The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Dr. Alex Dehgan, CEO of Conservation X Labs
Working at the intersection of technology, conservation, and democracy
Dr. Alex Dehgan is the co-founder and CEO of Conservation X Labs, a DARPA-inspired innovation engine for wildlife conservation technologies. Dr. Dehgan has previously worked as the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development (where he helped launch the USAID Global Development Lab), founded and led the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afghanistan program (where he helped found Afghanistan’s first national park), and served in Iraq with the U.S. State Department (where he helped recruit former Iraqi weapons scientists). His Ph.D. is on lemur evolution in Madagascar.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Dr. Dehgan’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
You've had a fascinating career spanning science, diplomacy, and technology. From the top, how did you launch your career and your first interactions with wildlife and environmental work?
The answer is actually a book called Wildlife Alert: The Struggle to Survive. I had it when I was 10, I still have it. It told me the stories of the California condor, the Florida panther, and the black-footed ferret and all these species are actually the ones that haven't gone extinct and they're now starting to come back. I wanted to be in the game of generating solutions.
I went to Madagascar as an undergrad to help Pat Wright, who later won the Indianapolis Prize and the MacArthur Genius Award, set up Ranomafana National Park. I was one of the first undergrads she had ever taken to the country, and it was kind of an extraordinary experience. I came back to do a Ph.D there.
When I left that Ph.D., there were 45 known species of lemurs. There were 15 or so that were extinct, all larger than the largest living lemur, which is the indri. What happened to the extinct gorilla-sized lemurs of Madagascar? A group of people came from what’s now Indonesia about 2,200 years ago [probably the first humans in Madagascar], and their arrival was this massive extinction event across the island, through the change of habitats and hunting. 90% to 95% of the forest has been cut to some extent.
And yet from 2001 to present, we went from knowing 45 lemur species to 115 or so. That to me is extraordinary. Because on a very small amount of forest, we have more than doubled, almost tripled, the amount of known primates in a single country. You know, this is a country that gave us a cure for childhood leukemia. [The biology of the endangered Madagascar periwinkle flower led to a key leukemia treatment]. It is the country where 80% of the plants and animals are found nowhere else on on earth. It's a natural laboratory for mutation and evolution. We barely know what is out there.
Lemurs, a lot of them are nocturnal, and a lot of this was cryptic genetics, where a lot of the nocturnal lemurs all kind of look alike and it's dark and you're really not paying attention. And when people started paying attention and people started doing genetics, they realized that there was an enormous amount of diversity in lemurs. My guess is the same thing is true in entire categories that we have on Madagascar and nowhere else, like tenrecs and chameleons and orchids and snails. I mean, it is a laboratory for evolution that is extraordinary, Madagascar.
I asked myself at a young age, “How do I maximize my impact per unit time of life?” How do you protect the most species per unit time? That pushed me to think about mega-diverse countries, the tropics, working internationally.
Because in some ways the United States is actually really well off. It has national parks, it has protected areas, it has entire communities and foundations and entities devoted to wildlife protection. We're seeing the U.S. go through a transition as people move to cities, as farming becomes more efficient.
That’s a very powerful and resonant conservation background. How did you go from there to the State Department in Afghanistan?
I was always deeply interested in both national security and the environment. In Madagascar, I spent three years on a tent, literally, with a team of what ultimately became 22 people. Malagasy people, internationals, US scientists, working together with me. About two days after I came back from three years of work without running water or electricity, 9/11 happened.
I had been looking at going to Yale, teaching and doing research at the Yale School of Forestry. A whole career. I had been picking out houses in the communities around New Haven.
Then, a few days after I got back in the United States, 9/11 happened.
And for context, I had some diplomacy and security background. Between undergrad and grad school I had actually worked as an international lawyer, I'd spent the summers helping rewrite Russian environmental law. And then after that I clerked for the chief judge of that court in New York, the U.S Court of International Trade, and worked on you know five cases that went up before the Supreme Court, including some really important trade and environment cases. So this interest between national security, international policy and the environment was always there. I wrote my undergrad thesis on redefining environmental change as a national security risk back in the day. But it was really 9/11 where I said, I can't just be an academic. I love teaching, I love life in the university, but I cannot be an academic.
There was an opportunity for scientists to go into the State Department, and I ended up recruiting former weapons scientists in Iraq.
I'm a lemur scientist, that's not my expertise! But what I did understand was that if you were redirecting someone, that meant that you needed to have a vessel to redirect people into. The science there had been highly militarized in the support of developing of these weapons. People were looking for weapons. The actual thing we should have been looking for was knowledge and how we put that knowledge in service to society. So it was an interesting time.
I used that time, actually, to rebuild science in Iraq, which seemed counterintuitive given that we invaded the country because of science. But I saw that building civilian science was actually the strongest bulwark against the militarization of science. It was probably the most effective thing for us to do to rebuild that society. One of the extraordinary things was, every time I'd come to the country, one of the very senior leaders in the government who would not take meetings with the U.S. embassy would always take a meeting with me. Because we would talk about science! And that was kind of a critical thing, this realization that engaging on science can connect across geographies, history, politics, ethnicity, language. That gives you a common foundation upon which an official relationship could rest. Senior members of the State Department would always beg to come with me to these meetings because we would talk science for an hour and then they would talk for 10 minutes about the issues.
I also worked on the Cairo Initiative for President Obama, and then later the Iran nuclear deal itself. And in the middle of all of this, I also went to Afghanistan and took a break from the State Department to set up their first National Park, which was the first time that national security and conservation came together for me in a way that no one thought possible. That was with the Wildlife Conservation Society. They had the most extraordinary conservationists. I was like, I miss science. Law is cool but conservation science is what I miss the most.
One of my childhood heroes was Dr. Alan Rabinowitz from the Wildlife Conservation Society. You probably met him during that period?
Yeah!
I loved all his books. I love your book too, The Snow Leopard Project, and I really was struck by your writing about how conservation and communal resource management is sort of inherently suited to promoting democracy if it's done well. There was that scene from your book where you held a community meeting in the National Park area about how to manage the land, and then someone from, I think, the Karzai government asked, “Okay, now that we've held a meeting, what do you actually want us to do?”And you're like, no, we actually mean it when we say we want to include people in managing this.
Yeah, it was an extraordinary moment. We believe in community conservation, which meant, you know, we didn't want to tell them what to do. We wanted them to set up the rules by which they would govern this new national park. And so all of these local villages that were within the watershed of the national park had elected representatives to the council that would actually run this national park. Plus the local government, the provincial government, which was led by the first female provincial governor in Afghanistan, and the national government, which was the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Environmental Protection Agency
I think it was really extraordinary watching this. Because we spent some time providing some training, but then once they were in operation we just stood back. I always felt it was like watching the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in the United States. The debates that they were having, the processes, the people voting.
And this is in rural Afghanistan!
Yeah, And as you said, one of the leaders, was like “Okay, what are we really gonna do?” I'm like, “No, this is it, this is how democracy works.”
But my favorite part was talking to someone from the National Democratic Institute, an NGO that is set up to promote democracy. I described all the stuff we were doing and he was essentially like, you're doing our job! I realized I had never thought of it that we were building democracy, but if you think about it, how hard is it to teach democracy as an independent standalone concept? Versus something that for 80 percent of the population in Afghanistan matters to their daily lives, which is, for example, the status of this grassland and can it feed my animals to allow my family to survive through the winter? And the management of the grassland is equally important for that livestock and that family as it is for the wild species like the ibex or the Marco Polo sheep.
That was once again reaffirming for me that the environment was actually critical to national security. Because without it you have these people who could not survive. And when the state fails to actually provide for them, that is where you see the breakdown of governance.
At least in certain countries in the Global North, meritocracy, transparency, and respect for evidence are important values, right? We can actually use science to promote these values. The one thing most countries do is respect the United States for its science. You can look across the Middle East, the view of the U.S., might be less than 100 percent positive but the view of U.S. science and technology is is usually in the 70s to 90 percent. We can use that to actually connect people to solve problems on both sides. It's works best when it's least politicized. Including environmental problems, this is a win for the planet and a win for everyone
I absolutely agree.
Apologies for touching on what I'm sure is a deeply distressing subject, but given the fall of Kabul, do we have any information at all if there's any vestige of community-led conservation projects that have survived as a purely grassroots initiative under the Taliban government?
Do you as an expert on Afghanistan have any knowledge of what the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is like these days?
The short answer is I felt an obligation, as the people who hired many of those environmentalists, to bring those that wanted to leave. Because they had daughters, because they had kids. So I set up a side project specifically to charter planes to get people out of the country, pay for safe houses, for apartments, pay for education. We worked with the international conservation community. We got seven of these families to Mexico where they were given apartments while their visas were processing, and ultimately we had them actually come through the southern border of the United States, legally, and apply for asylum. 11 of these families are now in the U.S. There's still countless people there. There were 300 plus people that I was working with that are stuck in Pakistan or Tajikistan. We just had another family, that's going to arrive I think in the next couple of weeks, that were threatened by the Taliban.
And then we had one family actually live in my house with my family. I have two kids under eight, they had four kids under eight. I don't live in a big house, and four adults and all six kids were living together for three months.
I think the most valuable thing you could do is support the people. WCS still has a small program in Afghanistan, never stopped working. They gave individuals the chance to leave and gave them some support, which I helped subsidize through the money I'd raise.
So it's a difficult question. It's my guess, my hope, that the community is still engaged in conservation, but it’s a challenge.
Two things happened for conservation in Afghanistan, right? It became the third most heavily land-mined country in the world, mostly along borders. Because of the Russian invasion, then the civil war in Afghanistan, and then the US invasion, there are mines all over the country. Those mines and the isolation of the country actually did something to protect some of the wildlife. But then the lack of governance and the flooding of weapons into the country had the opposite effect. So in this case war was a mixed bag, sort of like elements of the Chernobyl exclusion zone or the DMZ in in between North and South Korea
That is fascinating. Thank you so much.
Can you tell me the story of your current work at ConservationX Labs? And specifically some of the amazing stuff you're working on, like the NABIT and the Sentinel cameras.
Yeah, so Conservation X Labs came out of the work I did at USAID. I was asked to be chief scientist for the U.S. Agency for International Development, that is the world's biggest bilateral development agency. I was part of a leadership team that oversaw 20 billion dollars a year of investment.
We work on global health, on food security, on humanitarian response, and democracy building. It was an extraordinary opportunity, under President Obama, to kind of meet the needs of our planet, using and thinking about innovation and technology to do so. I worked with the Gates Foundation, they have a program called the Grand Challenges. Which was a research program, but we turned it into the Grand Challenges for Development, which became product innovation.
So we launched, with Gates, Norway, Germany, DFID in the UK, and Australia, countries around the world, to partner together on these Grand Challenges. It became a model for reform of innovation. At the end of this was when we launched this new element of a DARPA for international development. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has helped advance technologies from the Internet to drones to weather satellites. We said, can we have the same thing for development? That was what I helped get stood up, actually with the unanimous support of Republicans and Democrats, which I think is quite extraordinary. And it wasn't that long ago.
When I left the agency, I started asking the question, can we do the same thing for the environment? Can we use innovation and technology for the environment? The problems are increasing in some ways, potentially, as billions of people move in the middle class and they want the same things as everyone else. But conservation, which has been around for almost 50 years since it's been created, was really linear in our solution sets. And in fact, many of the things that we were doing, like building national parks, which I had been doing around the world in Madagascar, in Brazil, in Russia, in Afghanistan, were all irrelevant if we didn't take the pressures off those systems. And the pressures on those systems came from our demand for food, our demand for resources, the competing demands on the environment. Going back to Michael Soulé, who was one of the godfathers of the field of conservation biology, we described conservation as a solutions-based discipline. And so we've really been focused on, you know, how do we actually make sure that we are providing optimism to conservation. Because the “polar bear on the ice floe” image discourages people from actually doing anything about climate change, and the same thing is true for conservation. Merely telling people about the problem is insufficient to actually solve that problem.
So we wanted to focus on a series of things. Could we actually replace the products that are these underlying drivers of extinction? Can we, through new technologies, increase traceability, stop illegal activity? Can we actually help companies think about pathways are more sustainable, ways to make their supply chains more sustainable, all of these things? Can we engineer resilience in the ecosystems and in our economies within what we're trying to do? Conservation X Labs was set up to be that sort of Bell Labs, Xerox Park, Google X, DARPA-style innovation entity for the environment. Half of our work has been, really, using prizes, challenges, and prototyping competition.
My co-founder is Paul Bunje, who was chief scientist at XPRIZE and is extraordinary and brilliant. We're both also evolutionary biologists. And if you look at ecology and evolution, it kind of defines the big-picture rules of how the world works. I had focused on extinction and Paul had focused on the flip side of extinction, which is [species] radiation. We knew prizes and challenges, and to date we've supported something like 141 innovators on 70 countries across six continents. We've helped them, and then through their own work, they have gone on to raise $345 million. A little under 50% are still active.
So that is really good! For venture capitalists, you know, the success rates are less than 10%. If we can have something over that and we don't take equity or anything like that, that is good for the planet. This is an investment fund that we want to have.
On the other hand, we also build things ourselves, and we have incredible people and engineers on our team that do that. The Sentinel and NABIT are two of those products, as you mentioned.
The Sentinel uses machine vision and machine learning to take something that we all use in conservation, which are camera trap, and makes them smarter and turns them into near real-time devices. Because the camera traps all have one thing in common, which is a memory card. We can plug into that memory card slot, and when the device is recording on it, it uses what's called edge AI. And edge AI literally means AI that is processed locally, on the edge of the device that you're working with.
So it's not in the cloud? It's actually being processed even without an internet connection?
It is done locally in the rain forest. You could ask it to look for, is there a jaguar in this image? Is there is there a poacher in this image? Is there a disease? Is there a behavior? We can actually follow multiple animals simultaneously within the video and describe their behaviors, which I think is awesome. Then depending on communication pathways, we can use ultra-small satellites such as SWARM to be able to directly connect even when there's no [normal cellular data] connectivity. We can use a low bandwidth grid mesh net system in the rain forest that has super long distances to connect devices together, and then connect to the internet or a cellular system. We're looking at other systems as well, and even ideas of long-lasting drones as routers to be able to have these systems work. So this has been really good.
And then we try to make creating models as easy as possible for people. The goal is no one should have to learn how to code or learn machine learning if they don't have to, right? We want to make it accessible.
The second organization that just merged with Conservation X Labs is Wild Me, and they are really extraordinary. Instead of looking at species, they look at individuals based on patterns on their bodies, from whales to leopards to zebras to giraffes. They support a network of 10,000 scientists, and actively follow using machine vision 206,000 around the world, which is extraordinary. But they started with whale sharks and they started with citizen scientists. because whale sharks, they'll show up and then disappear half the time. They're solitary, but they meet in huge aggregations. And we just didn't know a lot about them.
Wild Me started off with a whale shark scientist named Brad Norman, Tanya Berger-Wolf, a machine vision expert, Jason Holmberg who was the database engineer at Dell, and another colleague who is an expert at NASA. And what they did with the whale sharks is they found that the pattern of spots on the back looks like a pattern of stars. So they used an algorithm that was developed for the Hubble Space Telescope to figure out where pictures of stars were in the universe. and used it to identify individual whale sharks that people were sending in through the platform as citizen scientists. They were able to increase the number of known whale sharks in the world from I think 3,000 to 10,000, and now those 10,000 are being followed 24 hours a day almost anytime anyone submits a picture right around the world. You have this global network of divers and dive masters and marine scientists that are taking pictures and we'll pop them up.
Then they started scraping every YouTube video for images of whale sharks, using natural language processing to pick up the metadata as to where this video was and bots to query the poster to get additional information. And they were then able, I think, to increase the number of known whale sharks to something like 30,000 whale sharks around the world, being followed through all these systems and through all these ways. What is really extraordinary is they've doubled the amount of known whale shark hot spots that are now critical for conservation. Like, we didn't know that whale sharks were in these areas at those numbers, and now we do.
The last device is the NABIT. This is a handheld molecular device. It is dependent on these cartridges. As you can see, each of those wells is the ability to look for an individual species. We can look at DNA, RNA, or protein. The goal is to really answer the question, "What is this?” in places where early detection and rapid response is really important.
So if you are a customs agent and you are looking at fish, 30% of the fish in the world that's traded is not what they say it is. Because there's high degrees of fish fraud. If it's red snapper in the United States, it's 88 to 92% unlikely to be red snapper. When they substitute the fish, it's 86% likely that it's coming from a less well-managed fishery. So this is a way to combat the fish fraud that is undermining conservation efforts around the world.
It's a way to deal with wildlife trafficking.
It's a way of identifying diseases and supply chains.
This is really built for anyone to be able to take the steps of how to run the device, which is simple, and we continue to make it that simple. And the goal is to make it so that a six year old would be able to run a molecular test in the places where we need it, right? In places where people don't have high degrees of literacy, don't speak English, don't know science. Those are the people that will help us with wildlife trafficking, timber trafficking, fish traceability, some of these other cases that are out there.
And now, we're really looking at disease and understanding where spillover is happening. We're developing assays for Ebola and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and Nipah virus and Mpox and a whole set of other zoonotic diseases, which tend to be 70% of emerging infectious diseases. Understanding where spillover is happening, and then thinking about the conservation management options to reduce that spillover and prevent the next pandemic.
So all of this is another example of where there are co-benefits to national security. By protecting the environment we can actually protect human health.
That is brilliant!
Well, thank you so much. This has been an extraordinary interview.
My pleasure. And if you're interested, happy to do a follow-up.
I would love that. There's so much more we should discuss. Thank you so much, Mr. Dehgan.
Thank you.
What a polymath!