Environmental Professionals Radio (EPR)

Science Communication, NFTs and the Metaverse with Sunny Fleming

May 06, 2022 Sunny Fleming Episode 65
Environmental Professionals Radio (EPR)
Science Communication, NFTs and the Metaverse with Sunny Fleming
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Sunny Fleming, National Solutions Engineer at Esri about Science Communication, NFTS, and Metaverse.   Read her full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form 

Showtimes: 
1:14  Nic & Laura talk about GIS in the Workplace
7:51  Interview with Sunny Fleming Starts
13:07  Science Communication
39:38  NFTs
44:23  The Metaverse 

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Sunny Fleming at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunny-esri

 

Guest Bio: 

As the National Solutions Engineer for state environmental agencies, Sunny is responsible for supporting some of Esri’s longest-standing customers: fish and wildlife agencies, environmental regulation, agriculture, state parks, historical preservation, and natural heritage programs. She loves helping our customers shape their vision and innovate to meet their business challenges.

 

 

Music Credits

Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa

Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

 

 

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Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Nic 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental enthusiast Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Laura and I discuss using GIS in the workplace. We invite sunny coming back to the show to talk science communication, NFTs, and the Metaverse.  And finally, flames do not have shadows because a flame is always a source of light, it will not cast a shadow by another source of light going through it. So basically, one light beam can't interact with directly with another. How about that?

Laura 
Hmm, that's interesting. Now I'm gonna look.

Unknown Speaker 
Cool. Hit that music.

[NAEP Event News]


Laura 
Registration is now open for NAEP's 2022 annual conference and training symposium May 16 through May 19 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Drew Bartlett, the executive director of SFWMD we'll be closing out our keynotes at the conference. We're really excited to have him there. Go to naep.org for more details. We appreciate all of our sponsors and they are what keeps the show going. If you'd like to sponsor the show, please head over to environmentalprofessionalsradio.com and check out the sponsor form for details. Now let's get to our segment.

[Nic & Laura Segment: GIS in the Workplace]

Nic 
Do you use GIS Laura?

Laura 

I try to. Like I want us to have a map for our speaker locations. I have a GIS map on the Environmental Career Coach page and I have made story maps myself, so I love GIS i I want to find ways to use it. I even thought about like what if that was one of my services at some point in my consulting career but never really brought that to fruition but yeah. What about you?

Nic 
Well, yeah, I don't do it personally. But we use it all the time for like our projects, like every single NEPA project has to have some component of GIS associated with it. And most of the time, it's just you know, straight up maps. It's just here's our project site. Here are the concerns with the site. A lot of times it's pulling in multiple different data sets into one. A lot of Esri's background information on wetlands or waterways. They were really helpful and you can include that with whatever your project is and kind of get an idea of what are the actual impacts of the site so you can even just look at the picture and say, Oh, this is, for example, we had a project once where they wanted to build a carwash on an installation and when they showed us where they wanted to put it, we were like, No, you should not build a carwash across a stream. That's a bad idea. Please don't put it there. And they're like, well, this is the most convenient spot. And actually this is this is, you know, a really interesting conversation. We have a really, it may be convenient for you guys from a construction standpoint. But getting to that point is going to cost a lot more money. It's going to require more permitting, and you're going to have to have every year I mean like you're gonna have to have really strong, what do they call it, like a reviews for those sites because it's the potential for contamination into a navigable waterway is really high. So you do not want to do that. You're much better off putting it in a different spot and they actually were like Oh, you're right, we should move that. And so, you know, putting that on a map is an easy way for people to see it cuz you can say it you can write it and a lot of people are really visually stimulated. So that's kind of like really visually oriented. So it's much easier for us to kind of digest what the project is by putting maps in. And so we have to that. Every project we have, we do.

Laura 
Yeah, we had a restoration project that was adjacent to a community that had recently been built and they were basically going to get tidal pools and all this beautiful habitat and plantings. And so birds would be there and then they were fighting it tooth and nail and it was like okay, look, here's the before and after. Pull out the map, add in, popped in some screenshots of other aerial locations like this is what the tidal pool would look like here and this is what this is going to look like here. And then it was like, oh, I see what we might get in our backyard. Right. That's very helpful.

Nic 
Yeah, I think it can be kind of, you know, people have put their own ideas into something that's abstract, right? They use their own influences and backgrounds histories, to influence the way that they see something. But when you show them something new visually, it's hard for you to that's the new frame of reference, right? So you now have a much better idea and understanding of what this project is going to be like because you have that picture. Where before It's just your imagination putting the worst things out, you know,

Laura 
Yeah, and you know, Sunny has been super excited about the new story maps that are coming out from Esri because they're free for personal use. So you can create a story map of your garden, which means you can geolocate everything there but then relate it back to like maybe in this corner, you've got high hibiscus, but you can link it to a story that links to the history of hibiscus. Or maybe you know, one of those Arbor pages that shows you how to take care of it or something. And so any hobby that you might have that has an almost anything, you do have some sort of spatial component. You could create something cool, which is I think, for me, a really cool tool, especially for people who are job seeking. And especially if there's a GIS component, because then you can say, hey, this is the work I've done. This is a project I did on my own, and it's super free, super fun. And you're still building your skills and then showing employers that you took the initiative to do something. So for you, you hire a lot of entry level people. Is GIS one of the skills you're looking for?

Nic 
It just depends on the need at the time, like use mentioned storybooks and or story maps. And I was gonna say the same thing actually, like we. We recently had a transportation project and we were using story maps to show the impacts of the construction project across miles and miles of road and so really, really neat application for that and you know, a shout out to our GIS team. They did a fantastic job pulling that together. And so we are eventually going to be looking for a new GIS person as well as our group grows and I know that's coming sooner rather than later. So in that sense, we definitely will be it's gonna be really a requirement and there's different ways to do it. Like some companies will have dedicated GIS personnel. That's the way we do it, right where it's, we have a GIS group, we have a team and you know, shout out to Erin and Kate. They are great, that's who I work with the most, but other companies will do it where the environmental professionals themselves has to do their own GIS. And there's there's pros and cons to that. I think a lot of times if you have a dedicated GIS person, they're gonna make fantastic maps and if that's what they're doing, then they don't rush things. I mean, you know, there's still going to be pressured to get things done on time, but they're dedicated, they're doing that so you can do the sciency part of it, right? And the writing and all that other stuff, but you know, if you're in a pinch and you need things get done. It's really great. It's a great skill to have. And if you can do that, that's also for me, it's like a secondary skill, right? Everybody should have at least one secondary skill when they're learning their careers. If your first skill is, you know, I'm a wildlife biologist. I know a lot of this stuff out there. But if you also know GIS that gives you some versatility so you even when times are slow, because you don't have a survey to go to you like, hey, I can make maps for you guys while I'm waiting for this next thing. There's always a benefit to doing that. So we do look for that to who we hire.

Laura
 
Yeah, totally. Cool. Well, we both use GIS we both love GIS. Now let's talk to you are Queen of Sciences in ESRI with GIS.

Nic 
All right, sounds great.

[Interview with Sunny Fleming Starts]

Nic
Hello and welcome back to EPR. Today we are super excited to have our GIS guru Sunny Fleming return to the show. She is now the environment Conservation and Natural Resources industry lead for ESRI  Sunny, we're so happy to have you back.

Sunny Fleming 
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be back. This is my favorite podcast obviously.

Nic 
What? Oh man, you can come back whenever you want. As long as you say that's,

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah, of course. Of course. I wasn't paid. I promise.

Nic 
Oh gosh. So let's start with you getting a new job title since last we spoke. What does it mean and how have your responsibilities changed?

Sunny Fleming  
Oh boy. Okay, so my former responsibilities here at ESRI. I was in our global business development team. And that's really our account managers and our solution engineers and all of that kind of really direct technical support and account management to the customers themselves. And I worked very specifically with state environmental agencies at that point. So how it's changed. I'm now with our industry marketing. So I'm not doing a lot of that kind of tactical work direct with our customers, but I still get to look at okay, what's happening across the environmental space. And how do we make sure that we're telling the great stories of the good work that people are doing in the environmental space with the technology and what are some of these trends and how do we really broadcast that? How do we support that insight at Esri. So, it's more on kind of just the understanding the space that really leaning into the, and I use air quotes so everyone can can see this subject matter expertise. I always laugh if you call yourself a subject matter expert, you're definitely not one. So that's that's not my term. And as you know, we have tons of people here at Esri, it's the Environmental Sciences Research Institute that have an environmental background, right. So I have a very specific perspective coming into this which means that I get to admit that I don't know everything because I absolutely don't. And my favorite thing about it is that I get to reach out to my teammates and really work with them. We get to collaborate and especially with things like the infrastructure bill and I think the way that people view environment now it's so cross cutting across all of these industries. So I'm talking to folks that work in transportation, I know nothing about transportation, right, but we can start to kind of bounce ideas off of each other and understand what some of the environmental crossover might be there, things like that. So all sorts of really interesting collaboration that I get to do now.

Nic 
That's really cool. That's got to be kind of fun to do something that touches a lot of different industries. Is there stuff you're learning like on a daily basis, is that what's happening then?

Sunny Fleming 
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. For sure. The learning curve is huge. And, and that's both from a, how do I execute on this job and what are their strategies as well as what are these topics that I haven't necessarily always been involved in? But now I am. So as part of this, it's called the industry lead for Environment and Conservation. As part of this, I really kind of was given government, environment, state and local government environment to kind of own that's kind of my baby. I have a lot of support in that because I'm a new new little Chicklet. And then I also get to part time support our conservation practices as well. So that's really the nonprofit side of things. And there is a lot of crossover there. And even when I was working in state government, we worked with a lot of nonprofit partners. And so there's crossover between what happens in government and environment and government conservation and what's happening with nonprofit conservation. So it is really cool to see these things coming together and really get to lean into these things that I didn't have much of an opportunity to before.

Nic 
That's really cool. And so I guess, long term for this. What are your goals for that position? What do you want to get out of it?

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah, well, I want to take over the world. No, I'm just kidding.

Nic 
Alright, cool. You and me both. Yeah. That's cool.

Sunny Fleming 

No, what keeps me going and long term. It's so funny. I'll take a step back and be the first one to admit you know, and you're like in school and the teachers asked you what, what do you want to do in 10 years, or where do you see yourself? I didn't know I was like, I want to be a professional soccer player and artist like, you know, my mind was never what do I want to be in 10 years I really follow opportunity in a very organic sense and I go with my gut and I go with my heart. The thing that I love about this job in this work, and Esri is that I can't quite describe how fulfilling it is to see a community of and it used to be, I would say GIS users, but it's more than that. Now. I think GIS is really starting to be understood by other levels by leaders of like, okay, this is yes, it's technology, but it's a different kind of technology and it can solve my challenge. So it's really fulfilling to see people do good work. That helps protect our environment, using a technology that we develop. That is just one of the coolest things on the planet. And I don't care if I'm having a good day or a bad day. Ultimately, when it comes down to it. That's what keeps me going. It's so exciting to see people using our technology to do great things and fulfilling values that are very important to myself.

[Science Communication]

Nic  
Man, Yeah. I mean, it's really cool. It's one of the I mean, the tools that you guys have blow me away and we're definitely going to dive into some of those as we go through. There's Yeah, we got it. We got to toss some examples out there. Right. So

Sunny Fleming 

That's funny too, because, you know, ironically, the further I go and, especially with industry marketing, that the less I have my hands on the tech but I definitely have there's some capabilities that came out in Arc 2.9 that I don't know if we talked about them on the last call or not, but I'm like very excited about it.

Nic 
Okay. Okay. Well, we're here. So what are they?

Sunny Fleming 

Okay, okay, so, god did we talked about this last time? I'm worried.

Nic 
I don't think we did.

Sunny Fleming 
Okay, so have you heard of like, presence only predictive modeling?

Nic 
I'm gonna say Laura has.

Sunny Fleming 
Okay, okay. Darn it. Laura, wish you were here. All right. So I really became fascinated by this kind of modeling when I was working with the state with the state of Tennessee. And oftentimes, you know, we were working with endangered species. So we had kind of a small sample size, right? There's not many populations of these specific species that I was working with. And we only had data on where they were, we weren't collecting on data on where they weren't. A lot of models use kind of random forest classification where it says, Oh, this thing, not this thing, to give you an output, and it requires that you tell the computer both where something exists and where something doesn't exist. Or what something is or what something isn't, there's that duality, right. So this kind of modeling presents only predictive modeling doesn't require you to not know right, that doesn't require it. It only will take if you have a limited set of data. And that's all you have, and you just know where something exists, but you don't know where it doesn't exist, then you can input it into this model, and it will spit out a raster, so a cover of the landscape that says here's a high probability that your species might exist here based on the conditions, or there's a high probability that the conditions for your species exist here. So the practical application of this other than just being awesome. It's super fun. It's super fun, because it's like whoo, I have I have treasure and now I have a really detailed map where I can go find more of this treasure, right? Okay, so that's the exciting thing about it. Now, we didn't always have this in our technology and it is now available in ArcGIS Pro 2.9. So that fish and wildlife agencies, other folks that work with rare data, rare species data, they can really take advantage of this and the tools. I used to use a separate software to run this and it was kind of a pain in the keister to do it. The tools are so easy. I tested it before it came out and I was just like can't tell me it's this easy. Now. It's so easy. It was great. It was really exciting.

But the practical application of this is a couple fold. First of all, I think it helps organizations really optimize Where are we going to search for the species. So let's say you're a State Natural Area. And you've gotten section six funding for your monitoring, and part of that is that you have a task this year to go hunt for more populations of this species. You can really optimize your searches based on these kinds of outputs. Now, they give you a really specific area to look at, and really ground truth the data. So that's super cool. But let's also think about something like environmental review. Oftentimes, states will conduct an environmental review, based on just a buffer of where they know something exists, right. But a buffer isn't a true representation of a species biology. Yeah, so using something like an output of where we know a species could exist gives you a much more accurate and true way to say, oh, you know, we do need to do an environmental review for X,Y and Z species here because the conditions are right, buffers are not going to tell you that. So I think and I don't want to speak for them. But I think Pennsylvania I feel like they're one of the states that's actually implementing this kind of stuff in their environment or review. And they were ahead of the curve. But yeah, they'll have to correct me on that one if there's anyone from PA listening in. Yeah, ok Kara. If there's anyone working with their heritage program. So yeah, so I really anticipate that states are going to start looking at the accessibility of this tool now and maybe implement it to their environment review it'll be a much better reflection of reality. So yeah,

Nic 
Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny you say that because I actually worked on a whooping crane Environmental Impact Statement. years ago, probably five, ten years ago at this point. Yeah,

Sunny Fleming
Whoop Whoop. Had to.

Nic
There you go. There you go. But yeah, one of the things we actually, I actually had to come up with an idea for finding out where these species are going to be and there's only like 500 of them total or whatever it is. Yeah, so their habitat becomes the most important thing, right?

Sunny Fleming
Yes, exactly.

Nic
That's exactly what we were doing. We were looking for Habitat parameters, and saying, Hey, these are wetlands that they will actually use because they are not just a pond, but they have trees as well, which is really important to them and all this other stuff. And we map it out and you know, you have 1000s of data points and you push the play button and it's just like boom

Sunny Fleming
it's awesome.

Nic
It was really really cool. So I mean,

Sunny Fleming
Very  powerful

Nic
an even better yeah, I guess adaptation of that, which is really awesome. And now I wish that I was doing that project now. So

Sunny Fleming 
yeah, it makes it a lot easier and the results from that and it's iterative, too, right. So we learn something from these models. And we as biologists, we do have to look at them and say, does that look right? Or you know what went wrong there and redo it, tweak it, make sure that that's iterative, but it's great. I love it. I'm very excited about it. So

Nic 
yeah, and I guess I guess your you know, how your data gets put in as it matters, you know, like, we had to use national wetlands inventory, which is not perfect, you know, it's better than than no data. So there's always challenges with that because we're looking at over you know, there's like basically from Texas to North Dakota. And you can imagine, you don't have a lot of time to go, Okay, well, let's, let's look at every single one of these and see if it's actually what it says it is, you know,

Sunny Fleming  
Well, I'm glad you brought up the NWI data because shameless self promotion here. My colleague, Gina O'Neil, PhD, she's brilliant. And I don't know if our listeners have heard about this yet, but we are going to be presenting on it a little bit. She's come up with a wetland identification model. So it uses similar functionality where you can tell the computer what is and what is not a wetland, and start to get a really accurate picture of wetland delineations using this model. And you mentioned Nic, it it's all about your data that you're inputting. And so our vision here if I had to come up with a perfect state agency that was collecting wetland data and doing these delineations This is a relationship right? We have environmental consultants that are out in the field, they're conducting these wetland delineations and how many times do they send this in? On some kind of static PDF with a form in that that actual spatial data is not going into a spatial database, but that data is so valuable if we know that we have accurate data coming out of our wetland delineation and we as a state agency are collecting that data. We could then input it into a model and ask the computer to tell us based on what we know, where else can we define wetlands and start to have a much more accurate picture that could facilitate better, facilitate our permitting processes. So Gina and I make sure you come to our presentation at NAEP, because that's kind of the vision that we're going to be hopefully illustrating for folks is how this can be used and how this can become a circular process. Right? So

Nic 
yeah, man, that's cool. I love that kind of stuff though. Because like you say, it just kind of feeds on itself and becomes a much better, much stronger program over time. It's really cool.

Sunny Fleming 
Exactly exactly and we're missing so much of that right now. All of that spatial data that consultants are sending in. In a lot of cases. It's stuck in a static PDF and nobody's able to take advantage of it. Especially the NWI. Who could really use it.

Nic 
I actually have a really funny story for that too. Like I remember the worst one I ever saw was I won't name the any of the details but I will say we got okay we were like what we did a previous wetland delineation like Okay, great at the site. Yes, absolutely. Okay, awesome. Send it to us. And it was literally someone's hand drawn approximation of where the wetlands were. And were, this is like I drew it, so we had to redo the whole thing. Yeah. And we're like you already did this. Why don't you accept that Yeah, it happens.

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, there are better ways and the tech exists and everyone already owns the tech. Let's let's do it better.

Nic 
Well, you know, we talked last time about like communication between groups. And there's, there's different ways and different challenges with that. I think, you know, I know like some of our clients, for example, absolutely require us to give them our GIS data, right. What they do with it after that, I don't know. Does it make itself to NWI? Probably not, and I don't know how we it's a really hard question to ask you. But how do we get this collaboration in lots of different arenas with lots of different people, like kind of how do we get them all to come together?

Sunny Fleming 
I think that's a fantastic question. And actually, I think the question is also the answer. We need to come together. I think so often, what happens is that maybe Environmental Consultants will be in a group of other Environmental Consultants and they know that this is kind of a problem or, and then maybe state groups get together and they're talking amongst themselves and they know that there's some inefficiencies and then the federal groups will be talking and you know, between EPA and US Fish and Wildlife Service, maybe they're not cross pollinating or maybe they are and but the communication between all of us and setting a vision and understanding the relationship between our private industry and our private consultants are local and county governments, our state and our federal. That rarely happens. And so I think what Gina and I are going to be presenting on it in NAEP is really kind of a hypothetical vision not going to lie. It is not implemented. There's components of it, everybody has access to this technology, but they're not recognizing that, oh, we can start using this to make sure that the relationship between everyone is there and is working smoothly and can actually feed into all of these other collateral things that we're all working on. Right. So that's really it. I think it just takes a conversation and you know, darn it, that's my pulpit right now. And, and if I can just present the vision, that's at least one way to get the conversation going.

Nic 
Oh, that's awesome. So I mean, that's a great thing for us to look forward to at NAEP. And kind of a nice segue to my next question, because we are beyond thrilled to have you as our first keynote speaker at the conference.

Sunny Fleming 

I'm so excited. I'm so excited. You know, I say I'm the I'm the jack consolation prize, and nobody knows who I am. But I'm very excited. I'm very excited. I picked out my outfit and everything. No. I had to pick out my outfit. Daily scrubs, they're not keynote material.

Nic 

Right? Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah. So it's gonna be awesome. You're gonna You're such a good presenter, you have such a good way to way your speaking. I don't know why I'm saying all these extra words here. But you're going to be great. And I'm really excited about it. But I wanted to ask if you can give us just a little preview of what you're going to talk about without spoiling too much.

Sunny Fleming 
Okay, well, without spoiling too much. I think environmental professionals have the greatest job in the world. And that's really what I'm going to be talking about. And I think that the work that environmental professionals do, you know, yesterday was national environmental professionals day, right.

Nic
That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Sunny Fleming
So I feel like this is appropriate to talk about, but I feel like the work that we do, I'll still include myself in that category. The work that we do is only going to become more and more important. And I think we need to be really proud of that. But we also need to lean into and think about what are some of the new expectations we might have as environmental professionals. And also how do we start communicating to others about the work we do, right? We can be very technical, we love our technical stuff, but how do we start communicating the value of what we bring to the table with people who their eyes will glaze over if we start saying technical words. So yeah, that's that's my intent. I really hope that with my keynote, I inspire folks to think about that and to be really, really proud of the work that they do and understand and recognize how important it is and that that's only coming into sharper focus as time goes on.

Nic 
Yeah. So, so great. And one of our focuses on the show has been, you know, that if we could if I could choose a word, I want it to be collaboration. I am a collaborator. I love that concept. I love the idea. And I also recognize that when I talk to like, my brother, for example, and I say anything about the environment, he's like, you know, so I know that I have I have a challenge. You know, you're like,

Sunny Fleming 
hey, that air you're breathing when you're snoring right? It's all my clean because of us.

Nic 
Yeah, but I think it's really important because I just, you know, people like oh, yeah, it's all you so go do your thing and leave me alone. And it's like, well, I need your help, too.

Sunny Fleming
Exactly. Exactly.

Nic
It's not just me. So. But have you seen any shifts in how we communicate with people that are kind of on the positive side of things?

Sunny Fleming 
It's interesting that you asked that question. My number one gripe right now. And the thing that really concerns me is that we're really hitting people over the head right now with climate change, climate change, climate change, and it's necessary, it's necessary that we draw attention to this as an issue. It absolutely is. However, we need to be really sensitive to the way in which we speak about climate change and think of what is the psychology of the person who's hearing that message? And what's the behavior that we want them to take? Because right now, when you hear about climate change, it's my favorite term Doom scrolling. Yeah, when you're doom scrolling on your phone. Yeah, you know, I personally, I'll catch myself doing that all the time that the algorithms on my phone, you know, they obviously know what I do. I get a lot of articles about climate change and things like this on my phone, and they're all really, really negative. And they're all really, really scary. And it puts a barrier that I have to overcome every morning to get up, get out of bed and do something about it. And a lot of people won't overcome that barrier if they're just faced with a really negative clickbait headline. And this is actually a topic that they talk about in science fiction writing as well. Science fiction writing can be really negative. And it presents this really like, dismal idea of what the future could be.

Nic 
Yeah, dystopias right.

Sunny Fleming
Why? Why do that technology can be a great thing. And we need to be illustrating why it could be a great thing. climate change presents us with an opportunity to do something about it and to better ourselves. And that's the message that I wish I would see more of and headlines. How do we do things as individuals on a daily basis that reduces our impact to climate change? Because there are ways and there's simple ways and the thing is to another thing I really don't like about our current climate change messaging. There's a lot of judgment in there.  But we have to realize that everyone lives their own life, and everyone has their own kinds of creature comforts that they might like to enjoy or things that they might like to do and we can't expect everyone to wake up one morning and do whatever it is that we think they should be doing, right. Everyone has to find their own way to tackle this challenge. And the message we need to be sending is that you can do it, that there's ways that you can implement this into your life and not to be judgmental, if you can or cannot do something. Sometimes they're not practical things that we can really implement. So yeah, I just want climate change messaging to be more hopeful and more possible, more action driven, more approachable for the individual.

Nic 

Yeah, that's very well said. And I really appreciate that too. Because I think it's really important for people to hear. It doesn't have to be doom and gloom. Yeah, because it's immediately people turn off right away. If you say, Well, you shouldn't do this, because if you do,

Sunny Fleming 

yeah, that gets you nowhere, gets you nowhere.

Nic 
So yeah, again, I thank you for that. And, you know, last time we had you on too, we also talked about the infrastructure bill, and your thoughts on reading through all that. So you've had a little bit more time to digest it. Do you have any more ideas on what it really means?

Sunny Fleming 
I do. I do. I think when we first did the podcast, I was not too far out from having read it. And my relationship with it in the past few months has has kind of changed. I'm still obsessed. I've actually become more obsessed with this bill. I'm kind of fascinated by it. And I don't know if I'm fascinated by it so much, or if I'm fascinated by people's reaction to it. I think both. I'm pointing to it on my desktop, like staring at it. Next to me, I reference it pretty often. But my my thoughts on it have changed. And it shifted from trying to figure out what's in it and what it means and what the intent is. To now I'm trying to think about how is this going to impact us? And I mean, us broadly. I mean, that's beyond environmental professionals. And I'm starting to kind of formulate, you know, a framework around this around how I formed my thoughts around this and my thoughts really are that I think there's four challenges that are not new for us, but that the bill is going to exacerbate and again, it's an opportunity for us to tackle things and do things better.

So first and foremost, I think community engagement and transparency. There's a lot of money in this bill. And there's some things that it challenges us to do, like build things sustainably, conduct our business sustainably, be resilient, be equitable. And folks are going to want to see the measurable outcomes of that. And by folks, I mean, the communities, right, they're gonna want to see hey, how are government spending this money? Are they meeting particular goals? But also I mean, of course, the Feds right? They're gonna have measurables and reporting and things like this. So really, like, you know, we're just starting to kind of find out and figure out I think what some of those measurables may be. So that's kind of the first challenge is that transparency and community engagement, and that includes also hearing back from communities. How do we enable communities to be able to apply for these grants the reason the same communities apply for these grants over and over again, is because they have the resources, the education to do it. So how do we technically enable communities that haven't historically applied for these grants, right? So that's kind of one leg. Prioritization. When you have a lot of projects that you can get done, but you have a mandate to look at them through the lens of equity, resiliency, sustainability, that's going to shift how you prioritize your projects. So that's going to become a challenge. I think those are muscles that we're going to have to exercise in ways that we haven't exercised them before. So that's another challenge really prioritizing those projects.

The third one is, I think, really around our operational sustainability and our efficiency, when we can even think about this very specifically through that environmental lens of permitting right, every one of these projects is going to require permits, and there's going to be a lot of these projects. So the manpower, boots on the ground, as well as you know, how are we processing these permits? What did those workflows look like? How do we communicate internally all of that? And it even goes back to our discussion about the wetland data? Gosh, we all use the same technology, how can we better utilize it and communicate with each other so that we make these processes more efficient. It can be done. So there's going to be some bottlenecks created by this and so the folks that have better operational efficiency in place and are looking to streamline that are going to do better than those that don't. So all of this though, is underpinned by equity and that lens of equity. And so that's kind of the fourth, I think, major challenge that this is going to present with us is what does equity mean? It's going to mean different things to different communities at different scales. That means different things, maybe to the feds, you know, how are they going to kind of approach this and they've done some of that. States sometimes have very specific ideas of what equity means, local governments individual cities. So the whole equity thing, I think really underpins all of this equity, the resiliency and sustainability. Yeah. So those are the four challenges I think that I am starting to see revealed from this bill.

Nic 
Yeah, and you know, that's because I very well summed, and I think like one of the things that mentioned equity and how we have even defined that differently in different communities. Do you have any examples of how communities are using equity in different ways?

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, especially when I think about the technology and what Esri provides to our end users, you know, every state owns our technology, the Feds own the technology, a lot of the major cities and the minor cities and the counties, they all own this tech, right. And that technology allows them to look at the demographic data, and maybe they have certain metrics around what equity means for them. So maybe in a metro area, there's really clear perhaps racial delineations of equity, more, you know, income delineations, but then maybe if you're looking at a statewide scale, maybe it's between the urban and rural divide, maybe that's your lens of equity, but the underlying attributes of demographic data, you can really look at those across the landscape and say, well, these are the characteristics that I'm targeting. And this is maybe what I want to look at, or in a Metro City, you can take that exact same data and say, well, these are the characteristics I'm interested in. So maybe you know, move your slider right to just capture those those characteristics and start to address these things. First of all, consistently, you can use the same data at scale across the landscape, but also be flexible enough that you can apply it to your individual characteristics and so yeah, I mean, I think we see a lot of different communities already doing this and already tackling this. So many states right now are looking at California's EJ screening tool I think they have and they're starting to implement their own versions of that based on their own kinds of criteria. So I just came back from the Environmental Council of the states. And I mean, they were all talking about their EJ screening tools. And it was really cool to see everyone's kind of looking at that pattern that California has put in place and implementing it for themselves in their own states. But that was awesome to see.

Nic  
That's really cool. I love hearing that because, you know, I don't always we don't always see that and sometimes, like when that stuff is happening, it's behind the scenes and yeah, it takes a year or two for that to come through. So I'm really excited.

Sunny Fleming 

Yeah, that's, that's my job. Now to get those stories out. How fun is that?

Nic  
Yeah, that is actually pretty great. And, you know, we have a lot of people listening I think we say we have environmental professionals right. what that even means is really unique to me because he may talk about what you're doing. You're not doing it quote unquote, but you are right, you telling stories about how this is all coming to be what you think about the infrastructure bill and the opportunity we have in front of us. All of that, to me is the essence of environmental professional. I think it's great.

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you. Because sometimes I'm like, Ah, I miss being in the field. But yeah,

Nic 
I know. I know. I mean, I feel the same way. You know, like I used to be in the field all the time. And now I'm like, Man, that field is nice. You know, you have the opposite, too, right? We're like the summer and you're like, you know what, I'm glad I'm inside.

Sunny Fleming 
You do you do? It's a different kind of reward.

[NFTs]

Nic 
Right. But, you know, there's lots of there's so many topics that I think are really, really important for us to tackle. And one of the wilder ones, though, sort of last year has been the emergence of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Oh, yeah. And I think it might be a passing fad. I don't want to say that out loud. Because I'm really worried that I'll say that and it will take off again, but I know investors are struggling and struggling to determine the actual value for these things. And so do you know like, you had a post about the potential value of NF T's for public land and historic site conservation, and, or you shared a post about that and what are the implications about adopting NF T's for public spaces?

Sunny Fleming 
So I find this really interesting. I have a good friend who was in Tennessee State Parks, he was their marketing guy. And he and I really enjoy having conversations around some of these topics and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, because when you start talking about using this kind of blockchain technology, which is really energy intensive technology, for the good of environment, it sounds really hypocritical. And I would say right now it is. The technology has not evolved yet to be energy efficient. And I'm not an expert on this. It's just one of these things. That we like to kind of think about, to your point about, we're really struggling to understand the values of NF T. I think anytime you have a new currency and we see this in history, and again, I'm not an economic expert, there's going to be a lot of volatility. And so we see that right now with cryptocurrency. And with NFTs, but what I find fascinating about it, and I really understand it at a high level. I think something that's kind of kept conservation back historically is that we have a finite opportunity to conserve, right. And so, therefore, when we are up against the question of what is the economic value of extractive industry, on our land, versus what is the value of preserving that. It can be really hard conversation. Now, when we look at technology like NFT's and starting to monetize this, in a way, you're starting to build an economy around conservation that has never existed before. And so, that fascinates me, because I think it finally gives conservation, an opportunity potentially, to explore how can we use this for conservation for raising funds for our public lands, raising funds for protection of species, and we've seen this and it has been controversial. I want to keep reiterating that we've seen this come from the World Wildlife Fund, I believe they did an NFT program, where they sold NFTs of rare species. And these are little virtual representations. of the rare species and you could buy them and they were a certain value and that raised funds for protection of those same species. We now have seen this with the National Park Service and I think that's the post that you're referring to. And they've put out in NFTs of nice little landscapes and things like that, that people can buy in that raises funds for other conservation efforts. And it's controversial because and I alluded to this, it's really energy intensive. Yeah. So I think it's only going to be truly valuable when the technology is more energy efficient and more sustainable because it's not right now, that's the bottom line. But that doesn't mean that as conservationists, we can't look at the implications of the technology and start to think about ways that we can use it. I do think that's valuable. I do you think that that's something that conservationists and environmentalists need to start thinking about, we know that it's an issue. We know that there's an energy efficiency issue, but I think there's opportunity here as well.

Nic 
Yeah. I think is one of the great reasons to have you on the show is you're a champion for creativity, right? Which is something

Sunny Fleming
 
I love that. God can I put that as a badge.

Nic
I will make it for you.

[The Metaverse]

Nic 
It won't look pretty. I can't I can't write or draw, but I say it'll say that and they're a champion of creativity. And I think it's really important too, because a lot of what we do is we write reports, right? There's a template you've already written half of it, because it's the same as the last report.

Sunny Fleming 
Exactly.

Nic
And there's, there's not always an opportunity to take the next step and to be creative. And so I hope people listening can get that from this. You know, there's lots of different ways that you can think about things and think about solving a problem in a different and unique way. And I don't know it's maybe a little too open ended but do you have an idea of like any of those creative processes becoming the standard for how we do things going forward?

Sunny Fleming 
That's an interesting question. When it comes to things like the metaverse and NFTs I think a lot of us still kind of chuckle at it, and I even backup a little bit. So for research purposes one night I decided I'm going to want to check out the metaverse what is the metaverse and it was like the worst video game I've ever played. It wasn't it was like glitchy It was weird. It was I was like I just don't, what is the stupid had a really like very old school chat interface and like some random person walked up to me and was like chatting and I got stuck like my avatar was like stuck and I couldn't move around. Oh, it's terrible experience. But it was for research purposes. I just wanted I needed to kind of see like what is this all about? And one thing that I find fascinating is that governments have started to purchase land in the metaverse. So they've started to set up spaces where like this is going to be our little you know our our space here. Marketing. We see tons of people setting up space and Metaverse for marketing purposes. And what's starting to happen is, I mean, we could laugh at it all we want but it's going to be there and it's going to be a thing. And you know, one of the things I like to think about are how what's the implication for owning land in the metaverse? And when you start thinking about land, what do you start thinking about? Well, the environment, what does it mean to protect and conserve in a digital world? It's a really weird question. I promise our listeners I'm not even on drugs to think about it's really fascinating to think about, and it could go so many different ways. I don't know where it's gonna go, but I am fascinated by it. But I do think about like, Okay, what if we set up a digital twin in the metaverse of Yellowstone National Park? And we model the behavior of species interactions inside this digital twin. And we maybe are looking at implementing some kind of policy in Yellowstone National Park that we think might impact a particular species. Can we model that impact inside our digital twin in the metaverse and understand what the downstream implications of that policy might be before we ever even implement it?

Nic 

Wow, that's cool.

Sunny Fleming 

Those are the kinds of things I think this could be really valuable technology. And that's all GIS, right? GIS, it cracks me up because it's like, what is GIS other than a digital twin? Yeah. Other than the metaverse so I say Esri was ahead. of the game. Well before the metaverse.

Nic 
Oh, man. Yeah, definitely. My point, though, I think that's, again, very creative and really interesting and has practical implications as well. And we've talked a ton about a lot of different things. But you know, it's always nice to take a break and talk about the really important thing. So how is your garden doing?

Sunny Fleming 
Oh, yes. Yeah.Man, I told you, I springs my favorite season. So during COVID We started to expand and expand and expand our garden and my backyard is split into two halves. And there's kind of an upper half where we have our patio, and then there's a lower half where we have it's mostly lawn but that's where we have our square vegetable garden. So in the upper half my goal right now is to turn to take all of the lawn out and slowly turn it into entirely garden. And I would say I'm about I don't know 40% of the way there. So every year we kind of add new garden so this is really accelerated through COVID and it's mostly native plant species that I have in these upper gardens as well as my herbs. I like to cook a lot. My husband likes to cook a lot. So we have a lot of herbs up here as well. And they're just starting to pop and it's just so exciting to see these things you know start coming up out of the ground and you're like oh it survived winter and here it is like my biggest joy every day. I don't care how stressed out I get if I go on just a little stroll or just got side and just see what's the status of my plants today. It's there's so much joy that comes out of that and then seeing the first flowers pop. Oh, man, I get so excited. My husband has really taken over our vegetable garden. That's kind of his domain now. And I'm so glad because he's really implemented. I think a more sustainable practice in that particular garden. I used to do it kind of in row and really small rows. I had small but many rows. Now he's made very few rows but they're nice big and fat. And it's been so much better. The plants that we've had, the vegetables that we've had coming out of his garden have been much higher quality than the one side I planted past so we're really starting to kind of after 10 years of marriage, we finally figured out how to collaborate with each other. And the yard. Oh, it's so exciting. I've strawberries this year for the first time ever. Yeah. And so I bought some kitchen implements so that I can make some strawberry ice cream like that's all I want. I want strawberry ice cream so bad I'm so excited.

Nic  
I love that. Oh man. So is that like your favorite ice cream or something? Whatever you're telling me

Sunny Fleming 

It's not I like you know, because I eat ice cream every night. I know people will like you know, drink their glass of wine at night to chill out or whatever. But for me it's ice cream. I eat ice cream every single night. And it's usually well there's some weird flavors from our local ice cream place that I love but,

Nic
Such as?

Sunny Fleming 
Okay, salted honey.

Nic
Huh. It is good?

Sunny Fleming 
Yeah, it is heavenly. I'm a vanilla girl and so many ways. But salted honey is like vanilla on steroids because it's basically vanilla ice cream. But it has this like depth of sweetness from the honey and then the salts in it really accentuates and balances it out and my local ice cream shop makes this so if you're visiting East Nashville, let me know I'll take you to my favorite ice cream shop.

Nic 
Oh, 100 percent Yeah,

Sunny Fleming 
So that's that's my advice every night some salted honey ice cream.

Nic 
I'm teasing you but I had salted caramel ice cream for breakfast so I really I cannot talk

Sunny Fleming 
I've I've no judgment there. I love ice cream.

Nic 
It's so good. Yeah.

Sunny Fleming 
It's so good. The reason I want to make strawberry ice cream is because we have this restaurant. We love food. Oh my god, we eat all the time. And I mean who doesn't? This restaurant that we went to it's this French restaurant in Nashville and she made strawberry mousse and she made it of course she only makes them spring and it was like the most heavenly thing I've ever had. And I know I'm not going to be able to make strawberry mousse. I'm just not, and so I'm like second best thing strawberry ice cream. So that's why I'm so excited about my strawberry ice cream

Nic  
that's that's incredible. I love it. I love hearing from you. It's so fun. Really excited to see you at any NAEP in May. It's going to be your speech is the 17th. So, you know, hopefully, everybody just didn't show up. It's going to be so fun. And you know, we're almost out of time but I always want to you know, you know I always ask is there anything else that you want to talk about before we let you go?

Sunny Fleming 

Oh, no, just happy spring everybody. I really look forward to seeing everybody in Florida. I'm very excited about it. I think what I've got to say will resonate with folks. I hope, and if not I hope you come up afterwards and tell me, or tell me that I didn't.  No, I'm really looking forward to just just seeing everyone and furthering these kinds of conversations.

Nic 
Yeah, that's gonna be great and I'm really really excited about it. So last but not least, tell everybody where they can reach out to you.

Sunny Fleming 

Okay, reach me I am now on Twitter. I have a Twitter. Yeah. 10s of followers. So that's at @esriSunny I believe is my Twitter handle @esrisunny. And then of course, you can always find me on LinkedIn. I think that's my favorite platform. Yeah, LinkedIn. So just find me Sunny Fleming on LinkedIn. And yeah, connect with me there.

Nic 
Awesome. Sounds great. Thank you, Sunny.

Sunny Fleming 
Thank you.

[Outro]

Nic 

And that's our show. Thank you so much, Sunny for hopping back on with us today. It's so great to catch up with you lots of really fun, interesting topic. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. See you everybody.

Laura
Bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai



Nic & Laura Segment: GIS in the Workplace
Interview with Sunny Fleming Starts
Science Communication
NFTs
The Metaverse