Follow the Thing: Digital Natures

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:For conservation and political ecology scholars, the paper offers a critical framework to trace the material and ecological relations underlying digital natures.

🏢実務担当者:Companies using digital nature or citizen-science platforms could assess the carbon, water, and conflict risks in their data supply chains.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers addressing biodiversity and digital infrastructure may factor data center resource use into conservation and land-use planning.

The gamification of animal movement data—as in exercise apps that enable users to run against GPS-tracked elephants—is a form of digital nature (Nelson et al. 2022; Turnbull et al. 2022; Luque-Ayala et al. 2024). More than games and animal movement, digital nature most broadly refers to the construction and virtualisation of humans and non-humans through a wide variety of digital technologies, including, as Nature 2.0, social media (Büscher 2013). Images of vividly coloured snails uploaded to iNaturalist or Instagram (Altrudi 2021), reviews of national parks on Trip Advisor (Astaburagua et al. 2022), Facebook comments about rhinos and rhino poachers (Lunstrum 2017), tweets made by sunglasses-selling geotagged sharks (Hawkins and Silver 2023), rare species glimpsed on camera traps, moose caught on live webcams (von Essen et al. 2021), birdsongs on acoustic sensors, and other-worldly flora and fauna rendered in a computer game (Tait and Nelson 2021)—digital tools give life to beings and relations that circulate in various forms of data and inform how automated machines act and how people feel, think, and make decisions about the environment. Digital natures have prompted scholars to reiterate and rework many critical questions about conservation, including whether new media change the politics of resource control, the commodification of nature, and the funding dynamics of international conservation NGOs, and whether they enable, disable, or rework forms of care for non-humans (Büscher et al. 2017; Fletcher 2017; Nelson 2017; Turnbull et al. 2022; von Essen et al. 2021). What is certain is that digital natures are new forces in their own right that we have to take seriously, for they materially and discursively construct non-humans and conservation itself in new ways (Turnbull et al. 2022). Digital natures like running elephants are not mere simulacra of the ‘real’ things (see McLean 2019)—they live “second,” digital lives that are not only “crude and simplified” copies but also ones that have meaning and are eternal (in as much as data about any animal may outlast it) (Adams 2020). This is not to say we can’t think about the connections between digital natures and the tangible, analogue counterparts they may have—for instance, how they might enable animal agency beyond the mediation of biologists (von Essen et al. 2021). It means precisely that—thinking about digital elephants and other digital natures in terms of the relations they reflect and produce rather than evaluating them for their authenticity (Stinson 2017). Digital natures both reflect new societal relations, such as a changing political economy of data and of conservation, as well as give shape to new ones, whether of caring or commodification. It is also certain that the apparent immateriality of and distance enabled by digital media do not preclude “(re)connecting” with nature (e.g., Sandbrook et al. 2015; Fletcher 2017; Stinson 2017; Kirksey et al. 2018; Altrudi 2021; Turnbull et al. 2022; von Essen et al. 2021; Verploegen et al. 2024). This is true in several senses. First, audiences often interact with digitised natures in ways that reflect attachment and empathy (but see Lunstrum 2017; Nelson 2017; von Essen et al. 2021 on harms and the complexities of care). Indeed, the interactive nature of web 2.0 technologies—in which we not only consume media, but also produce it—may make connection more likely. When we interact with tangible creatures that then become digitised (e.g., by uploading a photo of a rare plant to a citizen science platform), we can still come from a place of deep caring for nature rather than clout, rewards, or ignorance (Verploegen et al. 2024). This distinction between digitised and tangible natures is dubious, though. It may be tenable in the case of British runners who may only ever interact with the digitised representations of elephants alive on the other side of the planet; less so with cockatoos who show up on social media feeds as well as to feed in local parks (Kirksey et al. 2018). The distinction seems not at all tenable when we think of wholly novel natures algorithmically generated for games like No Man’s Sky (Tait and Nelson 2021). Of course, non-humans have long been co-constituted with science and media (e.g., Mitman 2009). What is new is interactivity, personalisation, and immersion, all of which lead to specific forms of learning and empathy, perhaps at the expense of contextual, political and ecological understanding. Today’s most dominant forms of digital nature may encourage connection with tangible ecologies, but on the terms of conventional science (Altrudi 2021). This may entrench status quos since, to date, many digital natures either resonate in an epistemological register—aiming to raise awareness of pre-defined issues like primate habitat loss—or in specific affective registers (e.g., care for this charismatic species), rather than giving us something to trouble what even counts as nature (Luque-Ayala et al. 2024) or ways of relating to it (von Essen et al. 2021). ‘Race the Wild’ illustrates this ambiguity—perhaps serious games instil in their users a felt and embodied connection that wasn’t there before, but aren’t able to say much about, for instance, land tenure in eastern Africa (Fletcher 2017). In short, the question, “Does the digital connect or preclude engagement with ‘real-world’ nature?” is perhaps better put as, “What kind of relations do digital natures give us?” (see e.g., Stinson 2017) Following Nelson et al. (2022), we can ask, when are these relations transformative towards convivial and just conservation? Under what conditions? What I can offer in this brief commentary is a reflection on what these new relations look like. Digital natures like elephants we run against in exercise apps are new relations we should care for, but what does that mean? In part, I believe it entails characterising the ecological webs they are entangled in (Turnbull et al. 2022). Taking inspiration from Cook et al.’s (2004) “follow the thing” approach to studying the social and ecological relations that inhere in commodities, critical conservation researchers might craft narratives of digital natures beyond their production and consumption. The political and ecological relations that comprise digital natures are not just those “upstream” involving the “tangible” species digitised in apps and media—for instance, the conservation conflicts surrounding African elephants or the gendered, racialisation, and scientific dimensions of data production. Neither are those relations simply “downstream”, where users interact with and interpret digital beings. They are also the “midstream” and downstream relations where digitalisation drives resource use, conservation responses, and landscape changes (see von Essen et al. 2022 on the public as producers of, consumers of, as well as interveners in digital wildlife). Digital natures are fueled by carbon. On the one hand, this is a banal observation in and of itself; almost every action in a fossil fuel-oriented society involves the release of greenhouse gases, and producing, storing, and circulating data and media are no exception. That this feels surprising reflects how the digital has typically been considered “virtual” in the sense of immaterial (Kinsley 2014). The growing scholarly and public realisation that the digital is very much material has proven both overstated and narrowly focused on greenhouse gases. Overall, the carbon footprints of many digital systems are currently relatively minimal compared to other drivers. For instance, one estimate puts data centres at 0.5% of the US’ greenhouse gas emissions (Siddik et al. 2021). This is not to dismiss such footprints but to put them into perspective, just as we might critically distinguish individual emissions and individual responsibility from structural drivers and corporate responsibility. Even when thinking about digital natures’ carbon impact, we should be careful not to slip between different technical systems. The carbon involved in sharing elephants’ movements on an exercise app is likely relatively minimal compared to that of training a large language model like ChatGPT (Strubell et al. 2019) or a cryptocurrency token that has to be verified through energy-intensive computation (Howson et al. 2019). But more than technical specificity, understanding how digital natures are imbricated in carbon cycles involves untangling global data supply chains and their local manifestations—different servers located in various places are fueled by myriad power sources, driving different footprints (Pasek 2019). Indeed, an emphasis on the place-based dimensions of digital natures’ footprints makes sense for political ecologists of conservation. Global measures of carbon impact matter, but the local imbrications of digital infrastructures are worth attending to in their own right for the conservation dilemmas they give rise to. Many data centres require copious amounts of water to cool servers and to generate the electricity that keeps servers on, exacerbating supply issues in many areas of the world where water is managed around scarcity and/or towards powerful interests (McGovern and Branford 2023). If one in five data centres in the US is drawing from stressed watersheds (Siddik et al. 2021), it’s not unlikely that, in some cases, water is being re-allocated away from habitat maintenance services and towards cooling the computers that serve us digitised forms of species dependent on those very services (as one activist in Oregon, USA worries, Osaka 2023). Elsewhere along the data supply chain, mining for the rare earth metals required for server components may exacerbate conservation conflicts in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (if other minerals mining is any indication; Verweijen et al. 2022). There is much opportunity, as Brodie (2023) points out, to draw connections between those who are resisting resou

• openalex https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_57_25first seen 2026-08-02 18:30:54