-copy
tactile version of the image in hand? stock at up to 100 dots per inch; Swell Form, braille, an illustration embossed onto a metal
Tactile graphic design is an art of trans- which involves feeding patented micro- sheet, or a tactile relief image made from
formation: what appeals to the eye may be capsule paper through a heated machine materials like wire, sandpaper, and foam. 
cluttered and chaotic to the fingertips. The to raise lines through a chemical reaction Alongside equipment designed specifi-
legibility and impact of a tactile graphic between alcohol embedded in the paper cally with production of tactile graphics in
depend on the author’s grasp of practices and carbon in the ink; and thermoform, mind, our lab offers mainstream hardware
for conveying information by touch. Since my favorite throwback. First developed in that can be put to use to create other tactile
perceivable tactile resolution is much lower the 1960s—before braille book transcribers media. Most methods for creating tactile
than resolution perceivable by vision, it’s had access to software to help with transla- graphics offer a sort of “2.5D” representa-
imperative that tactile graphics be scaled up tions and revisions, let alone graphics—a tion, using lines and shapes usually raised
enough to make key elements detectable. thermoform machine gets as hot as a pizza well under a millimeter, but 3D printing
Since color isn’t within the scope of tactile oven and uses a vacuum seal to impress a allows for the creation of full models. It
design, other methods must be used to draw
distinctions. For example, a tactile pie chart
might use four different textures (untextured
“white” space, dotted infill, squares, and
stripes) to differentiate four wedges. The
classic “flatten the curve” graphic, which
used colored lines to convey dramatically
different public health outcomes for covid-
19 with and without protective measures,
is just as effective as a tactile graphic when
dotted, dashed, and solid lines are employed
to communicate the message. 
The technology required to create
high-quality tactile images is typically found
in institutions—textbook publishing com-
panies, university disability service offices,
and administrative areas within schools,
for example. As a result, tactile graphics
are usually created to meet institutional
priorities, and they are mostly designed,
produced, and distributed by sighted peo-
ple. I realized that a free and open tactile
graphics lab would need to provide three
things to change this paradigm: easy access
to tactile graphics equipment, a focus on
COURTESY OF THE DIMENSIONS LAB

hardware and software that are accessible

by nonvisual means, and pathways for blind
people and our allies to build skills and con-
fidence in working with tactile graphics,
regardless of previous experience. With
this in mind, and with the help of a grant
from the NYPL’s Innovation Project for
employees, I launched the Dimensions Lab.
A visit to the Dimensions Lab always
begins with a chat about the project at hand Crucial pandemic updates were not
and a chance for patrons to flip through a readily available to blind readers.
This “flatten the curve” graphic
portfolio of samples made with a variety uses different types of lines to
of processes. There’s graphics embossing, display public health outcomes.

Devices at the Dimensions Lab
include a graphics embosser
(top) that quickly punches
dots of varying heights onto
cardstock; a Swell Form
machine (middle) for creating
raised and textured ink
prints; and a T3G3 Learning
Tablet (bottom), which helps
patrons learn braille.
33
doesn’t suit every tactile need: the method,
in which a plastic filament is pushed through
a heated nozzle and deposited layer by
layer to form the desired shape, is compar-
atively time consuming. Other approaches
work just as well for representing drawings,
charts, and graphs. A 3D model may be best,
however, when the original object is three-
dimensional but can’t be touched because
it’s too small (like a molecule), too big (like
an elephant), or too delicate. 
As it turns out, the New York Public
Library’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare
Books Division houses items of the too-
delicate variety in abundance, including a
series of clay cuneiform tablets dating back
to 2500 BCE. As a proof of concept shortly
after the launch of the lab, we worked with
NYPL’s digital team to capture some of
them through photogrammetry, a technique
archaeologists use to turn photos into 3D
models. I had read about cuneiform in text-
books and thought I understood it: I imag-
ined heavy clay tablets, paper-shaped but
brick-heavy, carried in two careful hands.
Our 3D models, which now move among
library branches and schools in interactive
classroom kits, told me more about the tan-
gible reality of cuneiform than a textbook
ever could. They’re rounded cylinders and
rectangles, densely inscribed, close to palm-
sized and so deeply engraved that I wonder
whether an official scribe or some other per-
son might’ve read them by touch, whether
because of blindness or for lack of a candle. 
Blind folks learn to assess the progress
of a 3D print by sound (a doomed print
often fails audibly as misplaced filament
scrapes, bumps, or drags), and by gen-
tly touching the filament as it enters the
tube to make sure material is flowing. The
things that might give you trepidation if
you closed your eyes—using touch strate-
gically and safely to monitor and maintain
a machine that has hot parts, or using wire
cutters and tweezers to unclog and reload
the filament—are actually easy to accom-
plish nonvisually once you learn how.
Software is another matter, though.
There is, at present, no commercially avail-
able equivalent to a dynamic screen for
tactile representation. (Although digital
34

For now, tactile readers miss out

on the expediency of zooming in on
the details of renderings like this
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map.

braille displays use pins to pop up one line

of braille at a time, those don’t have suffi-
cient resolution or space to show images.)
Tactile graphics must be printed to be read
by touch. Imagine sending every image you
encountered off to a printer and waiting
(usually for a minute or more) before you
could view it. For now, tactile readers miss
out on the expediency and fun of zooming
in from the big picture to minute details. If
you’ve ever used a digital map to explore
the streets around that reassuring “you are
here” pin, you know what we’re missing
and why it matters. 
Blind people working with graphics are
endlessly hampered by the need to print
every image, especially because it’s rare for
an unaltered visual image to make a legi-
ble, pleasing tactile one. An image might
seem promising but turn out to have white
space that needs cropping before it can be
scaled up, or a light gray background that
translates into a sea of distracting dots.
Time spent printing every picture we have
a passing interest in adds up. Minh Tam Ha,
a blind colleague in the movement for tac-
tile graphics education and access, noticed
her friends and family finding comfort and
calm through coloring during lockdown,
so she decided to curate coloring pages
from the web that work well for tactile
readers, emboss them, and mail them out
on demand. Each of these finds was hard and tactile literacy in the education sec- without waiting more than a moment felt
won, Minh says: “Finding clear and crisp tor; Humanware, an assistive technology like a new and remarkable power to have. 
COURTESY OF THE DIMENSIONS LAB; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF AMERICAN PRINTING HOUSE
images that would translate well was very company with a strong track record in the Meanwhile, poor interface design is still
much a hands-on-paper endeavor where I field of digital braille displays; and the a barrier to overcome. Popular computer-
couldn’t use visual assistance to speed up National Federation of the Blind, a civil aided design programs, including Inkscape
the process. An image could be a simple rights and advocacy organization leveraging and Adobe Illustrator, fail to conform to
flower in a pot with leaves, but if the lines the expertise of its members to improve well-established development guidelines
were too bold or too close to each other equity and inclusion for blind Americans. that would make their menus and dialog
and not clearly defined, it could mean that When I tested the Monarch earlier this boxes accessible to screen readers, which
tactilely, the image was indecipherable.” year, I zoomed in from the outline of the excludes blind users from simple tasks like
An effort is underway, though, to put United States to individual regions, panned rescaling, rotating, or outlining an image. If
digital tactile graphics under the finger- around a detailed floor plan of a conference blind students or adults aren’t in touch with
tips of students and adults. The Monarch, center, and gave a dozen images a quick advocates who can suggest more accessi-
a tabletop device featuring a refreshable tactile glance within a minute before choos- ble workflows, they’re likely to give up on
braille display 10 lines by 32 cells in size, ing the ones I wanted to explore in depth. digital design when the roadblocks become
is set to enter field testing in schools and Compared with methods for creating hard- apparent. Those of us who persevere in
other community settings this fall. The copy tactile media, the Monarch’s output design become creative, eclectic problem
project is a collaboration between the feels low-res and monochromatic (just one solvers: we make our own access by co-de-
American Printing House for the Blind, a dot height is supported for now). But the signing with sighted allies, hand-coding
nonprofit focusing on nonvisual, braille, chance to explore any given image in detail lines and shapes, drafting by hand with

The Monarch, a tabletop device
featuring a refreshable tactile
graphic and braille display, is set
to enter field testing this fall.
tactile tools, or using proprietary software
(like Thinkable’s TactileView) that allows us
to create and move objects and incorporate
labels using an accessible menu system.  blind people can consult as they work to
Learning what’s possible
Very little of what I’ve learned about tactile
graphics was taught to me formally. Instead,
I’ve relied on a web of blind folks and sighted
allies who have themselves learned from a
friend or through experimentation. Engaging
with graphics as a blind person requires
access to both equipment and a community
of practice. Fundamentally, we need what
everybody learning about technology needs:
mentorship, support, accessible tools and
a chance to build skills with them, and a
glimpse of what’s possible.  them, they can begin to imagine what else
My first few months at the Dimensions
Lab were strangely quiet: I had expected
droves of people signing up to make accessi-
ble graphics for free. But when I told patrons
about the lab, more than one of them asked
me: Why would they want graphics?  understanding, a sudden release from frus-
We are so accustomed to living in text-
only mode that we often don’t know where
to start with tactile images, and we might
not even think of ourselves as missing out.
These days, I keep a wide variety of tactile
graphics on hand to show different kinds
of patrons why images matter. A colleague
contributed her excellent handwriting to a
beautiful, scaled-up cursive alphabet that
refine their signatures. A web app called
TMAP, invented by the blind designer and
tactile cartographer Josh Miele and pro-
vided free of charge by the LightHouse
for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San
Francisco, generates tactile street maps on
demand for any address. And Minh Ha’s
coloring pages of guide dogs in harnesses,
flower bouquets, and intricate mandalas
pair nicely with braille-labeled crayons
to provide a gentle, joyful introduction to
imagery for all ages. Once patrons encoun-
ter a tactile graphic that’s meaningful to
they might like to explore.  receive what they don’t demand. Along with
As I think back to the moment when I
first felt our new house’s floor plan under
my fingertips after struggling to imagine
it through words, I remember the rush of
tration and confusion. I felt almost spoiled
by precision and ease: a tactile graphic was
the ideal tool to help me envision our future
home and make decisions about it with
confidence. As a tech educator, sparking
that moment of tech euphoria for someone
35
is the best part of my job. Some patrons
experience it when they use an accessible
compass on their phone, download a book
for the first time, or turn on audio descrip-
tion for their favorite show. Patrons come
to me for help with technology but leave—if
I’m doing my best work—with a belief in
their own abilities and excitement about
exploring tools that enhance their skills.
Tactile graphics can unlock strengths and
possibilities in spatial learning and creation
that blind and low-vision patrons might
never have considered. 
Though the technical limitations involved
in making these graphics are significant,
lack of access or even awareness is a larger
problem. People without access to graph-
ics don’t demand them, and they’ll rarely
a growing movement of blind people and
allies, I’m trying to break that cycle. 
For three days in March, the library’s
community room hosted an inaugural
tactile art teach-in. Participants learned
to draw by hand using a low-tech prod-
uct called the Sensational BlackBoard to
raise tactile lines on ordinary paper with
ballpoint pens. They used sound cues and
ribbons run through frames to learn about
perspective. They explored maps and wrote
code to make digital drawings. Together,
we shared a space where nonvisual access
to images was not just expected but cele-
brated, and where everybody understood
that engaging with images for the first
time, or the first time since vision loss,
can be hard and vulnerable work. We
confronted the stark reality that most of
us have become habituated to a state of
image poverty and affirmed that we need,
deserve, and can flourish with access to
tactile images. We demonstrated that image
poverty in our community is avoidable. 
Image literacy is important, from a
blind baby’s first picture book to the maps,
charts, and graphics that help us under-
stand what words fail to capture. If we
act from the proposition that images are
for everyone, we can create that reality. 
Chancey Fleet is the assistive
technology coordinator at the New
York Public Library.
36

Monica Sanders has spent her career advocating

for more equitable disaster policies. She
believes broadband access needs to be a part of
that conversation.

Connecting

climate
change
and the

digital
divide
By Colleen Hagerty

Photographs by Alyssa Schukar

38
T
he Wi-Fi signal is
weak outside the
Frederick Douglass
National Historic Site
in Anacostia, a historic
African-American sec-
tion of Washington, DC.
The abolitionist leader’s former home
sits serenely atop a grassy hill in the oth-
erwise bustling neighborhood. It is one
of Monica Sanders’s final stops on an
overcast December afternoon. Facing
the property, she holds her iPhone out to
measure Wi-Fi speeds. The readings flutter
between single and double digits before
settling on a final result: 10.8 megabits
per second (Mbps) download and 8.23
Mbps upload. Much faster than dial-up, to
be sure. But these speeds fail to meet the
Federal Communications Commission’s
minimum to qualify as broadband service,
despite the multiple free municipal Wi-Fi
access spots in the area.
Sanders, an adjunct professor of law at
Georgetown University, isn’t just checking
Wi-Fi speeds. She’s drawing connections
between a host of indicators at the inter-
section of internet availability, environ-
mental risk, and historical racial inequity.
The findings will be added to a report that
Sanders and her colleagues are assembling
for the Undivide Project, a nonprofit she
launched in 2022. The organization con-
ducts research pro bono for communities
to help them document evidence of the
digital divide—the gap between areas with
and without adequate internet access—as
well as the root causes and linked effects
of this discrepancy.
So far, her findings in Anacostia fit a pat-
tern Sanders has noticed walking around
low-income majority-minority neighbor-
hoods throughout the US: a lack of internet
access mirrors other inequities. In neigh-
borhoods shaped by racism and insufficient
infrastructure investment, among other
structural choices, residents can face dis-
proportionate risk from climate change,
affecting everything from flood vulnera-
bility to the ability to get disaster warnings.
This is what researchers call “cascading
risks,” she says. “How do we understand
what’s going on with internet speeds?”
What are “the legal and social as well as
geographical reasons why there’s no cov-
erage in some places?”
After she records the Wi-Fi numbers,
she checks the temperature: 46.9 °F. Then,
as she did at a series of sites earlier that
day—outside the Anacostia train station,
a local charter school, and an under-
construction hospital, to name a few—she
lifts her cell phone and snaps a photo of
the scene to help with the record-keeping.
Exclusionary practices like redlin-
ing, which long restricted access to loans
and suppressed home values in many
majority-minority neighborhoods, have
created generational inequity throughout
the United States. Though redlining was
banned decades ago, these areas are still
more likely to be economically depressed,
and their public services are more likely
to be underfunded. Sanders believes the
digital divide is another artifact of these
policies. So are the additional difficulties
communities may face in weathering the
threats posed by extreme heat, flooding,
and other hazards intensified by climate
change.
Studies from the Pew Research Center,
the most recent conducted in 2021, have
Policy choices have shaped how
vulnerable communities will be to natural
hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes.
repeatedly found that Black and Hispanic
adults in the United States are less likely
than white adults to have broadband access
at home. Researchers have also linked the
legacy of redlining to heightened flood
risks and higher temperatures due in part
to a lack of investment in infrastructure
such as tree cover and sewage systems.
The connection between internet
access and disaster resiliency has also
been established. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency’s 2022 National
Preparedness Report listed several societal
factors that have been found to affect the
severity of a disaster in a given community,
including “access to technology.” Without
it, communities risk missing crucial warn-
ings and other disaster-related information
like evacuation recommendations and aid
offerings, not to mention access to media
reports and other online resources.
The Undivide Project receives funding
through a mix of grants and donations and
has memorandums of understanding with
Georgetown and a few other universities,
which allow Sanders to bring on student
interns. The reports it has compiled in
Anacostia, as well as other neighborhoods
in DC and in Louisiana, are available for
free on its website.
What residents choose to do with the
information the project collects is up to
them, but Sanders uses her understanding
of the disaster landscape to offer advice
on next steps. Among other services, she
helps translate government jargon and
requirements into understandable terms
for residents and connects them with
other organizations that can provide direct
support, such as funding or infrastructure
development.
The ultimate goal, Sanders says, is for
residents to be able to tackle or mitigate
whatever comes their way next, without
any further help from her organization.
anders, a Louisiana native, knows
S what it feels like to have a disaster
upend your world: in 2005, she was
at home in New Orleans getting ready
for her first semester of law school when
Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Her expe-
rience of the storm, which killed nearly
1,400 people, displaced an estimated 1 mil-
lion, and caused $125 billion in damages,
shaped her career path. The immediate

Documenting inequity
The Undivide Project creates reports that document overlapping
inequities in communities. The screenshot below is from the group’s
“StoryMap” on Buzzard Point in Washington, DC.
aftermath delayed her first semester at
school; in the years to come, it informed
the sort of work she was interested in pur-
suing. She was a senior committee coun-
sel for the House and Senate Committees
on Homeland Security, worked on the
Small Business Administration’s response
to disasters including Hurricane Maria,
served as a senior policy and legal advisor
for the American Red Cross, and was pol-
icy director of the Internet Infrastructure
Coalition.
The Undivide Project marries her
understanding of what it means to be
affected by a disaster with her knowledge
of how Washington and disaster-related
policies work. She knows what it’s like to
have outside agencies or organizations
come in with big promises; she’s also seen
how those same groups can sometimes
fail to reach the communities that need
funding and assistance the most.
“In Saint John [Parish] and Saint James
Parish, there are still roofs that have not
been fixed from Ida and still massive levels
of displacement,” Sanders says, referring
to the 2021 hurricane that caused more
than two dozen deaths in Louisiana and
cost the state an estimated $55 billion. That
storm inspired her own family to compile
an emergency evacuation fund, she says—
money that can give them some peace of
mind heading into yet another hurricane
season. But she believes that other resi-
dents dealing with ongoing issues from
Ida have not received adequate support.
Sanders splits her time between DC and
her home state, where she is a senior fellow
with the Disaster Resilience Leadership
Academy at Tulane University and teaches a
39
course she designed on disaster equity. Some
of her Georgetown and Tulane students are
working as interns on projects related to the
Undivide Project, including drafting policy
papers and using a geographic information
system to lay out the Wi-Fi and environmen-
tal data points they are collecting in areas
like Anacostia on interactive maps.
Working with the project, students
learn about the layers of policies and deci-
sions that contribute to how hard a com-
munity is hit by extreme weather and other
hazards of the natural and built worlds.
“We’re looking at all the different out-
side risks people are having because of
climate change,” Sanders says.
In the same way that redlining has
shaped the development of neighbor-
hoods, policy choices have shaped how
vulnerable communities will be to natural
hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes.
Think of the way building codes have been
developed to mitigate the worst effects of
coastal flooding or seismic shaking; in the
absence of such regulations in the past,
communities were developed in high-risk
coastal regions or on seismic faults, making
them far more vulnerable than other areas.
“For me as a Louisianan, it is not always
as severe as, you know, we get a killer storm
every three years,” Sanders says. “It’s also
as subtle as everyone in this neighbor-
hood walks around in closed-toed shoes
because they’re so used to having [flood]
water … Sometimes when we’re thinking
about research or community engagement
projects, we have these big ideas, but a lot
of times, it’s right in our face.”
The argument that disasters happen
“by design,” when the natural world and
the world shaped by humans intersect, was
laid out by the sociologist Dennis Mileti
in his 1999 book Disasters by Design: A
Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the
United States. It’s an idea that is widely
accepted by disaster researchers—there’s
even an international organization called
No Natural Disasters. At its conference last
year, Sanders was a presenter, explaining
how use of the word “natural” removes
responsibility from those in power who
have the ability to craft policies that could
40
better support vulnerable communities. She
pointed as an example to the intersection of
industry pollution, sea-level rise, and inade-
quate infrastructure in Louisiana’s “Cancer
Alley,” which is one of the areas the Undivide
Project has mapped to demonstrate how
these risks compound at residents’ expense.
S
anders hatched the idea for the
Undivide Project during the covid-
19 pandemic. She was volunteer-
ing with RowdyOrb.it, a Baltimore-based
organization that trains and hires people
to install mesh networks in their own
neighborhoods in order to build commu-
nity, improve access to high-speed inter-
net, and generate local wealth. Walking
around one of those neighborhoods in
2019, Sanders remembers, she saw a tell-
tale sign of flooding: water marks on the
third or fourth steps leading up to houses.
“As we’re going through the neighbor-
hood working on the Wi-Fi issue, that’s
when I came to the realization—I was
like, this is a redlined neighborhood. They
have urban heat issues, which have already
been studied, but not by anyone from the
community,” Sanders says. “It can’t be a
coincidence that all of these things are
happening at the same time.”
Jonathan Moore, RowdyOrb.it’s
founder, sees the overlap as well.
“We’re recycling the same problems,
but just in the digital world,” Moore says.
“How do we make sure the biases that exist
in normal society and the redlining that
exists in normal society don’t exist online?”
But Sanders says she struggled to
convince other colleagues and realized
it would take more than anecdotal evi-
dence—she needed research and proof to
ensure that future policies would address
these communities holistically, rather than
cherry-picking issues in a way that would
only chip away at the larger problem. The
Undivide Project is an effort to gather that
data, drawing further inspiration from
RowdyOrb.it’s community-focused model.
In 2020, almost 20,000 households
in Baltimore with school-age children
did not have broadband or computers at
home, according to a report from the Abell
Foundation. Working with a cadre of other
local nonprofit organizations and using
funding from the Internet Society, locals
trained through RowdyOrb.it installed
antennas on city schools, community cen-
ters, and churches in Baltimore throughout
the year. RowdyOrb.it has since received
additional funding from United Way of
Central Maryland, which is supporting
new infrastructure that can also reach
individual residences. The organization
says its community hot spots now serve
around 2,000 people each week, a num-
ber they expect to spike to 6,000 once the
new installations are complete.
Moore cites studies that have found
Wi-Fi access to be a social determinant
of health, providing essential information
about everything from health-care options
to educational and economic opportu-
nities. A stable internet connection can
also dictate how much health-related data
a community is able to collect, as Moore
and Sanders discovered firsthand when
they found they did not have good enough
service to install air quality monitors a few
years back. They had hoped to track pollu-
tion levels across different neighborhoods
in Baltimore, but without Wi-Fi, the sensors
could not collect adequate longitudinal data.
“We’re recycling the same problems ... in the
digital world. How do we make sure the biases
that exist in normal society and the redlining
that exists in normal society don’t exist online?”
High-speed broadband access should
now be considered an “essential resource,”
argues Ernesto Falcon, senior legisla-
tive counsel for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, likening it to clean water
or affordable electricity. It’s a stance the
White House has echoed; in 2022 the
Biden administration created a Task Force
to Prevent Digital Discrimination that has
been charged with promoting equitable
access to broadband nationwide. Billions of
dollars in funding from the Infrastructure
Investment and Jobs Act that Congress
passed in 2021 is also being put toward
building “future-proof” broadband infra-
structure, which Falcon says is poised
to make a significant impact on what he
describes as “digital redlining.”
He cautions that this funding is another
tool, though, rather than an ultimate fix—
as with any infrastructure, officials at state
or local levels need to step up and ensure
that it is implemented equitably and on a
reasonable timeline, and funded to last.
Without attention to the underlying issues
that caused the problem in the first place,
unintended consequences can arise.
W
hile increasing internet access
is the key mission of Sanders’s
and Moore’s initiatives, it also
carries a risk: a number of projects expand-
ing broadband access in cities have been
associated with gentrification, increasing
property values and making the area less
and less affordable. This is part of the rea-
son Sanders is so adamant about letting
community members direct her team’s
efforts in their neighborhoods, something
Moore also models through RowdyOrb.it.
Moore says his goal is to create a “com-
munity of stakeholders,” training local young
people, veterans, and previously incarcer-
ated people to both install and maintain
such infrastructure. He was inspired by
the work of NYC Mesh, which similarly
looks to connect underserved residents and
has various payment tiers and incentives
to encourage neighbors to join the net-
work. By making sure its services remain
accessible—and even bringing money back
into the community by cultivating a new
workforce—RowdyOrb.it gives residents
a better chance of being able to enjoy the
benefits without being displaced by the
costs, he says.

Sanders gathers evidence of issues
that arise when neighborhoods
are shaped by factors such as racism
and insufficient investment
in infrastructure.
For Sanders, it’s about equipping resi-
dents to be their own advocates, starting
with the research itself.
When she started working in Anacostia,
she got in touch with a resident-led organi-
zation called Ward 8 Community Economic
Development, which has for years been
drafting a plan to revitalize the commu-
nity’s economy and curb gentrification.
In a recently released report, the group
proposed a “digital collective” to serve as a
virtual “community-based communication
and organizing hub.” To make it possible
for the entire community to be included,
the report acknowledges, internet access
will have to be expanded.
The Undivide Project’s maps can offer a
starting place for considering where to put
that new infrastructure, taking into account
not only which areas lack broadband access
but also whether proposed sites for new
access points might expose residents to
environmental hazards like heat or chem-
ical contamination.
“If it’s a site where they are thinking
about having people gather and connect
and do those things, we want the com-
munity to ask me more questions about
what’s happening at the locations where
the money is gonna go,” Sanders says.
Mustafa Abdul-Salaam, the facilita-
tor of the Ward 8 Community Economic
Development planning process, thinks
digital technology can be a “change agent”
for communities like his, disrupting the
status quo and changing how resources are
allocated. But he sees this as just part of a
larger shift that requires acknowledging
the role racism has played in marginaliz-
ing Black communities in the first place.
41
“There has to be a change of mindset to
see Black communities as viable places to
do business and to direct resources, because
until that happens, we’re going to continue
to see the inequities that exist,” he says.
Sanders sees young people as critical
to creating lasting change within com-
munities. Along with her university stu-
dents, she’s been working with teens from
Anacostia High School as part of her local
neighborhood mapping team.
“They are the living, breathing Ward 8,”
says Xavier Brown, who is establishing a
program with the University of the District
of Columbia to offer college courses to the
high school students and helped facili-
tate student involvement in the Undivide
Project. “It’s important for them to really
recognize the power within themselves
to be at the forefront of what’s going on.”
In May, some of the students presented
a PowerPoint and a map of Ward 8 to offi-
cials from the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Department of the Interior,
the Parks Department, and other federal
agencies, identifying areas with both insuf-
ficient broadband service and higher tem-
peratures. The hope was to encourage the
relevant agencies to invest in technological
development and tree planting, thereby
giving residents not only better internet
access but cooler spaces in which to uti-
lize it. Sanders arranged the meeting and
one of her university students helped them
with some of the work, but she says it came
at the request of the student researchers
themselves. The students also put together
a policy and advocacy guide to teach their
peers how to similarly step up for issues
they care about in their community.
“For them to be able to say, ‘We want
to talk to the mayor, we want to talk to
a representative from the Department
of Interior, we want someone from
the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration down here;
here is our vision laid out very clearly, and
this is [something] that we’re going to ...
continue advocating for’—to me, that’s a
win along the way,” she says.
Colleen Hagerty is a freelance journal-
ist based in Los Angeles.
 43

Still finding their voice

For decades, The iPad What By Julie Kim

assistive should have happened?
communication revolutionized Illustration
devices were access. by Nico Ortega
available only
to a small
fraction of
non-speaking
people.
 44
In
December 2022, a few months after
learning that he’d won an Iowa Arts
Fellowship to attend the MFA program
at the University of Iowa, David James
“DJ” Savarese sat for a televised inter-
view with a local news station. But in
order to answer the anchorman’s ques-
tions, Savarese, a 30-year-old poet with
autism who uses alternative communi-
cation methods, needed to devise a com-
munication hack. He’d been coming up
with them since early in his childhood.
Savarese participated remotely, from
his living room couch in Iowa City.
“What motivates you to write your
poetry?” the news anchor asked.
Watching the interview online, I
could see Savarese briefly turn his head
away from the camera, as if to compose
a thought. He leaned in toward his lap-
top, a MacBook Pro that doubles as his
communication device, and tapped a
few keys to activate a synthesized voice.
“Poetry offers me a way to answer less
and converse more.”
“At a time when fear dominates
the airwaves,” he continued, “poetry
“EVERYTHING MOVES SLOWLY BECAUSE
IT HAS TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH THE PAST,
WHICH MEANS IF THE PAST
WAS KIND OF CLUNKY,
PART OF THE PRESENT
IS KIND OF CLUNKY TOO.”
reawakens the senses and dislodges
us from a strictly meaning-based expe-
rience, freeing ideas to mingle across
boundaries of the brain and moving
us beyond artificial, classificatory con-
structions of power.” He swayed and
nodded to his sentences, which rose
and fell like music.
I shifted my attention to trying to
figure out Savarese’s technical setup.
I didn’t see any wires or devices in
the frame. Was he using a brain chip
to wirelessly transmit his thoughts to
a word-processing application on his
computer? I wondered, “Am I looking
at the future here?”
There was a reason for my particular
focus: at the time, I’d been researching
augmentative and alternative com-
munication (AAC) technology for my
daughter, who is five years old and also
non-speaking. Underwhelmed by the
available options—a handful of iPad
apps that look (and work) as if they
were coded in the 1990s—I’d delved
into the speculative, more exciting
world of brain-computer interfaces.
Could a brain chip allow my daughter
to verbally express herself with the
same minimal effort it takes me to
open my mouth and speak? How might
she sound, telling me about her day at
school? Singing “Happy Birthday” or
saying “Mama”? I wanted the future
to be here now.
But watching Savarese revealed
magical thinking on my part. Behind
the curtain, the mechanics of his par-
ticipation were extremely low tech—
kind of janky, in fact.
The process didn’t fit the mold of
what I thought technology should do:
take the work out of a manual opera-
tion and make it faster and easier. The
network had invited Savarese onto the
program and a producer had emailed
the questions to him in advance. To
prepare, Savarese had spent about
15 minutes typing his answers into
a Microsoft Word file. When it came
time for the live interview, the anchor-
man recited the questions, to which
Savarese responded on his MacBook by
using Word’s “Read Aloud” function to
speak his pre-composed answers. The
types of readily available technology
that could power an assistive commu-
nication device—AI, natural-language
processing, word prediction, voice
banking, eye-gaze tracking—played no
role here. And yet, without any of the
features I’d expected to see, Savarese
had the tools he needed to express the
fullness of his thoughts.
Six years into the wild, emotion-
ally draining ride of raising a disabled
child in an ableist world, I’ve learned to
keep my mind open to every possibil-
ity. While my daughter is intellectually
and physically delayed—she was born
missing 130 genes and 10 million base
pairs of DNA—she is a healthy, joyful,
and opinionated child. Since she came
IOWA LOCAL 5 NEWS/YOUTUBE
into our lives, I have been amazed over
and over that simple things that would
make her life easier—curb cuts, thicker
crayons, kindness—aren’t more preva-
lent in our advanced society. But we do
have a range of more sophisticated and

To prepare for an on-air a Microsoft Word file.
interview, DJ Savarese, During the broadcast,
a poet with autism he responded to the
who uses alternative anchorman by using
communication methods, Word’s “Read Aloud”
typed answers to pre- function to speak his
submitted questions into pre-composed answers.
inventive things I didn’t think would
ever exist—calming VR environments
built into Frozen-themed MRI scanners,
for example. So I hope it makes sense
that initially, while watching Savarese
speak, I assumed he was using an
implanted brain chip to automatically
transmit his thoughts into a Word doc.
That just seemed to me more plausible
than revolutionary. When I realized
there was no brain chip—just a few
emails and Microsoft Word—a famil-
iar sense of disappointment landed me
back on Earth with a thud.
verything moves slowly
“
E because it has to be
compatible with the
past, which means if
the past was kind of
clunky, part of the present is kind of
clunky too,” Mark Surabian, an AAC
consultant, told me.
Surabian, 61, has trained adminis-
trators and speech therapists at hun-
dreds of schools for 35 years. He has
taught graduate students at nearly every
special-education teacher training pro-
gram in New York City, including those
45
at Columbia Teachers College and New
York University. He specializes in cus-
tomizing off-the-shelf AAC apps to
meet the specific needs of his own cli-
ents and has made a career of being the
indispensable “tech guy” who partners
with speech and language pathologists,
teachers, and neuropsychologists to
find the right hardware and software
for their clients.
The default TouchChat display of
PRC-Saltillo’s communication device,
for example, consists of 12 rows of eight
buttons displaying a mix of letters, object
icons (“apple”), category icons (“food”),
and navigation elements (back arrows)—
many of them in garish neon colors.
Part of what I find infuriating about the
interface is how it treats every button
similarly—they’re all the same size, 200
by 200 pixels, and there’s no obvious
logic to button placement, text size, or
capitalization. Some words are oddly
abbreviated (“DESCRB”) while others
(“thank you”) are scaled down to fit the
width of the box. The graphic for “cool”
is a smiling stick figure giving a thumbs
up; aside from the fact it’s redundant
with “good” (a hand-only thumbs up),
“yes,” and “like” (both smiley faces), what
if the user means cool in temperature?
Established principles of informa-
tion hierarchy and interface design for
AAC devices aren’t standard—it’s up
to Surabian to define the number and
size of buttons on each screen, as well
as icon size, type size, and whether
a button’s position should change or
remain fixed.
I’d called Surabian in hopes of being
wowed. When he and I met up at a café
in lower Manhattan, I got excited by the
rolling briefcase by his side, thinking
he might show me the coolest stuff
happening in AAC. But I was again
underwhelmed.
Because the reality is this: the last
major advance in AAC technology hap-
pened 13 years ago, an eternity in tech-
nology time. On April 3, 2010, Steve
Jobs debuted the iPad. What for most
people was basically a more convenient
46

form factor was something far more

consequential for non-speakers: a life-
changing revolution in access to an
attractive, portable, and powerful com-
munication device for just a few hun-
dred dollars. Like smartphones, iPads
had built-in touch screens, but with the
key advantage of more space to display
dozens of icon-based buttons on a sin-
gle screen. And for the first time, AAC
users could use the same device they
used for speaking to do other things, like
text, FaceTime, browse the web, watch
movies, record audio, and share photos.
“School districts and parents were
buying an iPad, bringing it to us, and
saying ‘Make this work,’” wrote Heidi
LoStracco and Renee Shevchenko, two
Philadelphia-based speech and lan-
guage pathologists who worked exclu-
sively with non-speaking children. “It
got to the point where someone was
asking us for iPad applications for AAC
every day. We would tell them, ‘There’s
not really an effective AAC app out
there yet, but when there, is, we’ll be
the first to tell you about it.’”
A piece of hardware, however
impressively designed and engineered,
is only as valuable as what a person can
do with it. After the iPad’s release, the
flood of new, easy-to-use AAC apps
that LoStracco, Shevchenko, and their
clients wanted never came.
Today, there are about a half-dozen
apps, each retailing for $200 to $300,
that rely on 30-year-old conventions
asking users to select from menus of
crudely drawn icons to produce text
and synthesized speech. Beyond the
high price point, most AAC apps require On the NovaChat
communication device’s
customization by a trained specialist
default TouchChat
to be useful. This could be the reason display, all the
access remains a problem; LoStracco buttons are the same
size, and there’s no
and Shevchenko claim that only 10% obvious logic to button
of non-speaking people in the US are placement, text size, or
capitalization.
using the technology. (AAC Counts,
a project of CommunicationFIRST,
a national advocacy organization for
people with speech disabilities, recently
highlighted the need for better data
about AAC users.)

There aren’t many other options avail-
able, though the possibilities do depend
on the abilities of the user. Literate
non-speakers with full motor control
of their arms, hands, and fingers, for
example, can use readily available text-
to-speech software on a smartphone, tab-
let, or desktop or laptop computer. Those
whose fine motor control is limited can
also use these applications with the assis-
tance of an eye-controlled laser pointer,
a physical pointer attached to their head,
or another person to help them operate
a touch screen, mouse, or keyboard. The
options dwindle for pre-literate and
cognitively impaired users who com-
municate with picture-based vocabu-
laries. For my daughter, I was briefly
intrigued by a “mid-tech” option—the
Logan ProxTalker, a 13-inch console with
a built-in speaker and a kit of RFID-
enabled sound tags. One of five stations
on the console recognizes the tags, each
pre-programmed to speak its unique
icon. But then I saw its price—$3,000
for 140 tags. (For context, the National
Institutes of Health estimates that the
average five-year-old can recognize over
10,000 words.)
I am left to dream of the brain-
computer interfaces heralded as the
next frontier—implants that would send
signals from the central nervous system
straight to a computer, without any voice
or muscular activation. But the con-
cept of BCIs is riddled with significant
and legitimate ethical issues. Partly for
that reason, BCIs are too far off to take
seriously right now. In the meantime,
the mediocre present, it’s hard to think
that non-disabled consumers would
be expected to accept the same slow
pace of incremental improvement for
as essential a human function as speech.
n the late 2000s, AAC companies
I braced themselves for a massive
COURTEY OF PRC-SALTILLO
shift. When I talked to Sarah Wilds,
chief operating officer for PRC-
Saltillo, she described the mood
at the company’s annual meeting in
2008, the year she began working there.
IT’S HARD TO THINK
THAT NON-DISABLED CONSUMERS
WOULD BE EXPECTED TO ACCEPT
THE SAME SLOW PACE OF INCREMENTAL
IMPROVEMENT FOR AS ESSENTIAL
A HUMAN FUNCTION AS SPEECH.
“We’re all speech pathologists
[together] in this room,” Wilds told
me, “and somebody said, ‘There’s this
thing called the iPod Touch.’ And every-
one said, ‘We have computers. Why
would anyone want a small screen?’”
“The next year, people said, ‘Oh
my gosh, they’re doing it—and what
if those screens get bigger?’ And the
year after that, the iPad was here. We
were all horrified that anyone could
get to the store, pick one out, and put
an app on it.”
Horrified, that is, because they
assumed the new technology would
radically undercut the price of the kinds
of tools they were making and selling.
AAC developers, in stark contrast to
a company like Apple, weren’t set up
to sell their software directly to the
masses in 2010. The small handful of
AAC players in the US—PRC-Saltillo
and Dynavox were the largest—had
been running modest operations mak-
ing and selling programs pre-loaded
onto their proprietary hardware since
the 1980s (though PRC introduced its
first device in 1969). Their founders,
former linguists and speech therapists,
were optimistic about the technology’s
potential; they were also realists who
recognized that assistive communica-
tion would never be a booming busi-
ness. The assistive communication
market was, and still is, relatively small.
According to the National Institute on
Deafness and Other Communication
Disorders, between 5% and 10% of
people living in the US have a speech
impairment, and only a small fraction
of them require assistive devices.
When I asked Wilds how many
people use PRC-Saltillo’s products,
she demurred, noting that the com-
pany is private and doesn’t publicly
disclose its balance sheets. About the
landscape in general, she offered this:
customer demand for apps developed
by AAC companies is generally 10 times
greater than demand for their hardware
products. Oh, and about that “special
dedicated communication hardware
device”—it’s probably an iPad.
In fall of 2022, when I set out to find
a device for my daughter, her speech
therapist referred me to AbleNet, a
third-party assistive technology pro-
vider. (Public school districts in the
US can also procure AAC devices on
behalf of students who need them, but
at the time, my daughter wasn’t eligible
because the provision wasn’t listed in
her individualized education program.)
An AbleNet representative sent me a
quote for a Quick Talker Freestyle, an
“iPad-based speech device” for which
they would bill our health insurance
$4,190. The “family contribution,” the
representative reassured me, would be
only $2,245.
For that price, surely the Quick
Talker Freestyle would offer some-
thing more advanced than an app I
could download onto the refurbished
iPad I’d already bought from Apple for
$279? (A new ninth-generation iPad
retails for $329.) When I pressed for
details, I was handed off to a benefits
assistance supervisor, who suggested
I sign up for the company’s payment
plan. (I did not.) I would later learn that
in order to comply with Medicaid and
health insurance requirements, third-
party AAC technology providers usu-
ally strip Apple’s native applications
off the iPads they distribute—making
48
them less useful, at 10 or 20 times the
price, than the same piece of hard-
ware that I (or anyone else) can buy
off the shelf.
When I reached out to AbleNet
for comment, Joe Volp, vice president
of marketing and customer relations,
detailed customer-service benefits built
into the pricing, including a device trial
period, a five-year unlimited warranty,
and quick turnaround for repairs. Those
are nice options, but they don’t come
close to justifying the markup.
I told Wilds about my experience;
she sounded genuinely sympathetic.
“I think it’s very difficult to be an app-
only company in the world of assis-
tive technology,” she explained. AAC
companies, she suggested, need to sell
expensive hardware to fund the devel-
opment of their apps.
Most AAC companies were started
by experts in technology development,
not distribution. For at least the last
three decades, they’ve developed their
products as FDA-approved medical
devices to increase the chances that
Medicaid, private health insurers, and
school districts will pay for them. To
compensate for the small market size,
developers backed into a convoluted
business model that required a physi-
cian or licensed speech pathologist to
formally “prescribe” the device, strate-
gically (and astronomically) priced to
subsidize the cost of its development.
“IMAGINING THAT TECHNOLOGY
ALONE CAN LIBERATE US
IS A BIT SHORTSIGHTED
AND, IN SOME WAYS, DISABLING.”
Before 2010, companies building
their own AAC hardware and software
from scratch could get away with keep-
ing their pricing strategy opaque. But
when Apple mass-produced a better
version of the hardware they’d been
developing in house, the smoke and
mirrors disappeared, exposing a sys-
tem that looks a lot like price gouging.
But it would be too easy to call AAC
companies the villain; considering they
operate in the same market-driven
system as the most popular consumer
technology products in the world, it’s a
minor miracle they even exist. And the
problem of jacking up products’ prices
to cover the cost of their development
is hardly unique. All too often—in the
absence of a public or private entity
that proactively funds highly special-
ized technology with the potential to
change, even save, a small number of
lives—some form of price gouging is
the norm.
Perhaps it’s my expectations that
are flawed. It may be naïve to expect
affordable, groundbreaking AAC tech-
nology to spring from the same con-
ditions that support billions of people
selling makeup and posting selfies.
Maybe there needs to be an altogether
separate arena, complete with its own
incentives, for developing technology
products aimed at small populations
of people who could truly benefit from
them.
n March, Savarese agreed to meet
I me online for a live conversation.
(From our email exchanges, I
sensed he was most comfortable
communicating asynchronously, in
writing.) I sent him a list of questions
in advance. I wanted his thoughts on
some not-easy topics, and I didn’t want
the inconvenience of the live medium
to limit what he had to say.
A few minutes before our sched-
uled meeting, Savarese emailed me
an eight-page Word document, into
which he’d copied my questions and
added his answers. I recognized my
own questions as well as a few of his
responses—a mix of passages quoted
from his previous writings and some
new material he’d typed in.
One question about AAC devices
that Savarese added to my list: “Have
they improved?” To which he replied,
“Sure: lighter, less expensive, consol-
idated all my word-based communica-
tion and work needs into one smallish
device (laptop or iPad). The subtlety
of voices is improving although I’ve
chosen to use the same voice through-
out the years and cannot come close
to replicating what a poem I wrote
should sound like without coaching
and recording a trusted, speaking poet
reading them aloud.”
Given the existence of the Word
document—which was essentially a
transcript of an interview I was about
to conduct—what would be the pur-
pose of our live conversation? I sug-
gested to Savarese that I might read
the document aloud—the words I’d
written myself, at least. It felt inva-
sive to use my voice to read Savarese’s
responses; he gets understandably
frustrated by the tendency of others
to speak for him.
Instead, I asked him to paste his
pre-written answers into the chat win-
dow or to use the Read Aloud func-
tion to speak them. Over the course
ALI LAPETINA
of the interview, I paraphrased his
responses and asked follow-up ques-
tions to ensure I was interpreting him

Savarese looks back
on his early AAC
years with surprising
wistfulness: “Instead
of insisting I join
their speaking world,
my parents learned these
new languages with me.”
correctly. I followed his lead in alternat-
ing between modes of communication.
In this way, Savarese discussed his
personal history of AAC communica-
tion. As a six year-old, he’d learned sign
language alongside his non-disabled
parents. In elementary school, they
equipped him with a $17 label maker
from Staples to teach him sight words
and help him learn to read and type. In
fourth grade, Savarese started typing out
his thoughts on a personal computer
called the Gemini, a souped-up $12,000
version of a late-’90s Apple laptop.
The Gemini required plug-in power
and a teacher to help him move it. In
keeping with the Medicaid require-
ments (which force manufacturers
to remove features that might tempt
parents to use a device themselves),
it had no word processor or internet
access. Savarese adapted by continu-
ing to use his label maker to fill out
tests and write poems and stories. To
write faster, he assembled pre-printed
paper strips of commonly used words
and phrases, pulled from a word bank
made by his mother.
49
“It was at the time a big deal for
me to have what seemed like my very
own computer,” Savarese told me.
“So that status sort of outweighed the
inconvenience.”
Savarese looks back on his early
AAC years with surprising wistfulness:
“Instead of insisting I join their speaking
world,” he told me, “my parents learned
these new languages with me … These
technologies were more multisensory,
more communal, and in a sense more
democratic; in pictures, sign language,
and tangible sight words, my parents,
teachers, friends, and I were all learners,
all teachers.” By the time he was in 10th
grade, text-to-speech software was finally
ubiquitous enough to come pre-installed
on a laptop—a single lightweight device
that gave Savarese the ability to commu-
nicate both silently and out loud.
“Imagining that technology alone can
liberate us is a bit shortsighted and, in
some ways, disabling,” he typed to me.
But he does have a wish list of improve-
ments, starting with a louder voice built
into laptops, tablets, and smartphones so
others can hear him better. He’d like slide
presentation software with customizable
script-reading options, so users can sync
their voiceover with the changing slides.
He also thinks that word prediction has
a long way to go to become truly use-
ful—and less prescriptive.
Yet Savarese’s attitude toward AAC
technology remains realistic, even gen-
erous. “I live in a speech-centric society/
world, so I have to have a speech-based
way to communicate to the majority of
people,” he told me. “I am able to make a
living as a writer, filmmaker, presenter,
collaborator, and activist (inter)nation-
ally. My AAC devices have offered me
the public voice I needed to exist as an
essential member of these communities.”
The payoff for Savarese, and for his
audiences, is big: “I think it’s maybe
gotten better for me as I’ve gotten older.
People are invested in hearing what I
have to say.”
Julie Kim is a writer based in New
York City.
50

The
border
lottery An app was meant to streamline
immigration at the border.
It may be making things worse.

By Lorena Ríos

Photographs by
Alicia Fernández

Keisy Plaza looks at her

daughter Arantza Plaza with
disappointment after failing to
get an appointment on the CBP One
app in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
51
52
few minutes before 9
A
a.m. on a day in late
March, Keisy Plaza,
39, leans against a wall
on the corner of Juárez
Avenue and Gardenias
Street in Ciudad Juárez.
It’s the last intersection before Mexico
turns into El Paso, Texas, and a stream of
commuters drive past on their way to work
and other daily activities that intertwine
the two border cities.
I first met Plaza in a small, crowded
shelter a few feet away from the border
wall. Originally from Venezuela, she had
left her home in Colombia seven months
before. She walked a 62-mile stretch of
dense mountainous rainforest and swamp-
land called the Darién Gap with two small
children and crossed several countries on
foot and atop train cars to get to this corner.
Her destination is just a few feet away. But
instead of walking over to the bridge that
serves as an official border crossing and
asking for protection in the United States,
she just stands there with her 20-year-old
daughter, both glued to their phones, as her
seven-year-old daughter and three-year-old
grandson cry for breakfast and attention.
Plaza has been trying every day for weeks
to secure an appointment with Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) so she can
request permission for her family of five to
enter the US. So far, she’s had no luck: each
time, she’s been met with software errors
and frozen screens. When appointment
slots do open up, they fill within minutes.
Plaza has not been the only person to
encounter this new obstacle to finding
refuge in the United States. At the start of
this year, President Biden announced that
people at the southern border who want to
seek asylum in the US must first request
an appointment to meet with an immi-
gration official via a mobile app. The app,
called CBP One, had been used by the US
Department of Homeland Security since
2020, to let travelers send their information
in advance and speed up processing at a
port of entry. But in January, the department
expanded the app’s use to include people
without documentation who are seeking
protection from violence, poverty, or perse-
cution. At the time, Secretary of Homeland
Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas said it was
poised to become “one of the many tools
and processes this administration is pro-
viding for individuals to seek protection in
a safe, orderly, and humane manner and
to strengthen the security of our borders.”
In the months since, the app has only
become more entrenched. On May 11, the
US government lifted a pandemic-era pub-
lic health policy called Title 42 that for a
few years enabled officials to rapidly expel
migrants from the US. CBP One, which
since January had been used to process
humanitarian exemptions to the policy,
stayed. It is one of just a handful of legal
pathways for people seeking protection
to enter the US (they may be allowed in if
they have been denied asylum in another
country, and there is a program that allows
successful applicants from Cuba, Haiti,
Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly in directly).
At the same time, DHS is implementing
harsher consequences for people who don’t
use these pathways. Under a new regulation,
those who enter the US unlawfully are inel-
igible for asylum, with few exceptions. The
policy so tightly restricts avenues for legal
entry that many immigrant rights groups
in the US have called it an “asylum ban.”
For years, the number of migrants and
asylum seekers arriving at the southern
border seeking protection has been more
than what the US government can process
at ports of entry. They often wait in pre-
carious places—border cities like Ciudad
Juárez, Tijuana, Reynosa, and Matamoros,
where shelters are often at full capacity
and migrants are exposed to kidnapping,
extortion, and other dangers. Many people
are homeless, with no running water, no
electricity, no access to school or educa-
tional programs for kids, and no guarantee
of a hot meal. “Mexico doesn’t recognize
this as a humanitarian crisis, but in my
opinion, it is a migration crisis that requires
resources, services, and a humanitarian
response plan,” says Rafael Velásquez,
Mexico director of the International Rescue
Committee, an organization that helps
people affected by crises around the world.
The app essentially adds one more
stop—this time a digital one—in peo-
ple’s migration route to the US. With a
few exceptions, migrants can no longer
approach a US immigration officer at the
southern border or turn themselves in after
crossing to seek protection. Now, they’re
supposed to make an appointment online
to present at the border if they want their
internationally recognized right to seek
asylum in the US upheld. But getting an
appointment, for many people, has been
as challenging as trying to buy a ticket to
a Taylor Swift concert on Ticketmaster.
No one who uses the app knows how
long the wait will be. In late May, I caught
up with Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest
who visits shelters and migrant encamp-
ments in the Mexican border state of
Tamaulipas. He knew people who had
been using CBP One since the first week
of March and still didn’t have an appoint-
ment. “They use it every single day,” he
said, “so that’s three months of daily stress,
of saying, ‘Is today the day I am going to
win this lottery?’ Can you imagine the toll
it takes psychologically, thinking every day,
‘Maybe today is the day’?”
Although CBP has expanded the num-
ber of appointments available each day on
the app and addressed a number of tech-
nical issues, immigration rights activists
argue that the software itself, no matter
how efficient or error-free it becomes, is
A migrant at a makeshift
shelter in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,
shows a smartphone with the
malfunctioning CBP One app.
 “Can you imagine the toll it takes
psychologically, thinking every day,
‘Maybe today is the day’?”
54

an unacceptable barrier. To use it, people

need a compatible mobile device. They
also need a strong internet connection,
resources to pay for data, electricity to
charge their devices, tech literacy, and
other conditions that place the most vul-
nerable migrants at a disadvantage.
“Technology is not policy, and no
matter how many fixes they make to the
app … it’s still not a sufficient system for
people running for their lives,” says Bilal
Askaryar, the interim campaign manager
for #WelcomeWithDignity, a coalition of
organizations, activists, and asylum seekers
that advocates for the rights of immigrants
and refugees. “The issue isn’t the glitches
and the bugs. The issue is the app itself.
That people must have an app to request
protection is misunderstanding the dire
situation these people are in.”
DHS maintains that while the situation
at the border is challenging and difficult,
the department is sticking with its strat-
egy of discouraging people from attempt-
ing unauthorized crossings. At the same
time, it is making more and more CBP One
appointments available: at the beginning of
June, the department expanded the number
of available slots to 1,250 per day, up from
about 750 when the program started. “We
have a plan; we are executing on that plan,”
Mayorkas said on May 5. “Fundamentally,
however, we are working within a broken
immigration system that for decades has
been in dire need of reform.”
Immigrant rights groups are mount-
ing legal challenges to the latest policy
changes. But while the new rule stands,
people contemplating crossing the south-
ern border must make a choice: roll the
dice to see if they can enter the country
officially, apply for asylum in a country
they do not want to settle in (which would
make them ineligible to apply in the US),
or put their lives at risk by attempting to
cross unlawfully.

Norkys A., a Venezuelan migrant and

mother, watches others pass the time
playing games as they wait for an
appointment slot to open up through
the CBP One app.
“That people must have an app to
request protection is misunderstanding
the dire situation these people are in.”
n late March, thousands of migrants and
I asylum seekers wandered the streets
of downtown Ciudad Juárez, passing
time, washing windshields at red lights,
and selling candy on the streets. Others
charged their phones at one of a handful
of free charging stations near the National
Women’s Institute downtown, waited in
line to enter a food kitchen, or watched
as their children played, distancing them-
selves from the grownups’ troubles.
Not far from where Plaza was stand-
ing, Óscar Fuentes approached a woman
selling empanadas to ask her what she
had heard from her usual customers. “No
appointments,” she replied. Fuentes, who
is from Colombia, had been in Juárez for
two months. He was renting a small room
that he shared with 28 other people, but
he counted himself lucky. “Think of all the
people that are staying in places that we
can’t see,” he said.
Mexico is a dangerous place. More
than 100,000 people have disappeared
since 1964, most during the state’s war
on drugs that started in 2006. Migrants
making their way through the country are
especially vulnerable: they risk being kid-
napped, extorted, robbed, and murdered
along their journey. Those who do make
it to the border are not out of danger. On
January 26, for example, a 17-year-old from
Cuba was shot to death in a hotel in the
northern city of Monterrey while waiting
for a scheduled appointment. Days later, a
15-year-old Haitian boy died in a Reynosa
rental house waiting for an appointment
slot, according to local media.
People seeking asylum in the US don’t
have an immigration status in Mexico that
would allow them to seek formal employ-
ment in the country. Some are picked up
off the streets by Mexican immigration
officials and detained in facilities that
pose dangers of their own. In March, 40
migrants awaiting deportation died in a
fire at an immigration detention center
in Ciudad Juárez.
US government officials say that CBP
One is achieving its purpose. Instead of
trying to cross unlawfully, people waiting at
the border are opting to try for a sanctioned
passage. Monthly encounters between
CBP and people trying to enter without
authorization, which reached record highs
in 2022, decreased to around 128,877 in
January—the first decline since February
2021. The number has increased since then,
but it is still lower than in previous years.
But CBP says it can only process so
many people in a day. “We have an oper-
ational capacity at ports of entry because
we are balancing legitimate trade and
travel and other enforcement missions,” a
CBP official told MIT Technology Review
in April. He explained that the agency is
making sure the billions of dollars’ worth
of trade that crosses from Mexico into the
US is processed smoothly, while still work-
ing to catch drug and weapon smuggling:
“We have to balance our finite resources.”
For those waiting at the border, how-
ever, the app represents another chapter
in an already rocky story. For many years,
the backlog at the border was managed
through metering—a simple limit on the
number of people who would be accepted
for processing. Over time, as US policy
shifted, Mexican government officials and
civil society organizations began creating
informal wait lists to organize the queues
of people in Mexican border cities who
wanted to seek asylum in the US.
Then, in March 2020, the US Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention issued
an order under Title 42 of the US code of
laws, expediting expulsions, halting the
processing of asylum claims at ports of
entry, and blocking entry for individu-
als without valid travel documents. After
lawyers and activists filed suit in 2021, the
government introduced exceptions that
56
 57

allowed people to request permission to

enter the US on humanitarian grounds.
Those with a physical or mental illness or
disability were potentially eligible for an
exception, as were those who lacked safe
housing or shelter in Mexico, faced threats
of harm there, or were under 21, over 70,
or pregnant.
The number of people seeking Title
42 exceptions surpassed CBP’s number
of daily slots, and the wait lists created by
nonprofit organizations grew and prolifer-
ated. As of August of last year, there were
over 55,000 people on Title 42 excep-
tion wait lists across different border cit-
ies, according to research by the Strauss
Center for International Security and Law.
Since January, use of CBP One has elimi-
nated the wait lists. But the backlog—and
the protracted waits—have continued.
Mexican officials and civil society orga-
nizations don’t keep track of the num-
bers, but there could be around 660,000
migrants in Mexico, according to United
Nations figures cited by the acting CBP
commissioner, Troy Miller. Shelters reg-
ularly reach full capacity, and wait times
are proving to be long.
The wait-list framework was far from
perfect: it was susceptible to fraud, extor-
tion, and the poor judgment of people
managing the lists. Still, it was a more
humane policy because it was up to people
to decide who was eligible for an excep-
tion, says Thiago Almeida, head of the
Ciudad Juárez field office for the United
Nations’ International Organization for
Migration, an intergovernmental orga-
nization that works to ensure the orderly
and humane management of migration.
With the app, there’s no way to prioritize
those most in need. “People who have
better access to technology, know how to
use it, and have access to faster internet
have a better chance to get an appoint-
ment,” he says.

Migrant children play

at a tourist landmark in
downtown Ciudad Juárez.
58

hen I spoke with Strassburger in

W March, he said CBP was effec-

tively “beta-testing the app on
people in vulnerable situations.” In the
first few months after the rollout of the
appointment system, advocates quickly
identified problems that made the app
difficult or almost impossible to use.
At first, for example, it was avail-
able only in English and Spanish, leav-
ing out migrants who speak Haitian
Creole, Indigenous languages, and more.
Organizations working with migrants also
flagged serious issues with the app’s facial
recognition feature, which is used to estab-
lish that the software is interacting with
a real person and not a bot or malicious
software. Many people with darker skin
tones found that the app failed to regis-
ter their faces.
The facial recognition feature began
improving with CBP One’s update at
the end of February, says Felicia Rangel-
Samponaro, director of Sidewalk School, an
organization that provides shelter and edu-
cational services to migrants and asylum
seekers in Tamaulipas. Sidewalk School
works with a large population of Haitian
migrants and has been calling out the
app’s biases against this population from
the start. “This whole time, Black people
have been left out [of the process],” she
says. “That’s crazy!”
“A lot of the difficulties with live photos
have to do with the quality of the image, not
with the algorithm looking at those photos,”
said the CBP official who spoke with MIT
Technology Review. To eliminate some of
those problems, CBP decreased the num-
ber of live photos required per application,
reducing the data bandwidth needed and
allowing for a smoother experience with
this function. “We saw an increase in the
expediency in which someone was able
to access the application from when we
originally started doing it,” he said.

Migrants get a meal in the basement

of the Cathedral of Ciudad Juárez
(top); Yessica N. and family members
sit on a city sidewalk (middle);
Damaris Hernández leads exercises in
a makeshift shelter (bottom).
 59

The International Organization for

Migration surveyed migrants in Tamaulipas
and found that the app seemed to present
more issues on Huawei phones. Rumors
abounded about potential fixes. Some
migrants believed the iPhone’s iOS system
works better than Android and that older
versions of the app worked better than
the most recent updates. When I asked
the CBP official about these discussions
in April, he said that hardware shouldn’t
be an issue. “You just have to have your
device updated to the most recent soft-
ware,” he said.
Those with hardware that works still
need a broadband internet connection
to use the app. The Wi-Fi connections
in shelters, migrant camps, and hotels
are spotty and slow down considerably
when hundreds of people try to connect
at once. Many migrants buy cellular data
instead, spending between 50 and 100
pesos ($2.50 to $5) a day.
At first, even with a good connection,
people faced issues with frozen screens,
confirmation emails that never arrived,
log-in failures, and errors with the app’s GPS
location data. The app tracks users’ location
and is designed to work only in central and
northern Mexico. Yet some people within
range were having issues with this feature;
they got error messages indicating that they
were too far from a port of entry.
By May, Strassburger says, CBP had
addressed many of the issues that came
with connectivity limitations, but that
hasn’t eliminated all barriers. “The app has
gotten to a much better place in terms of
its functionality,” he says, “but the US gov-
ernment has done everything in its power
to funnel people to use the app as their
one way of crossing, and yet they have not
made it an adequately sufficient avenue.”
There are still not enough appoint-
ments given the number of people “who
are waiting and living in really inhumane

Children focus on a distraction

(top); Keisy Plaza stands near the
international bridge in Ciudad
Juárez in March (middle); women
and children rest in a makeshift
shelter (bottom).
60
conditions,” he says, often facing safety
risks in Mexico. The need for a working
smartphone with enough battery charge
and a good internet connection is “an
expense they are having to make as a
family, prioritizing that over food on any
given day,” he adds. “That continues to be
a decision they have to make.”
n the first months after the CBP One app
I was introduced to make appointments
for entry applications, all the slots avail-
able for the day opened up at 6 a.m. Pacific
time. But people logged in hours earlier.
“People are waking up at 3 a.m. these days,
because they have to get into that app early.
Otherwise the bandwidth overflows and
they don’t get their text confirmation to log
in,” Strassburger said at the time.
On May 5, on top of the increase in daily
appointments, CBP announced changes to
the app that will give users additional time
to complete the appointment request. A big
source of problems and anxiety for migrants
came at this stage of the process, because
people had only minutes to confirm their
slot—if they were lucky enough to get one—
by submitting a photo. If the app had trouble
reading the photo or bandwidth problems
prevented them from uploading it, time
could quickly run out. This happened to Plaza
several times. Each time, she says, she was
devastated by getting so close but failing.
Now, instead of making appointments
available at the same time each day for a
short period, the scheduling system will
let people make requests and confirm
appointments in two separate steps over the
course of two days, essentially giving them
a “longer window of time to ask for and to
confirm their appointment” and reducing
“time pressure and dependency on inter-
net speed and connectivity,” according to a
CBP press release announcing the change.
CBP also stated that it will work to prior-
itize people who have waited the longest.
“It’s taken five months and a lot of
mistakes, but I think they have made the
system better,” says Strassburger. “I just
wish they had run way more tests and
gone through it a lot more thoroughly so
that this sort of procedure had launched
in January, as opposed to all the stress
and trauma that people were put through
because of all the missteps along the way.”
As of late May, migrants and asylum
seekers had managed to schedule more
than 122,000 appointments at points of
entry along the southern border, accord-
ing to CBP. Many people are still cross-
ing into the US on their own: in April,
CBP encountered 182,114 people entering
unlawfully between those ports of entry,
up 12% from the number a month before.
Nevertheless, though the Biden adminis-
tration expected a big increase in migrants
and asylum seekers at the border upon the
end of Title 42 on May 11, that didn’t hap-
pen. The government’s increased restric-
tions and enforcement policies targeting
unlawful migration appear to be deterring
people from crossing without authoriza-
tion and encouraging them to use the CBP
One app instead.
hile some people might get an
W appointment through CBP One
on their first attempt, others may
try for weeks or months, depending on their
circumstances and their luck. Norkys A.,
a single mother who left to support her
family and church in Venezuela, tried for
months to get an appointment in Ciudad
Juárez after she arrived on December 26,
2022, with her two teenage children. By
March, they were living in a shelter and
barely going out. “This confinement is
driving us crazy,” she said, speaking from
a little nook in the attic where she slept.
Backpacks hung from hooks on the walls,
and the floors were made of plywood. A
few old toys were scattered around for
 61

“No one lends their phone here,

since everyone is on the lookout
for their appointments.”

children to play with. “I want to get to

the US so my children can start going to
school,” she said.
Norkys broke her shoulder while hop-
ping trains to get to Ciudad Juárez. She
visited a local clinic, which prescribed
painkillers and told her she needs surgery
that would cost about $5,000. She didn’t
have that kind of money; she didn’t even
have enough for a sling to immobilize her
arm. Nor did she have a working phone to
use CBP One. “I left without a cell phone,
money, and food,” she explained. She occa-
sionally tried for an appointment with a
borrowed phone, if she could find one. “No
one lends their phone here, since everyone
is on the lookout for their appointments,”
she said. “Their goal is getting across.”
Plaza says that when she was staying in
a shelter in Ciudad Juárez in March, she
tried the app practically every day, never
losing hope that she and her family would
eventually get their chance. Seven weeks
after arriving in the city, she got her CBP
One appointment, at the Paso del Norte
port of entry in El Paso, and slowly made
her way north to her destination, where
she will settle while she awaits her day in
immigration court next year.
Not everyone is choosing to wait. After
four months in Ciudad Juárez, Norkys
and her two children crossed into the US
unlawfully on April 25. They were detained
and deportation proceedings were begun,
but they were released in Laredo, Texas,
and will have the opportunity to appear in
court to present their case in an immigra-
tion hearing in the near future. While she
waits, Norkys is trying to settle into life in
the US, relying on shelters and charities to
get on her feet. The future remains uncer-
tain, but she is grateful. “As long as we are
alive and healthy,” she says, “all is good.”

Lorena Ríos is a freelance journal-

ist based in Monterrey, Mexico.

Norkys A. looks out

the window of a
makeshift shelter.
62
Astronomers and other scientists
are exploring ways to make data
more accessible through sound.
the sky
In the cavernous grand ballroom of the
Seattle Convention Center, Sarah Kane
stood in front of an oversize computer
monitor, methodically reconstructing the
life history of the Milky Way. Waving her
shock of long white hair as she talked
(“I’m easy to spot from a distance,” she
joked), she outlined the “Hunt for Galactic
Fossils,” an ambitious research project
she’d recently led as an undergraduate at
the University of Pennsylvania. By mea-
suring the composition, temperature, and
surface gravity of a huge number of stars,
she’d been able to pick out 689 of them
that don’t look like the others. Those celes-
tial outliers apparently formed very early
in the history of the universe, when con-
ditions were much different from those
By Corey S. Powell
Sonifying
today. Identifying the most ancient stars,
Kane explained, will help us understand
the evolution of our galaxy as a whole.
Kane’s presentation, which took
place at the January 2023 meeting of the
American Astronomical Society, unfolded
smoothly, with just two small interrup-
tions. Once she checked to make sure
nobody was disturbing her guide dog. The
other time, she asked one of the onlookers
to help her highlight the correct chart on
the computer screen, “since of course I
can’t see the cursor.”
Astronomy should, in principle, be
a welcoming field for a legally blind
researcher like Kane. We are long past
the era of observers huddling at the eye-
piece of a giant telescope. Today, most
Illustration by Stuart Bradford
astronomical studies begin as readings of
light broken down by intensity and wave-
length, digitized and sorted in whatever
manner proves most useful. But astrono-
my’s accessibility potential remains largely
theoretical; across the board, science is full
of charts, graphs, databases, and images
that are designed specifically to be seen.
So Kane was thrilled three years ago when
she encountered a technology known as
sonification, designed to transform infor-
mation into sound. Since then she’s been
working with a project called Astronify,
which presents astronomical information
in audio form. “It is making data accessible
that wouldn’t otherwise be,” Kane says. “I
can listen to a sonification of a light curve
and understand what’s going on.”
64
Sonification and data accessibility were
recurring themes at the Seattle astronomy
meeting. MIT astrophysicist Erin Kara
played sonic representations of light echo-
ing off hot gas around a black hole. Allyson
Bieryla from the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics presented sonifica-
tions designed to make solar eclipses acces-
sible to the blind and visually impaired
(BVI) community. Christine Limb from
Lincoln University described a proposal
to incorporate sonification into astronom-
ical data collected by the $600 million
Rubin Observatory in Chile, scheduled
to open in 2024. The meeting was just a
microcosm of a bigger trend in science
accessibility. “Astronomy is a leading field
in sonification, but there’s no reason that
work couldn’t be generalized,” Kane says.
Sure enough, similar sonification exper-
iments are underway in chemistry, geol-
ogy, and climate science. High schools
and universities are exploring the poten-
tial of auditory data displays for teaching
math. Other types of sonification could
assist workers in hazardous and high-stress
occupations, or make urban environments
easier to navigate. For much of the public,
these innovations will be add-ons that could
improve quality of life. But in the United
States alone, an estimated 1 million people
are blind and another 6 million are visually
impaired. For these people, sonification
could be transformative. It could open
access to education, to once unimaginable
careers, even to the secrets of the universe.
VISUAL DEPICTIONS OF STATISTICAL DATA
have a deep history, going back at least to
1644, when the Dutch astronomer Michael
Florent van Langren created a graph show-
ing different estimates of the distance in
longitude between Rome and Toledo, Spain.
Over the centuries, mathematicians and sci-
entists have developed graphical standards
so familiar that nobody stops to think about
how to interpret a trend line or a pie chart.
Proper sonification of data, on the other
hand, did not begin until the 20th century:
the earliest meaningful example was the
Geiger counter, perfected in the 1920s,
its eerie clicks signifying the presence of
dangerous ionizing radiation. More recently,
doctors embraced sound to indicate spe-
cific medical readings; the beep-beep of
an electrocardiogram is perhaps the most
iconic (unless you count Monty Python’s
medical device that goes bing!). Current
applications of sonic display are still mostly
specialized, limited in scope, or both. For
instance, physicists and mathematicians
occasionally use audio analysis, but mostly
to express technical operations such as
sorting algorithms. At the consumer end,
many modern cars produce sounds to indi-
cate the presence of another vehicle in the
“Astronomy is a leading field
in sonification, but there’s no reason that
work couldn’t be generalized.”
driver’s blind spot, but those sonifications
are specific to one problem or situation.
Niklas Rönnberg, a sonification expert
at Linköping University in Sweden, has
spent years trying to figure out how to get
sound-based data more widely accepted,
both in the home and in the workplace.
A major obstacle, he argues, is the con-
tinued lack of universal standards about
the meaning of sounds. “People tend to
say that sonification is not intuitive,” he
laments. “Everyone understands a line
graph, but with sound we are struggling to
reach out.” Should large numbers be indi-
cated by high-pitched tones or deep bass
tones, for example? People like to choose
personalized tones for something as sim-
ple as a wake-up alarm or a text-message
notification; getting everyone to agree on
the meaning of sounds linked to dense
information such as, say, the weather fore-
cast for the next 10 days is a tall order.
Bruce Walker, who runs the Sonification
Lab at Georgia Tech University, notes
another barrier to acceptance: “The tools
have not been suitable to the ecosystems.”
Auditory display makes no sense in a
crowded office or a loud factory, for instance.
At school, sound-based education tools are
unworkable if they require teachers to add
speakers and sound cards to their comput-
ers, or to download proprietary software
that may not be compatible or that might
be wiped away by the next system update.
Walker lays some of the blame at the feet
of researchers like himself. “Academics are
just not very good at tech transfer,” he says.
“Often we have these fantastic projects, and
they just sit on the shelf in somebody’s lab.”
Yet Walker thinks the time is ripe for son-
NASA/CXC/SAO/K.ARCAND, SYSTEM SOUNDS (M. RUSSO, A. SANTAGUIDA)
ification to catch on more widely. “Almost
everything nowadays can make sound, so
we’re entering a new era,” he says. “We
might as well do so in a way that’s beneficial.”
Seizing that opportunity will require
being thoughtful about where sonification
is useful and where it is counterproduc-
tive. For instance, Walker opposes adding
warning sounds to electric vehicles so
they’re easier to hear coming. The chal-
lenge, he argues, is to make sure EVs are
safe around pedestrians without adding
more noise pollution: “The quietness of
an electric car is a feature, not a defect.”
 65
Space jams
NASA researchers have translated data from the
Crab Nebula into sound. Panning across the image, each wave-
length of light has been assigned to a different family of
instruments. Light from the top of the image plays at a higher
pitch, and brighter light sounds louder.

THERE IS AT LEAST ONE WELL - PROVEN PATH

to getting the general public excited about
data sonification. Decades before Astronify
came along, some astronomers realized that
sound is a powerful way to communicate the
wonder of the cosmos to a wide audience.
Bill Kurth, a space physicist at the
University of Iowa, was an early propo-
nent of data sonification for space science.
Starting in the 1970s, he worked on data
collected by NASA’s Voyager probes as they
flew past the outer planets of the solar sys-
tem. Kurth studied results from the probes’
plasma instruments (which measured the
solar wind crashing into planetary atmo-
spheres and magnetic fields) and started
translating the complex, abstract signals
into sound to understand them better. He
digitized a whole library of “whistlers,”
which he recognized as radio signals from
lightning discharges on Jupiter—the first
evidence of lightning on another world.
In the late 1990s, Kurth began exper-
imenting with ways to translate those
sounds of space into versions that would
make sense to a non-expert listener. The
whistles and pops of distant planets caught
the public imagination and became a sta-
ple of NASA press conferences.
Since then, NASA has increasingly
embraced sonification to bring its publicly
funded (and often expensive) cosmologi-
cal discoveries to the masses. One of the
leaders in that effort is Kimberly Arcand
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. For the past five years, she
has worked with NASA to develop audio
versions of results from the Chandra X-ray
Observatory, a Hubble-like space telescope
that highlights energetic celestial objects
and events, such as cannibal stars and
supernova explosions.
Arcand’s space sonifications operate on
two levels. To trained astronomers, they
express well-defined data about luminosity,
density, and motion. To the lay public, they
capture the dynamic complexity of space
scenes that are hard to appreciate from
visuals alone. Radio shows and television
news picked up these space soundscapes,
sharing them widely. More recently, the
sonifications became staples on YouTube
66
and Soundcloud; collectively, they’ve been
heard at least hundreds of millions of times.
Just this spring, Chandra’s greatest hits
were released as a vinyl LP, complete with
its own record-release party.
“The first time I heard our finished
Galactic Center data sonification, I expe-
rienced that data in a completely differ-
ent way. I was hearing clumps where the
sounds were in harmony with each other.
I was hearing solos from the various wave-
lengths of light,” Arcand says. Researchers
in other fields are increasingly embrac-
ing her approach. For instance, Stanford
researchers have converted 1,200 years of
climate data into sound in order to help
the public comprehend the magnitude
and pace of global warming.
ARCAND ’ S SHORT , ACCESSIBLE ASTRONOMY
sonifications have been great for outreach
to the general public, but she worries that
they’ve had little impact in making sci-
ence more accessible to blind and visually
impaired people. (“Before I started as an
undergrad, I hadn’t even heard them,” Kane
confesses.) To assess the broader usefulness
of her work, Arcand recently conducted
a study of how blind or visually impaired
people and non-BVI people respond to data
sonification. The still-incomplete results
indicate similar levels of interest and engage-
ment in both groups. She takes that as a
sign that such sonifications have a lot of
untapped potential for welcoming a more
diverse population into the sciences.
The bigger challenge, though, is what
comes next: pretty sounds, like pretty pic-
tures, are not much help for people with low
vision who are drawn in by the outreach
but then want to go deeper and do research
themselves. In principle, astronomy could be
an exceptionally accessible field, because it
relies so heavily on pure data. Studying the
stars does not necessarily involve lab work
or travel. Even so, only a handful of BVI
astronomers have managed to break past the
barriers. Enrique Pérez Montero, who stud-
ies galaxy formation and does community
outreach at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica
de Andalucía, is one of a handful of success
stories. Nicolas Bonne at the University of
Portsmouth in the UK is another; he now
develops both sound-based and tactile tech-
niques for sharing his astronomical work.
Wanda Díaz-Merced is probably the
world’s best-known BVI astronomer. But
her career illustrates the magnitude of the
challenges. She gradually lost her eyesight
in her adolescence and early adulthood.
Though she initially wondered whether
she would be able to continue her stud-
ies, she persisted, and in 2005 she got an
internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center, where she ended up collaborating
with the computer scientist Robert Candey
In principle, astronomy could be an
exceptionally accessible field, because it
relies so heavily on pure data. Even so, only a
handful of BVI astronomers have managed
to break past the barriers.
to develop data-sonification tools. Since
then, she has continued her work at NASA,
the University of Glasgow, the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the
European Gravitational Observatory, the
Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory
in Paris, and the Universidad del Sagrado
Corazón in Puerto Rico. At every step, she’s
had to make her own way. “I’ve found soni-
fication useful for all the data sets I’ve been
able to analyze, from the solar wind to cos-
mic rays, radio astronomy, and x-ray data,
but the accessibility of the databases is really
bad,” she says. “Proposals for mainstreaming
sonification are never approved—at least
not the ones I have written.”
Jenn Kotler, a user experience designer
at the Space Telescope Science Institute
(STScI), became obsessed with this prob-
lem after hearing a lecture by Garry Foran,
a blind chemist who reinvented himself
as an astronomer using early sonification
tools. Kotler wondered if she could do
better and, in collaboration with two col-
leagues, applied for a grant from STScI
to develop a dedicated kit for converting
astronomical data into sound. They were
funded, and in 2020, just as the covid pan-
demic began, Kotler and company began
building what became Astronify.
“Our goal with Astronify was to have a
tool that allows people to write scripts, pull
in the data they’re interested in, and son-
ify it according to their own parameters,”
Kotler says. One of the simplest applica-
tions would be to translate data indicat-
ing the change in brightness of an object,
such as when a planet passes in front of
a distant star, with decreased brightness
expressed as lower pitch. After hearing con-
NASA/CXC/SAO/K.ARCAND, SYSTEM SOUNDS (M. RUSSO, A. SANTAGUIDA)
cerns about the lack of standards on what
different types of sounds should indicate,
Kotler worked with a panel of blind and
visually impaired test users. “As soon as we
started developing Astronify, we wanted
them involved,” she says. It was the kind
of community input that had mostly been
lacking in earlier, outreach-oriented son-
ifications designed by sighted researchers
and primarily aimed at sighted users.
Astronify is now a complete, freely
available open-source package. So far its
user base is tiny (fewer than 50 people,
according to Kotler), but she sees Astronify
 67

as a crucial step toward much broader

accessibility in science. “It’s still so early
with sonification, and frankly not enough
actual research is being done about how
best to use it,” she says.
One of her goals is to expand her sonifi-
cation effort to create auditory “thumbnails”
of all the different types of data stored in
the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes,
a super-repository that includes results
from the Hubble and James Webb space
telescopes along with many other missions
and data archives. Making that collection
searchable via sound would greatly improve
the accessibility of a leading data science
repository, Kotler notes, and would estab-
lish a template for other fields to follow.
Kotler also shares ideas with like-
minded researchers and data scientists
(such as James Trayford at the University
of Portsmouth, who has collaborated with
Bonne on a sonification package called
STRAUSS) through a three-year-old inter-
national organization called Sonification
World Chat. Arcand participates as well,
seeking ways to apply the intuitive nature
of her cosmic outreach to the harder task
of making research data accessible to the
BVI community. She notes that sonifica-
tion is especially useful for interpreting any
measurement that changes over time—a
type of data that exists in pretty much
every research field. “Astronomy is the
main chunk of folks in the chat, but there
are people from geology, oceanography,
and climate change too,” she says.

T H E B R OA D E R G OA L O F G R O U P S L I K E
Sonification World Chat is to tear down
the walls between tools like Astronify,
which are powerful but useful only to a spe-
cialized community, and general-purpose
sonifications like spoken GPS on phones,
which are beneficial to a wide variety of
people but only in very limited ways.
Rönnberg focuses a lot of his attention
on dual-use efforts where data sonification
is broadly helpful in a specific setting or
occupation but could have accessibility
applications as a side effect. In one project,
he has explored the potential of sonified
data for air traffic control, collaborating with
68

the Air Navigation Services of Sweden. His
team experimented with sounds to indicate
when an airplane is entering a certain con-
troller’s sector, for instance, or to provide
360-degree awareness that is difficult to
convey visually. Thinking about a more
familiar transportation issue, Rönnberg is
working on a test project for sonified buses
that identify themselves and indicate their
route as they pull in to a stop. Additional
sonic displays could mark the locations of
the different doors and indicate which ones
are accessible, a feature useful to passen-
gers whether they see well or not.
Walker, who has been working on data
sonification for more than three decades, is
trying to make the most of changing tech-
nology. “What we’re seeing,” he says, “is we
develop something that becomes more auto-
mated or easier to use, and then as a result, it
makes it easier for people with disabilities.”
He has worked with Bloomberg to display
auditory financial data on the company’s
terminals, and with NASA to create stan-
dards for a sonified workstation. Walker is
also exploring ways to make everyday tech
more accessible. For instance, he notes that
the currently available screen readers for
or for analysis. Other prototype education
projects use sonification to help students
understand protein structures and human
anatomy. At the most recent virtual meeting
of the Sonification World Chat, members
also presented general-purpose tools for
sonifying scientific data and mathematical
formulas, and for teaching BVI kids basic
skills in data interpretation. Phia Damsma,
who oversees the World Chat’s learning
group, runs an Australian educational soft-
ware company that focuses on sonification
for BVI students. The number of such efforts
has increased sharply over the past decade:
in a paper published recently in Nature,
Anita Zanella at Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di
Astrofisica and colleagues identified more
than 100 sonification-based research and
education projects in astronomy alone.

THESE LATEST APPLICATIONS OF SONIFICATION

“I was hearing clumps where the
sounds were in harmony with each other.
I was hearing solos from the various
wavelengths of light.”
Dual use is also a guiding theme for Kyla cell phones fail to capture many parts of the
McMullen, who runs the SoundPAD Lab at social media experience. So he is working
the University of Florida (the PAD stands with one of his students to generate soni-
for “perception, application, and develop- fied emojis “to convey the actual emotion
ment”). She is working with the Gainesville behind a message.” Last year they tested
Fire Department to test a system that the tool with 75 sighted and BVI subjects,
uses sound to help firefighters navigate who provided mostly positive feedback.
through smoke-filled buildings. In that sit- Education may be the most import-
uation, everyone is visually impaired. Like ant missing link between general-purpose
Rönnberg, McMullen sees a huge oppor- assistive sounds and academic-oriented
tunity for data sonification to make urban sonification. Getting sound into education
environments more accessible. Another of hasn’t been easy, Walker acknowledges, but
her projects builds on GPS, adding three- he thinks the situation is getting better here,
dimensional sounds—signals that seem too. “We’re seeing many more online and
to originate from a specific direction. The web-based tools, like our Sonification Studio,
goal is to create sonic pointers to guide that don’t require special installations or a
people intuitively through an unfamiliar lot of technical support. They’re more like
location or neighborhood. “Mobility is a ‘walk up and use,’” he says. “It’s coming.”
big area for progress—number one on my Sonification Studio generates audio
list,” she says. versions of charts and graphs for teaching
are quickly getting real-world tests, aided
by the proliferation of cloud-based software
and ubiquitous sound-making computers,
phones, and other devices. Díaz-Merced,
who has struggled for decades to develop
and share her own sonification tools, finally
perceives signs of genuine progress for sci-
entists from the BVI community. “There is
still a lot of work to do,” she says. “But little
by little, with scientific research on multi-
sensorial perception that puts the person
at the center, that work is beginning.”
Kane has used Astronify mainly as a
tester, but she’s inspired to find that the
sonified astronomical data it generates are
also directly relevant to her galactic studies
and formatted in a standard scientific soft-
ware package, giving her a type of access
that did not exist just three years ago. By
the time she completes her PhD, she could
be testing and conducting research with
sonification tools that are built right into
the primary research databases in her field.
“It makes me feel hopeful that things have
gotten so much better within my relatively
short lifetime,” she says. “I’m really excited
to see where things will go next.”
Corey S. Powell is a science writer,
editor, and publisher based in
Brooklyn, NY. He is the cofounder of
OpenMind magazine.
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70
 71

Three books that grapple with the role

of humans in restoring natural ecosystems.
By Matthew Ponsford

An
unnatural In Colombia, there’s a national debate about what to do
with Pablo Escobar’s feral “cocaine hippos.” To many,
the 160 hippos—descendants of four illegally imported
African hippopotamuses that escaped from the drug king-

world
pin’s private zoo after his death in 1993—are agents of
destruction. Each night, they collectively chomp through
half a ton of vegetation, and by day, the number of attacks
on humans is slowly rising.
Yet while government officials have called for erad-
ication, others see a surprising ecological blessing.
A 2020 study found that the hippos bear similarities
to Hemiauchenia camelids (giant relatives of llamas
and alpacas) and the semiaquatic hoofed monster
Trigonodops—both of which have been absent from
The Book of
Wilding: A Practical
the Colombian landscape since they went extinct 10,000
Guide to Rewilding, years ago. Similar to those animals, the hippos engineer
Big and Small habitats for native species by wallowing in the swampy
by Isabella Tree shallows, and their voracious appetites mean they carry
and Charlie Burrell and deposit nutrients around the landscape. Instead of
BLOOMSBURY, 2023, $40 culling the hippos, dissenting voices have asked: What if
they were allowed to remain, wild yet carefully contained?  
Fresh Banana
In The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to
Leaves: Healing
Indigenous Rewilding, Big and Small, Isabella Tree and Charlie
Landscapes Burrell ask us to “conjure up the ghosts of missing
by Jessica Hernandez megafauna in our minds.” Rewilding proposes to make
NORTH ATLANTIC, 2022, $17.95 more room for natural processes and allow other species
the freedom to shape their environments, with human
Wild by Design:
management kept to a minimum. And the key, for Tree
The Rise of
and Burrell, is bringing back megafauna. Success stories
Ecological
Restoration include the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone
by Laura Martin National Park, which created positive ripple effects
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, such as reduced overgrazing by elk and increased
2022, $39.95 beaver populations.

View from Mount Holyoke,

Northampton, Massachusetts,
after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow

Thomas Cole

1836
72
It has been only a fleeting moment in evolutionary
time, the authors observe, since almost every landmass
was crisscrossed by giant animals. Hulking, leaky crea-
tures like hippos, elephants, and rhinos make a dynamic
mess wherever they go, engineering the topography and
architecture of the forest, cycling nutrients and dispersing
seeds. Even in death, their rotting carcasses help nourish
a patchwork of complex grasslands, open-canopy forests,
and wooded swamps. Their absence from so much of the
world has affected everything from the composition of
its flora to the chemistry of its
soil and seas.  utopian communes of the 1960s
But today, so-called prox-
ies can be found filling in for
species rendered extinct or
Not since the eco-
locally absent. Some of these
proxies were set loose negli-
utopian communes
gently, like the packs of Arabian
camels that mingle with kanga-
of the 1960s has
roos in Australia’s desert inte-
rior; others were deliberately
there been such
introduced, like the Aldabra
tortoises released to replace
an appetite for
extinct cousins on two small
islands off Mauritius.
practical guides to
Tree and Burrell advocate for
such proxies from their privi-
engineering our
leged perspective as owners of
a 1,400-hectare farm in pastoral
surroundings to meet
southern England—Burrell’s
ancestral estate, which comes
the needs of nature.
with two castles (one a ruin) and
the aristocratic title of baronet. For two decades, they
have been leading figures in the movement to restore
this wilderness, and The Book of Wilding is their blue-
print for doing so.
Rewilding, they insist, is a “spectrum” of practices
relevant to homes, schoolyards, cemeteries, and cities.
But their book is unmistakably a practical bible for rural
landowners. Those with a few thousand acres to spare
will be treated to dense tables showing the quantity of
livestock you should allow per hectare, advice on where
to locate a deer-culling marksman, and hard-earned les-
sons in fencing poisonous yew trees from cattle.
The Book of Wilding is one of a growing number
of books that propose practical projects to repair the
natural environment and heal our relationship with it.
This collection comprises manuals for regenerative agri-
culture, manifestos for policy change, and tomes that
defy easy categorization. Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing
Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science, by
Jessica Hernandez, challenges many of the foundations
of today’s restoration practice, while Wild by Design: The
Rise of Ecological Restoration, by Laura J. Martin, gives
helpful context for understanding how this restorative
oeuvre has arisen.
Amid mounting awareness of environmental destruc-
tion and biodiversity loss—peaking with the UN’s
landmark COP15 plan to protect 30% of the planet
by 2030—these books aim to reveal alternative paths,
leading us out from ecological anxiety toward hope for a
wilder world. Not since the eco-
and ’70s has there been such an
appetite for practical guides to
engineering our surroundings
to meet the needs of nature.
Then, as design historian Lydia
Kallipoliti noted in a 2018 paper,
Stewart Brand’s 1968 Whole
Earth Catalog and the slew of
open-source manuals that fol-
lowed defined a new practice
of “activist ecological design,”
which proposed blueprints for
sustainable architecture in the
service of a new, sustainable
social and spiritual order.
Tree and Burrell see them-
selves as embarking on a sim-
ilar mission: they’ve created a
practical handbook for a “wilder,
more resilient world.” And they
practice what they preach—on Burrell’s family estate,
they’ve removed fences to make room for herds of Old
English longhorn cattle (proxies for the extinct aurochs),
old-breed Tamworth pigs (stand-ins for wild boars), and
Exmoor ponies—rare, tiny horses that now make up one
of the largest feral herds in the UK.
This has at times put them at odds with the neigh-
boring farmers, who fear that noxious weeds or unsu-
pervised animals will escape from Burrell’s land. But
Tree and Burrell say their plan to transform agricultural
fields into rich mosaic habitats is working: rare nightin-
gales and purple emperor butterflies now breed there.
Floppy-haired longhorns graze while white storks, the
first spotted in Britain for over 600 years, nest overhead
in the chimney of the couple’s castle home.
The United Nations has dubbed this the UN Decade
on Ecosystem Restoration. Yet the rewilding approach
is somewhat in tension with the science of restoration
ecology. Restoration is defined by the US-based Society

for Ecological Restoration (SER) as “the process of
assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been
degraded, damaged, or destroyed”—but no one quite
agrees on what “rewilding” means, or whether it’s actu-
ally being done.
Fundamentally, rewilders emphasize hands-off prac-
tices to restore ecosystem functions. “Taking our hands
off the steering wheel and allowing nature the time
and space to express itself is one of the fundamentals
of rewilding,” write Tree and Burrell. But in reality, this
often means interven-
ing intensively in the
short term—say, by cull-
ing deer that eat young
trees or reintroducing
wolves—so that natu-
ral processes like forest
regrowth can play out.
In the book’s appeal
to planetary change—its
conclusion calls for “an
upwelling of global pub-
lic action.” It can feel as
if we have skipped a few
important steps. Like,
where do those of us
without castles fit in?
If rewilding is a verb,
who is its subject? And
what really is the goal
in all this?  including foundational
Stewards of the land
Jessica Hernandez, an Indigenous scholar, proposes a
very different vision of land stewardship, shining a light
directly into what’s been a major blind spot for much
The Abbey
Western environmentalism: those communities that
have maintained long histories of living sustainably in
biodiverse landscapes.
Her book Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous
Friedrich
Landscapes sets out to reverse centuries of “whitewash-
THIS PAGE AND PREVIOUS SPREAD: PUBLIC DOMAIN
ing” that have eradicated or marginalized Indigenous
land management practices. These connections with
the land—including such diverse techniques as harvest-
ing wild and semi-wild plants, setting beneficial forest
fires, and cultivating coastlines—grew out of specific
environments, only to be displaced first for capitalist
exploitation and later by wilderness reserves from which
native people were evicted.
At the outset, Hernandez argues that in order for us
to “start healing Indigenous landscapes,” each person
73
must acknowledge our place in the social system that
is overseeing climate collapse. For the majority of peo-
ple in the Americas who aren’t Indigenous, this means
understanding that we can be either “settlers,” “unwanted
guests,” or “welcomed guests”—roles determined by the
Indigenous communities native to these lands.
Today, Indigenous communities protect 80% of
global biodiversity while holding just over 25% of land.
But despite this record, environmental organizations
have rarely invited Indigenous stewards or leaders to
manage conservation
projects. While lead-
ing voices such as Deb
Haaland, the US secre-
tary of the interior, have
called for environmental
management to begin
integrating Indigenous
knowledge, Hernandez
sets out a more radi-
cal project that begins
with Indigenous frame-
works and challenges
those Western concepts
that cannot be incorpo-
rated into them. Much
of the book is a rebuke
of Western concepts
that have come to domi-
nate environmentalism,
ideas like “wilderness”
and “conservation,” for which she says Indigenous lan-
guages have no direct translation. Hernandez instead
focuses on “kincentric ecology,” a term coined by the
Indigenous scholar Enrique Salmon for “the notion
in the that we are not separate from nature but rather an inte-
Oakwood gral component.” This is increasingly taken as true by
Caspar Westerners too, but Hernandez is not arguing for finally
David granting Indigenous people a seat at their decision-making
table. “It is time we stop trying to have our knowledge
1809-10 validated and rather build our own tables and be the ones
who validate Western knowledge systems,” she writes.
In a narrative that braids personal history, criticism
of Western environmental sciences, and Indigenous
case studies, Hernandez begins her story with the
banana tree. Although the banana was transplanted
from Southeast Asia to Latin America as an agricul-
tural crop, Hernandez finds kinship in these trees.
They fed her father, a Maya Chʼortiʼ man, when he was
a child soldier in El Salvador’s brutal civil war, in which
74
US-backed military death squads terrorized insurgents
and Salvadoran civilians. Even more striking, her father
credits a banana tree with saving his life when a bomb
that was dropped on him failed to detonate after land-
ing in its leaves. He passes on the lesson that “nature
protects us as long as we protect nature.”
The models she proposes are drawn from exam-
ples that have worked in the Americas, such as the
community- based forest management of Santiago
Xiacuí, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico, that has stopped
illegal logging and deforesta-
tion while supporting a local
economy based on wood and
natural resources. Further exam-
ples come from Indigenous-
led marine protected areas,
Restoring the
sustainable economies based
on artisanal crafts, and net-
planet is always
works of mutual aid. Crucially,
each emphasizes self-reliance
a process of design,
and self-governance, favoring
those approaches that prom-
one that is shaped
ise to grow power from the
Indigenous communities’ roots.
by the values,
One cornerstone of her argu-
ment is the demand for “land
idiosyncrasies,
back,” the return of large areas
of the Americas to communities
and blind spots
displaced by colonialism. “Land
back allows us to reclaim our
of those in charge.
self-autonomy and determina-
tion,” she writes. She gives an
example: in the Zapatista uprisings of 1994, Indigenous
peasants seized thousands of hectares of land in the
Mexican state of Chiapas from cattle ranchers and other
large landowners, employing tactics that merged armed
rebellion with symbolic acts of resistance.  ecology in the US was the Atomic Energy Commission.
The restoration myth
If current projects to restore the degraded planet seem
curiously conflict-ridden, the environmental historian
Laura J. Martin reveals that this mission has never
been a harmonious one. In Wild by Design: The Rise
of Ecological Restoration, she walks us through how
restoration as a distinct practice emerged from a set
of disjointed projects championed by American land
managers and environmentalists beginning in the early
20th century.
The philosophy located itself between wilderness
preservation—roping off nature into protected areas like
Yellowstone National Park to leave it untouched—and
conservation, or managing “working landscapes” inten-
sively by planting trees, culling animals, and sustainably
exploiting natural resources. “Whereas conservationists
like President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot,
first head of the US Forest Service, believed that experts
could guide the efficient management and use of natural
resources for the greater good,” Martin writes, “preser-
vationists adhered to a Romantic belief in the sanctity of
undeveloped nature, opposing conservationist projects
to harvest forests and dam rivers.”
Often erroneously said to
have started in 1988 with the
founding of the Society for
Ecological Restoration, resto-
ration activities actually began
much earlier, with the American
Bison Society (established in
1905). Its successful efforts to
prevent the extinction of the
bison relied on vast reserves
designed for breeding the ani-
mals, appropriated from Indian
reservations. Far from a univer-
sal good, these reserves were “as
much a part of the settler project
as the bison’s initial destruc-
tion,” Martin says, with those
who had tamed the American
West now restoring it as a place
for manly adventure. 
Martin tells a story about
how big ideas, like restoration,
are shaped by real things—federal regulations, lawsuits,
funding flows, trade legislation, impatient senators, and
industrial patrons. For a surprising chunk of the 20thcen-
tury until the early 1970s, for example, the main funder of
At a time when President Eisenhower was desperate
to build public support for federal investment in nuclear
weapons research, his Atoms for Peace campaign doled
out radioactive cobalt-60 to scientists. This radioisotope
allowed them to breed mutated salmon and trout in a quest
to grow more robust fish for America’s waterways and
fishing industry. In May 1961, 22,273 irradiated fish were
released into Portage Bay in Seattle to migrate to the ocean.
These fish fared surprisingly well—twice as well as
non-irradiated fish—and ever since have been outcompet-
ing natural fish and breeding with them, not to mention
the countless other “improved” fish released by states and
federal government agencies every year since at least the
1930s. Catch a wild fish today and its body probably bears
 75

marks of human manipulation: “It is perhaps anachronis- intervene in the fate of a species or an entire ecosystem,”
tic to call any fishery ‘wild,’” Martin writes. she writes. “If preservation is the desire to hold nature in
Wild by Design’s biggest gift is to “denaturalize” res- time and conservation is the desire to manage nature for
toration as it is done today, showing that concepts that future human use, restoration asks us to do something
can seem essential to the practice, such as eradicating more complicated: to make decisions about where and
invasive species or returning landscapes to some pre- how to heal. To repair and to care. To make amends for
disturbance state, have been insignificant for much of the damage we have done, while learning from nature
the movement’s history. even as we intervene in it.”
Readers might be surprised to learn that both Wilding Wild by Design, like Fresh Banana Leaves, is held
and Banana Leaves critique what they view as alarm- together by a forthright argument for responsibility
ist narratives around and accountability.
non-native species. Restoration projects
Martin shows how cannot afford to commit
invasive-species man- mistakes already made
agement grew to promi- by wildlife conserva-
nence opportunistically tionists, they argue, by
by capitalizing on other displacing vulnerable
forms of American minorities and eras-
nativism. Starting in ing culture in pursuit
the 1980s and 1990s, of pharaonic visions of
environmental charities nature cleared of human
piggybacked on fears influence. Both these
about migration and the accounts, grounded in
softening of national history, show why res-
borders. By the post- toration must be dem-
9/11 years, the Nature ocratic and guided by
Conservancy had open deliberation about
adopted the language of justice. “Who benefits
counterterrorism, call- from restoration? Who
ing for “rapid-response” is harmed? Who does
units to “attack” inva- the work of care, and
sive species and trans- who is cared for?” asks
forming environmental managers into “Exotic Plant Martin. “Whose vision of wildness is acted on?”
Eradication Strike Teams.” Rewilding, as it is framed by Burrell and Tree, has little
Martin argues that returning landscapes to “pre- to say on such questions of justice. Given that their prac-
human” or precolonial conditions—often assumed to tice arises from a private landholding, ideas like democ-
Cathedral
be the core purpose of restoration—emerged as a wide- Rock, River racy and participatory decision-making are far from the
spread goal only in the 1980s before diminishing again in View authors’ minds. The restoration that happens is their per-
the 2000s, as climate change and human development Carleton E. sonal vision; justice never gets a mention in 500 pages of
made that impossible. Nor was it necessarily desirable. Watkins Wilding. Yet as these accounts show, questions about how
Since the American restoration movement largely set to share the finite space of the planet with other people,
1861
the arrival of Europeans as its baseline and excluded as well as other species, cannot be ignored. As restorative
Native Americans from the lands in question, it typically practices become wide-reaching and world-shaping, Martin
resulted in human-cleared, ecologically restored fantasy concludes, restoration’s power to transform landscapes
worlds that allowed White Americans to perpetuate the reintroduces familiar dangers for the powerless: “I suggest
myth of the New World’s “discovery.”  that we conceive of restoration as an optimistic collabo-
Restoring the planet is always a process of design, says ration with nonhuman species, a practice of co-designing
Martin—one that is shaped by the values, idiosyncra- the wild with them. But we still have the responsibility to
PUBLIC DOMAIN

sies, and blind spots of those in charge, even when they collaborate with one another, too.”
claim to be ceding control to wild and primeval forces. Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in
“Restoration is, by definition, active: it is an attempt to London.
76
Lithography’s
long journey
When we talk about computing these
days, we tend to talk about software
and the engineers who write it. But we
wouldn’t be anywhere without the hard-
ware and the physical sciences that have
enabled it to be created—disciplines like
optics, materials science, and mechani-
cal engineering. It’s thanks to advances
in these areas that we can fabricate the
chips on which all the 1s and 0s of the dig-
ital world reside. Without them, modern
computing would have been impossible.
Semiconductor lithography, the manu-
facturing process responsible for producing
computer chips, has 70-year-old roots. Its
origin story is as simple as today’s process
is complex: the technology got its start in
the mid-1950s, when a physicist named
Jay Lathrop turned the lens in his micro-
scope upside down.  your data.
Lathrop, who died last year at age 95,
is scarcely remembered today. But the
lithography process he and his lab partner
patented in 1957 transformed the world.
Steady improvement in lithographic meth-
ods has produced ever-smaller circuitry
and previously unimaginable quantities
The technologies that produce
today’s chips are among
humankind’s most complex
inventions.
of computing power, transforming entire
industries and our daily lives.
Today lithography is a big business with
tiny margins for error. The world leader,
the Dutch firm ASML, is also Europe’s
largest tech company by market capital-
ization. Its lithography tools—which rely
on the world’s flattest mirrors, one of the
most powerful commercial lasers, and an
explosion far hotter than the surface of the
sun—can pattern tiny shapes on silicon,
measuring just a handful of nanometers.
This nanometer-scale precision, in turn,
makes it possible to manufacture chips
with tens of billions of transistors. You
probably rely on chips made with these
ultra-advanced lithography tools; they can
be found in your phone, your PC, and the
data centers that process and remember
Of all the mind-bogglingly precise
machines that manufacture chips, lithog-
raphy tools are the most critical—and the
most complex. They require hundreds of
thousands of components and billions of
dollars of investment. But they are not
only the subject of commercial rivalry and
By Chris Miller
GUTTER CREDIT HERE
 77

A silicon wafer is shown beneath a reticle, a

special type of photomask that holds patterns
used to manufacture integrated circuits.
GUTTER CREDIT HERE
78

scientific wonder; they stand at the center

of a geopolitical competition to control the
future of computing power. Where com-
puting goes next will be shaped by the
evolution of the lithography industry—and
the struggle to produce even more precise
lithography tools. The history of the tech-
nology’s development suggests that any
future advances will rely on even more
complex and precise machinery, and even
more far-flung supply chains, to produce
the specialized components required. The
speed at which new lithography systems
and components are developed—and the
question of which companies and countries
manage to manufacture them—will shape
not only the speed of computing progress
but also the balance of power and profits
within the tech industry.
The idea that today’s nanometer-scale
manufacturing has its origins in Lathrop’s
upside-down microscope lens might seem
implausible. But the lithography industry Jay Lathrop spent summers throughout the small look bigger. As he puzzled over how
has advanced rapidly. It has enabled chips 1970s and 1980s working with his friend Jack to miniaturize transistors, he and Nall
Kilby on solar technologies.
to follow—and set the pace of—Moore’s wondered whether microscope optics
Law, the idea that the number of transistors turned upside down could let something
in an integrated circuit doubles roughly diffusion furnaces. But even at an advanced big—a pattern for a transistor—be minia-
every two years. weapons lab, many of the materials and turized. To find out, they covered a piece
Lathrop invented the process in the tools needed to fabricate them had to be of germanium material with a type of
1950s, at a time when computers used developed from scratch. chemical called a photoresist, which they
vacuum tubes or transistors so large they These early transistors were made of a acquired from Eastman Kodak, the cam-
were visible to the naked eye—and thus block of the chemical element germanium era company. Light reacts with photore-
easy enough to manufacture without hav- with different materials layered on top, sist, making it either harder or weaker.
ing to create an entirely new class of tools. so they resembled the shape of a desert Lathrop took advantage of this feature
He wasn’t trying to revolutionize com- mesa. These flat-topped blocks of material and created a “mask” in the shape of a
puting; he later recalled that he had “no were made by first covering a portion of the mesa, placing it on the microscope with
idea about computers.” As an engineer at germanium with a drop of wax. A chemical upside-down optics. Light that passed
the US Army’s Diamond Ordnance Fuze was then applied, which etched away the through holes in the mask was shrunk
Lab during the mid-1950s, he’d been tasked germanium that wasn’t covered. When the by the microscope’s lens and projected
with devising a new proximity fuze to go wax was removed, only the germanium onto the photoresist chemicals. Where
inside a mortar shell only a couple of inches that it covered was left behind, sitting on the light struck, the chemicals hardened.
in diameter. One of the components his a metallic plate. This system worked well Where light was blocked by the mask, they
fuze required was a transistor—but the enough for large transistors, but minia- could be washed away, leaving a precise,
PREVIOUS: COURTESY OF ASML; SMU LIBRARIES

shell was so small that existing transistors
were difficult to fit inside.
At the time, transistor manufacturing
was in its early stages. Transistors were
used as amplifiers in radios, while discrete
transistors were beginning to be used in
computers the size of rooms. The fuze lab
already had some equipment for making
transistors, such as crystal growers and
turizing them was all but impossible. The
wax oozed in unpredictable ways, limiting
the precision with which the germanium
could be etched. Lathrop and his lab part-
ner, Jim Nall, found their progress on the
proximity fuze stuck in the imperfections
of overflowing wax.
Lathrop had spent years looking
through microscopes to make something
miniature mesa of germanium. A way to
manufacture miniaturized transistors had
been found.
Lathrop named the process photoli-
thography—printing with light—and he
and Nall filed for a patent. They deliv-
ered a paper on the topic at the annual
International Electron Devices Meeting
in 1957, and the Army awarded him a
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80
$25,000 prize for the invention. Lathrop
bought his family a new station wagon
with the money.
In the midst of the Cold War, the mar-
ket for mortar fuzes was growing, but
Lathrop’s lithography process took off
because companies producing transis-
tors for civilian electronics realized its
transformative potential. Lithography not
only produced transistors with unprec-
edented precision but also opened the
door to further miniaturization. The two
companies leading the race to commer-
cial transistors—Fairchild Semiconductor
and Texas Instruments—understood the
implications early on. Lithography was the
tool they needed to manufacture transis-
tors by the millions, turning them into a
mass-market good.
Painting with light
Robert Noyce, one of the cofounders of
Fairchild, had studied alongside Lathrop
when both had been PhD students in
physics at MIT. The two of them had spent
their weekends in graduate school hiking
New Hampshire’s mountains, and they
had stayed in touch after graduating. At
Fairchild, Noyce moved quickly to hire
Nall, Lathrop’s lab partner, and spear-
headed his company’s lithography efforts
by jury-rigging his own device with a set of
20-millimeter camera lenses he’d bought
from a Bay Area photography shop.  satellites. In the late 1960s, it realized that
Lathrop, meanwhile, took a job at
Fairchild’s competitor, Texas Instruments,
driving his new station wagon down to
Dallas. He arrived just as his new colleague
and lifelong friend Jack Kilby was on the
brink of creating a piece of semiconductor
material with multiple electronic compo-
nents built—or integrated—into it. These
integrated circuits, it soon became clear,
could be efficiently produced only with
Lathrop’s lithography method. As chip
firms strove to shrink transistors to cram
more of them onto chips, photolithography
provided the precision that miniaturized
manufacturing required.
Fairchild and Texas Instruments
made their first lithography machines in
house, but the growing complexity of the
Robert Noyce, who later cofounded Intel,
launched Fairchild Semiconductor’s lithogra-
phy program with lenses purchased from a Bay
Area camera shop.
machines soon attracted new entrants.
As the scale of transistors declined from
centimeters to millimeters to microns, the
importance of precision optics increased.
Perkin-Elmer was a Connecticut-based
firm that produced specialized optics for
the US military, from bombsights to spy
this expertise could be used for lithography,
too. It developed a scanner that could proj-
ect the mask pattern onto a silicon wafer
while aligning them with almost flawless
precision. The scanner then moved a light
across the wafer like a copy machine, paint-
ing it with lines of light. This tool proved
capable of fabricating transistors as small
as a micron—one millionth of a meter.  the 1980s too broad a brush with which
But the approach wasn’t practical as
chip features got still smaller. By the late
1970s, scanners began to be replaced with
steppers, machines that moved light in dis-
crete steps across a wafer. The challenge
with a stepper was to move the light with
micron-scale precision, so that each flash
was perfectly aligned with the chip. GCA,
a Boston-based firm that had its origins
in spy balloons, devised the first stepper
tool, reportedly on the advice of Texas
Instruments executive Morris Chang—
later the founder of TSMC, which is today
the world’s largest chipmaker. 
New England’s specialist lithography
firms soon faced steep competition. In
the 1980s, as Japanese chipmakers began
winning major market share in the produc-
tion of memory chips, they started buying
from Nikon and Canon, two homegrown
producers of lithography tools. Around the
same time, the Dutch chipmaker Philips
spun out its own unit that made lithogra-
phy tools, calling the new company ASML. 
GCA, which remained America’s lithog-
raphy champion, struggled to cope with
the competition. Its lithography technol-
ogy was widely recognized as top-notch,
but the machines themselves were less
reliable than those from its new Japanese
and Dutch rivals. Moreover, GCA failed to
anticipate a series of chip industry business
cycles in the 1980s. It soon found itself
financially overextended and, by the end of
the decade, on the brink of bankruptcy. Bob
Noyce tried to rescue the firm; as the head
of Sematech, a government-backed semi-
conductor research institute intended to
revitalize the US chip industry, he poured
millions of dollars into GCA. Yet it wasn’t
enough to stop the firm from hurtling
toward collapse. The lithography industry
thus entered the 1990s defined by three
firms, two Japanese and one Dutch.
The decline of an industry
The decline of America’s lithography indus-
try coincided with a dramatic leap forward
in the field’s technological complexity.
TED STRESHINSKY PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Visible light—which has a wavelength
of several hundred nanometers—was by
to paint the smallest transistors. So the
industry shifted to using new chemicals
like krypton fluoride and argon fluoride
to create deep ultraviolet light, with wave-
lengths as low as 193 nanometers. By the
early 2000s, after this ultraviolet light
itself proved too blunt a tool, lithography
machines were created that could shoot
light through water, creating a sharper
Read
smarter,
not
harder
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82
angle of refraction and thereby allowing
more precision. Then, after this “immer-
sion” lithography proved insufficient for
the finest features on a chip, lithographers
began using multi-patterning, applying
multiple layers of lithography on top of
one another to produce yet more precise
patterns on silicon.  depend on access to a single tool produced
As early as the 1990s, however, it was
clear that a new light source with a smaller
wavelength would be needed to continue
manufacturing ever-smaller transistors.
Intel, America’s biggest chipmaker, led
the early investments into extreme ultra-
violet (EUV) lithography, using a type
of light with a wavelength of 13.5 nano-
meters. This was sufficiently exact to
pattern shapes with roughly equivalent
dimensions. But only one of the world’s
remaining lithography companies, ASML,
had the guts to bet its future on the tech-
nology, which would take three decades
and billions of dollars to develop. For a
long time, many industry experts thought
it would never work.  at Clemson University, where his father
Producing EUV light at sufficient scale
is one of the most complex engineer-
ing challenges in human history. ASML’s
approach requires taking a ball of tin 30
microns wide and pulverizing it twice with
an ultra-high-powered carbon dioxide laser.
This explodes the tin ball into a plasma
with a temperature of several hundred
thousand degrees. The plasma emits EUV
light, which then must be collected with
the flattest mirrors ever created, each made
of dozens of alternating, nanometers-thick
layers of silicon and molybdenum. These
mirrors are held almost perfectly still by
a set of actuators and sensors that, their
manufacturer says, are so precise they
could be used to direct a laser to hit a golf
ball as far away as the moon.
Producing the specialized components
in an EUV system required constructing a
complex international supply chain. The
high-powered laser is manufactured by a
German firm called Trumpf, which special-
izes in precision cutting tools. The mirrors
are produced by Zeiss, another German
firm with a proud history of expertise in
optics. The chamber in which the tin balls
GCA’s Mann 4800 stepper was a big step for-
ward in resolution for lithography machines. But
the Boston-based firm ultimately lost the chip
market to Japanese and Dutch rivals.
are pulverized was designed by Cymer, a
San Diego firm later purchased outright
by ASML. A machine with hundreds of
thousands of components can be produced
only with participation from companies on
multiple continents, even if its assembly
is monopolized by a single firm.
Today, EUV lithography tools are used
to produce many of the key chips in phones,
PCs, and data centers. A typical smart-
phone processor will have over 10 billion
microscopic transistors, each printed by
the photolithography process Lathrop
pioneered. Lithography has been used
to create transistors by the quintillions,
making them the most widely produced
manufactured product in human history.  sion is underway, though it is unclear if it
Perhaps most important, however, is the
role of EUV lithography in producing the
chips that advanced data centers require.
Large AI systems are usually trained on
cutting-edge chips—which means they
benefit from the ultra-advanced transistors
that only EUV lithography can fabricate
efficiently. This has made lithography a
matter of geopolitical jostling. As the US
tries to stop China’s chip industry from
producing cutting-edge AI chips, it has
limited Beijing’s access to critical tools.
EUV lithography systems are the biggest
choke point for China’s chip industry.
The fact that the computing capabili-
ties of the world’s second-largest economy
by a single company illustrates the central
role lithography plays in the world’s tech
sector. The industry is extraordinarily
complex—the result of intensive research
efforts by a worldwide network of experts
on optics and materials science, plus bil-
lions of dollars of investment. China’s
homegrown lithography tools are several
generations behind the cutting edge, lack-
ing many of the key components—like the
ultra-flat mirrors—as well as the expertise
in systems integration.
The industry has come a long way since
Lathrop’s work on fuzes. He left Texas
Instruments in 1968, having worked there
for a decade, and took up a professorship
had studied and not far from where his
parents then lived. Lathrop spent the rest
of his career teaching, though in the sum-
mers during the 1970s and 1980s he would
return to TI to work with his old friend Jack
Kilby on an unsuccessful effort to develop
photovoltaic technology for solar power.
Lathrop retired from Clemson in 1988,
having left an imprint on thousands of
electrical engineering students.
The lithography process he invented,
meanwhile, continues to advance. In
several years, ASML will release a new
version of its EUV technology, called high-
numerical-aperture EUV, which will allow
even more precise lithography. Research
into a future tool with even more preci-
will ever be practically or commercially
feasible. We must hope it is, because the
future of Moore’s Law—and the advances
in computing it enables—depend on it.
GCA CORPORATION
Chris Miller is author of Chip War:
The Fight for the World’s Most
Critical Technology and an associate
professor at the Fletcher School at
Tufts University.
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84 Field notes

A 1969 Federal Highway Administration

photologging van prototype.

cars, and often people just walking by the

side of the road.
In addition to helping with infrastruc-
ture planning and maintenance, these data
sets proved useful in defending the state
against legal claims involving accidents on
state roads. Photolog imagery provided a
clear historical record for the courts, show-
ing the placement of signs, curbs, cross-
walks, and other traffic-control devices. 
Today, many states have retired these
customized data-collection vans; the work
has been outsourced to third parties, and
ubiquitous online mapping providers make
such efforts seem antiquated.
But many states’ highway departments
still have shelves full of old footage, a
lot of it on 35-millimeter film and laser
discs. I made a public records request to
Connecticut’s Department of Highways
to get access to this archival footage,
which had been digitized at a fairly low
resolution.
Over the years, such data-collection
runs added side and rear cameras. They

The forgotten
were further modernized with detailed
3D scans of the actual road surface,
and with higher-resolution cameras.

history of highway
Starting in 2017, Utah’s Department of
Transportation set out to record not just
pictures of the roads, buildings, cliffs, and

photologs
utility poles on the sides of the roadway
but the actual geometry of the objects,

BLACK AND WHITE ARCHIVAL PHOTOS: NATIONAL COOPERATIVE HIGHWAY RESEARCH PROGRAM
using vans equipped with dual 360-degree
lidar sensors. A public portal developed
by Utah’s Department of Transportation
Decades before Google Street View, state government vans were uses colorful visualizations of this 3D
photographing each mile of roadway, capturing a rich visual history data to let you virtually drive any major
of America’s roads and highways. By Jon Keegan route in the state. Other states, such as
Pennsylvania, also have web-based por-
tals that let the public browse their more

O
n May 10, 1985, a Highway departments in almost every recent photolog data sets.
tricked-out van drove state had such “photolog” programs, some These millions of frames of film are
south on US Route 1 in dating back as far as 1961. Each year, these little snapshots of the roads we drove in
Pawcatuck, Connecticut, vans would drive thousands of miles of the past, now sitting on dusty shelves in
on a sunny spring day. state roadways in both directions. States state archives. If more states digitized
Every .01 miles, a 35- ran these programs because they wanted and published them, a wealth of valuable
millimeter movie camera mounted on an up-to-date visual record of each section history could be preserved.
the dashboard captured an image out of of road, intersection, overpass, and bridge.
the front of the van, along with a digital The effort also captured some beautiful A version of this story
appeared on Beautiful Public Data
readout displaying the date, route, mile- scenes from the past, featuring long-closed (beautifulpublicdata.com),
age, and bearing.  shops, hilariously low gas prices, classic a newsletter curated by Jon Keegan.
 Field notes 85

Below: A typical photolog camera and Right: Photolog controller for camera and
recording equipment. display; automatic exposure control unit.

Below: Today, Utah’s photologging vans

include dual 360-degree lidar sensors
capturing detailed 3D scans of the roads and
surrounding area.
PHOTOLOG FRAMES: CONNECTICUT DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Above: Reels of 35-millimeter footage

could be played back on a stop-motion
analyzer.
86
 87

Frames from
a Connecticut
Department of
Transportation photolog
run taken on June 14,
1985, driving east
on Route 66.
88 Puzzle

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

AI did not make this 14 15 16

crossword, but ... 17 18 19

By John-Clark Levin 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

Over the past decade, neural nets have become the 27 28 29

dominant architecture for artificial intelligence.
John-Clark Levin, a researcher on the future of AI, 30 31 32 33

is the creator of this issue’s puzzle, which features

34 35 36 37 38
“AI” inserted into four familiar phrases. He reports
that while ChatGPT can’t make good crosswords yet, 39 40 41 42

such capabilities will be here sooner than we think.

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51
ACROSS 40 Knee-slapper
52 53 54
1 Waze display 41 Where a helix and
4 Lollipop antihelix are 55 56 57 58 59

10 Attired 43 Potpourri bit

60 61 62
14 Knives Out star 46 OpenAI cofounder
de Armas Altman
63 64 65
15 Hope 47 First Bond film

16 Unsavory joint 48 *Tinkerbell’s skillet?

17 *Jokes about cheese? 50 Midnight raid target

52 AOL or MSN DOWN 13 Fancy-schmancy 43 Moderna rival in
19 MIT’s features a
1 ___ scientist 18 Plows into, on purpose vaccine technology
scientist, a blacksmith, 53 Command to a robot
and the words “Mens dog, perhaps (Frankenstein trope) 22 Most common kind 44 Without breaking
et Manus” 2 Eleven plus two and of volcanic rock a sweat
54 Mathematician’s
20 Boston storm output twelve plus one 24 Past due amount? 45 Move stealthily
drain covers 55 Penne pasta 3 Connected, as AirPods 46 Lustrous fabric
25 Nickname of a city
21 Where small boats alternative to a computer near Silicon Valley 47 “My Heart Will Go On”
are often found 57 Deep-learning sys- 4 Tell singer Celine
26 Crucifix inscription
23 Poker great ___ Ungar tems ... which might 5 Leading job at that stands for 49 Digital notification
24 Seismograph create the answers to a stadium? “Jesus the Nazarene, sounds
recording the starred clues King of the Jews”
6 Apple cores? 50 Falsely incriminate
25 *Duty in Egypt? 60 SpaceX founder Musk 28 PC Gamer or E&T
7 North Korean dynasty 51 Mike Myers had four
27 Dosimeter units in 61 The human one was 31 Onion rolls in Goldmember
8 Like much con-
a nuclear lab first fully sequenced
tent blocked by 32 Tolkien treeman 54 Han Solo’s blaster, e.g.
in 2022
28 Windows alternative SafeSearch 33 Class that covers DNA 56 Connections
62 {1, 4, 9, 16, 25},
29 Saw logs 9 Any episode of The 35 Bring up 58 Game with Skip
for example
Big Bang Theory, now and Reverse cards
30 Second-tallest living 36 Skill for a Fortnite
63 Deli loaves
bird 10 Storage devices player 59 Many an MIT dorm
64 Website confirming with a capacity around
31 Noggin 37 Many an MIT event, room, to parents
that Stephen Hawking 700 MB
33 At least one is needed really warned that this proudly
11 Deceives
to make a cellular call puzzle’s theme could 38 Typical Most Wanted
spell the “end of the 12 Virtual-reality repre- listee John-Clark Levin
34 *Snow in April?
sentation of a user is a journalist and
human race” 42 Future fish
39 “Dig in!” author from Ojai,
65 Make an effort California.

MIT Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), July/August 2023 issue, Reg. US Patent Office, is published bimonthly by MIT Technology Review, 196 Broadway, 3rd floor, Cambridge, MA 02139. Entire contents ©2023. The editors
seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to
MIT Technology Review, Subscriber Services, MIT Technology Review, PO Box 1518, Lincolnshire, IL. 60069, or via the internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice. Basic subscription rates: $120 per year within the
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