Interview with Joycelyn Longdon, Author of Natural Connection
A conversation with environmental justice technologist, writer and educator Joycelyn Longdon for Resurgence & Ecologist
I interviewed Joycelyn, a former colleague at It’s Freezing in LA! and all-round exceptional environmental campaigner for Resurgence & Ecologist’s May/June 2025 issue. You can access the full issue, ‘Unexpected Pollinators’, here.
In her expansive new book Natural Connection, academic and campaigner Joycelyn Longdon explores six roots of environmental practice: RAGE, IMAGINATION, INNOVATION, THEORY, HEALING, and CARE. Innovation is an area that she has explored more than most in the climate movement.
Longdon is a true polymath: she originally studied astrophysics (‘as far disconnected from planet Earth as possible’), at the same time as founding BLACKONBLACK, a studio for Black creatives. Her long-standing interest in environmentalism ‘bubbled away’ in the background, and in 2019 she founded ClimateInColour, a hugely popular online climate education platform and community. Racial justice campaigning, creative media, computational skills and environmental knowledge are all braided across her ongoing PhD and, now, Natural Connection.
These experiences appear diverse in a Western system that siloes fields of expertise. But it is precisely this separation that is the problem, she argues: ‘it's impossible for me to view technology as something that's disconnected from people in a living world. Technology has physical, material, cultural implications… [even in] a purely computational project, the tools that we're using are made of materials of the earth.’
Instead, Longdon considers herself a designer, and received the London Design Festival’s Emerging Talent award in 2022. Natural Connection has partly been an effort to start pinning down her approach in words, she tells me. The result is ‘rooted innovation’ which, she writes, is ‘a way of looking more closely at the objects and structures around us and embedding them in the greater ecosystems of nature and culture… [it is] the ability to solve problems in the unlikeliest of places, with the resources available to us.’ Through this lens, the technological and the natural are indistinguishable, ‘recent’ knowledge is not prioritised over ancient, and social justice is paramount.
Longdon isn’t interested in capital-T Tech, for Tech's sake (‘it probably took me six months to use chatGPT for the first time after it came out.’) But she is open to new tools and processes, within a wider consideration of natural and traditional knowledge systems. In her PhD, she uses machine learning to interpret results from bio-acoustic sensors, which are placed in a forest in the Ashanti region of Ghana. She works with a group of local people to design the sensor network and its functions.
Her willingness to test novel computerised technologies is not shared by all in the environmental movement. With ChatGPT and generative AI in the public consciousness, engineered by rapacious companies and unscrupulous billionaires, many rightly focus on the malign applications of modern technologies, their vast ecological footprints and their staggering privacy and surveillance risks. Longdon empathises: ‘so many of us are becoming disenchanted with and fearful of a lot of the technologies that we interact with on a daily basis’. But she thinks that perceptions have become too polarised. ‘There's this idea that technology will either save us or that it will be the source of our demise’, she says. But ‘there's a huge amount of exciting projects going on in the low tech space that are using technologies building sensors from scratch…AI is a [wide] space of analysis techniques.’
This is true: the ecological footprint of a sensor, for example, isn’t nothing, but is negligible compared to that of an AI chatbot. But can the sensors she uses actually help connect the people she works with to the ecosystems around them? Computers do, after all, usually create a distance between ourselves and the real world. As Longdon herself writes of the Vision Pro VR headset: ‘Apple asks us to be satisfied with a few high-definition videos of nature as we spend ever more time in their digital universe…[might this] exasperate our already dwindling meaningful interaction with the rest of the living world?’
Longdon doesn’t think that disconnection has to be the case. In her PhD, she asks people what they want to use eco-acoustic technology for. So far, she says, the community she’s working with mainly wants to understand the forest better. Many feel disconnected from it - some worry they’ll be arrested if they go in at all (she notes that after colonial administrators demarcated the area a formal forest reserve, its boundaries have been policed). They have decided to use the sensors to help identify which birds they are hearing.
Even the process of entering the forest to lay sensors has proven connective: ‘there's 20 of us together, walking, talking, laughing, running, scrambling, playing, teaching… we're going to deploy the sensors. But also we are kind of bonded together around this activity that we're doing.’ It’s a lesson that citizen scientists know well: monitoring pollution, digitizing rainfall records and documenting changing landscapes are all digital activities that can be community strengthening, defining and nourishing. Just listening back to recordings doesn’t bring us closer to ecosystems, Longdon notes, but ‘rooted innovation takes understanding that these technologies are situated in locations, and can have a goal to be very connected with place.’
Longdon feels her project is enabling a deepening, rather than replacing or sanitizing, of human experiences of the natural world. But it has also ended up interacting with the forest very differently to conventional Western ecological research. ‘The most common way that people might use AI in eco-acoustic monitoring is to pick a specific species or a range of species, or to do a kind of baseline survey… this has been going on for a long time’. This compartmentalisation, or tendency to measure and categorize, is something Longdon thinks comes from a colonial impetus and agenda, not AI tools. In Natural Connection, she argues that ‘science’ separated decisively from being about people during the industrial revolution and colonial era, during which Indigenous peoples were cast as ‘backward’ or ‘anti-technological’, and enforced colonial education severed Indigenous communities from their traditional skills and practices. By deploying technologies through a genuinely deliberative approach, she is also seeing much more organic forms of knowledge production emerge.
There’s a lot to Natural Connection, it’s far-reaching, ambitious and deliberately open-ended. But her willingness to see through boundaries is deeply refreshing, whether those separating fields of expertise, between natural and digital technologies, or across the environmental movement. For her, most technology has potential depending on how and where it is used, and she is one of few people trying to properly investigate what this could look like in ecological spaces. ‘Often, as a Black woman and environmentalist living in the West,’ she writes ‘I encounter individuals whose lives have not been touched by environmental disaster or oppression but who have already admitted defeat… unable to imagine the world outside its current extractive and destructive systems, they are resigned to apathy and inaction.’ For her, a true natural connection is ‘to plant strong roots in our communities and within the Earth: to build better futures’, whatever the technology.