Collaboration is key in the race to address climate change, says science futurist and entrepreneur, Catherine Ball.
Chatting with Catherine Ball can be stimulating, eye-opening and exhausting, all at once. She’ll have you engrossed in methods of seafloor mapping and bushfire tracking at one moment, before casting your mind to off-planet solar generation, under-water data storage and the STEM illiteracy of politicians at the next.
An author, speaker, entrepreneur and multi-award-winning ‘scientific futurist’, Ball has an eclectic range of research and business experience that she says can be summed up under one neat phrase: Gaian cybernetics, an idea developed in the 1970s by British chemist James Lovelock. “Gaian cybernetics describes everything I’ve ever done; everything I’ve ever cared about,” says Ball, who holds an honorary associate professorship in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra.
In 1979, the same year that Ball was born in Coventry, England, Lovelock published Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. The book described Lovelock’s hypothesis that Earth, and all of its living and non-living components, functions as a self-regulating system. “We try to keep everything in balance, and so does planet Earth,” Ball explains. Cybernetics is the study of systems in machines and living things.
Gaian cybernetics, therefore, is a way to understand that the whole is better than the sum of its parts, says Ball. “It’s how humans, technology and the environment work together to solve a problem.”
Such problems include how to produce meat in the lab, bring back the dodo and thylacine from extinction, and protect populations from new avian flus, says Ball. “We are now interacting with planet Earth, in technological terms, in ways we’ve never done before. Gaian cybernetics is about steering the boat – being in a tinny with the engine behind you and steering where you want to go.”
Breaking down barriers
In her public-speaking engagements, and in her latest best-selling book, Converge, Ball speaks to the power and potential of modern technologies. She’s particularly interested in engaging readers who haven’t quite kept up with the latest in scientific advances.
“I love taking people from business, government and academia, and getting them involved in a conversation – not just a monologue,” says Ball. “Scientists are frustrated at the level of STEM literacy out there. We’ve got politicians and business leaders who have to make decisions. As academics, we need to have wording around how technology and data can be deployed. We need literacy around how we look at this from a bigger picture.”
Education systems have traditionally siloed everything into different subjects, which hasn’t helped us see the bigger picture, says Ball. “When I went to university, I had to choose between environmental protection or marine biology. Is there anywhere else in the world where there’s a solid line between environmental protection and marine biology? There are so many ways that we could be teaching and learning.”
Double degrees, by which students can study engineering alongside psychology, for example, are a great way to break through these delineations, says Ball.
Drones for good
Ball’s eclectic mix of expertise and interests has been developing since she was a child. She had an early fondness for science fiction (Star Wars on a well-worn VHS tape) and wildlife documentaries on the BBC. “Science has always been a part of me,” she says. “Dad’s an engineer, who worked on gas rigs in the North Sea. He was always tinkering in the garage on things like little engines that would toot, powered by liquid paraffin. My mum decided to do law as a mature student with three children under 10, and graduated as a lawyer in her early 40s.”
Ball completed her studies at Newcastle University in the UK in environmental science and statistics. She was lucky enough to travel the world as a young researcher, investigating a new banana species in Thailand for one project, and using drones to study turtle rookeries off the coast of Western Australia for another.
This experience inspired Ball to dedicate her career to exploring and advocating for the positive uses of drone technology. In 2017, she founded World of Drones and Robotics Global, a Brisbane-based organisation that runs the annual World of Drones and Robotics Congress and associated trade exhibition. “I wanted to change the way that people view drones,” says Ball. “We’ve got some world-first projects in Australia that have resulted from the largest drone and robotics conference in the world.”
Such projects include using drones to find people who are lost in the wilderness and helping communities manage bushfire risks and endangered species.
In the past year, Ball founded Applied Future Industries, which will be continuing the drone work in New Zealand. She also recently launched the Futures Conference, which was held in Sydney in July, covering topics such as games, movies, marketing, media, health, ethics, law and cyber security.
“I’ve started a few companies,” Ball says. “I’ve closed a few, and a few have kept going. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done towards accelerating research in drone industries – using drones for good.”
Using drones to collect unprecedented amounts of data about Earth gives us access to technologies such as Google maps – things that Ball could have only dreamed about as a child, she says. “Look at where we are now. We’ve never combined this much data before, on so many different platforms.”
By harvesting this data, solutions to climate change are within reach, says Ball. “I’m an eternal and hopeful optimist. If we collaboratively work together, there’s actually nothing we can’t do.”
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Story by Ken Eastwood