A new startup named Tehanu is envisioning a world where “interspecies money” allows flora and fauna to financially advocate for their interests – with some help from AI.
If you’ve opened social media in the last year, you’ve likely seen photos of a pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng. This cute, bumbling baby hippo went viral, capturing the hearts of millions of Internet denizens. But despite her fame, Moo Deng hasn’t benefited much. She may be the world’s most beloved animal, but she doesn’t spend her days frolicking in the swamps of West Africa with other pygmy hippos. She lives in captivity, in a zoo in Si Racha, Thailand, where humans pay to gawk at her and take pictures.
Her story illustrates a sobering reality. In our human-centered world, non-humans have no way to advocate for themselves. But what if animals like Moo Deng could promote their own interests, using money from their own bank accounts?
How much is nature worth?
In 2024, the first “cross-species” financial transaction took place, between a human and a mountain gorilla in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. In this symbolic deal, a gorilla paid roughly $15 (€13) for a ranger to remove a poacher’s snare. Naturally, the gorilla never strolled into a bank and set up a checking account. So how did this all work? With the help of one of the wildest, weirdest, and most ambitious startups you’ve never heard of: Tehanu.
Tehanu is the brainchild of journalist and novelist Jonathan Ledgard, a former Africa correspondent for The Economist. During his years traveling the continent, Ledgard saw one scene repeated: people with intimate connections to rare, complex life, forced by circumstance to scrap it for bottom dollar. Primates hunted for bushmeat, elephants for tusks. Swaths of biodiverse rainforest razed for monoculture crops.
Can an AI working on behalf of gorillas represent their interests better than an NGO? Photo: Jacob Maentz / Getty Images
On one assignment, in South Sudan, a switch flipped. “I watched this magnificent, ancient fig tree, perhaps 300 or 400 years old, being chopped down by villagers for charcoal,” Ledgard says. The tree would be chipped and burned, the resulting charcoal sold at market. In all, it would net the villagers roughly $200 (€170). Good news for short-term cash flow, perhaps, but less good for the long-term interests of the village – not to mention the tree.
If mechanisms existed to accurately appraise its ecological role, Ledgard is convinced the same tree would be worth far more. “I started running a calculator in my head of the value of that tree, accounting for the insects living in it, the mycelial life, the birds… It’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Research exists to support the belief that nature’s economic value is woefully undercalculated. A dead elephant, for example, can fetch $30,000 on the black market, but the value it creates over its lifetime by helping store carbon (still an absurdly narrow way to gauge a living thing’s worth) has been estimated at $2 million.
RELATED ARTICLES
In a 2022 essay on interspecies money, Ledgard laid out his dream. “It makes no sense that the human market economy puts money into ores, promissory notes, and blocks of computer code,” he wrote, “but not into the continuance of rare, complex, and ancient biological life.” A year later, with the help of geneticist and biotech pioneer Kaja Wasik, he founded Tehanu.
Can you give an ape a dollar? An AI for animals
The Tehanu idea is simple in theory, and involves two main steps. Before working with a given species, Tehanu will evaluate its ecological role, quantifying the ‘services’ it provides the ecosystem around it, from pollination to soil health to air quality. This knowledge will guide where funds are best spent, and allow Tehanu to communicate the species’ ecological value to the public.
The species is then provided with a custom-built artificial intelligence (AI) to serve as its proxy. This AI is trained to become an expert advocate for the animal, by trawling scientific papers and interviews with scientists and researchers, and drawing on the input of “people whose perspectives are not often represented in scientific research,” co-founder Wasik explains, “such as veterinarians, rangers, trackers, and local community members.”
What’s the dollar value of the ecological role of fruit bats? Photo: Justin Lo / Getty Images
The AI then creates tasks – like planting trees, picking up trash, or monitoring for poachers – that serve the animal’s needs, and uses a secure, blockchain-based platform to pay nearby humans to complete them. In Tehanu’s words, they are “extending the gig economy to life on Earth”, like giving animals access to Uber or DoorDash. Although they’ve currently only worked with gorillas, they plan to expand to other species that serve important ecological roles, such as orangutans and fruit bats.
So where will the animals get their money? Initially, from the billions already earmarked for conservation by NGOs, governments, and corporations. A big reason that Tehanu piloted with Rwandan mountain gorillas is because the species is the cornerstone of a booming ecotourism industry worth over $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion), so its dollar value is easy to define.
In the future, the idea goes, if you want to support gorilla conservation you donate directly to the gorillas, and because the payment system is blockchain-based, it’s fully transparent. No need to worry about human-run nonprofits with unavoidable costs and varied efficiency, effectiveness, and ethics. You can watch exactly how the gorilla’s AI spends your money.
Still, the choice to use artificial intelligence to serve as an animal’s proxy (see box), raises questions that are becoming ever more familiar in today’s world: does the risk outweigh the opportunity? And if we shun the technology, do we protect ourselves from that risk? Or just expose ourselves even more?
AI and nature
Artificial intelligence divides opinion in the green movement. The technology holds the promise of helping us use less energy, but so far has mainly proven itself as a way to use more. Between 2017 and 2023 the amount of energy used in US data centers more than doubled, and tech giants including Apple, Google and OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions building new ones to feed AI’s rapid growth. When Microsoft revealed in 2024 that it was nowhere near meeting its carbon reduction targets, it shrugged and blamed AI. Add all this to considerations about ethics, jobs, accountability and safety, and there’s plenty to be concerned about. On the other hand, as a proportion of the world’s total energy use, AI is still small, while its potential to help tackle environmental challenges such as climate change and conservation could be huge. And on that front, we need all the innovation and all the efficiency we can get.
Ledgard sees it as imperative that we pre-emptively build concern for nature into AI systems, rather than leaving them to optimize for human goals. “If Tehanu and others successfully incentivize AI systems to gather data and provide services to unprotected species in unprotected areas,” he wrote in a Tehanu white paper he shared with me, “we can look forward to an AI period for conservation in which AI ‘sentinels’ understand other species and care for them at a level far exceeding the previous efforts of humans.”
If the gorillas could speak, one can imagine their enthusiasm about taking humans out of the equation. “What stresses these gorillas most is contact with humans,” Wasik explains, noting that the gorilla AI has suggested limiting human contact, and implementing stricter health protocols to prevent human-gorilla disease transmission. In reality that’s a challenge, since it’s human visits – gorilla trekking – that make the money that pays for conservation. “We have to strike a balance,” she says.
“We hope that by creating a tool that allows representation for non-humans, more funding for nature will arise”
Kaja Wasik
Wasik says she doesn’t “think humans are doing a terrible job with conservation,” but notes that in current models, funding tends to follow human sentiment. “No one donates to some amphibian, but everyone donates to an elephant. As a result, you have 10,000 elephant NGOs in Africa.” Meanwhile, less charismatic species have scant support. The humble fruit bat, for instance, is an important pollinator and seeder in the Congo Basin, but its numbers are nevertheless collapsing.
Through Tehanu’s focus on assigning value to species’ ecological contributions, Wasik and Ledgard say the public will be better able to understand the role all living things play in our world’s interconnected ecosystems. “We hope that by creating a new tool that allows some form of representation for non-humans, more funding for nature will also arise,” Wasik explains.
Animals spend money… and humans benefit?
Tehanu hopes their gig economy model will create sustainable incomes for people living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots, which overlap with its poorest regions. Individuals will be able to download an app to their phone, where they can accept tasks proposed by the wildlife’s AI and receive payment.
Serge Wich, a primate ecology specialist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who has advised Tehanu on orangutan conservation, says this is what appeals most to him about the project. “Historically, conservation has been directed by outside actors,” he explains. “Local communities and Indigenous people are often left out of the picture, but when it comes to making conservation effective, it is these people who matter most. The Tehanu concept provides a direct way to support them.”
Wich, who has spent decades working to protect critically endangered orangutans in Indonesia, notes that “there are hundreds of villages surrounding conservation areas, and it’s physically impossible to reach all these communities. We desperately need scalable mechanisms to engage and incentivize them.” Tehanu, as an electronic platform, has potential in this capacity.
Admittedly, the concept still faces daunting infrastructural hurdles. It requires proof of an animal’s existence at a specific time and place, which relies on a complex web of camera traps, drones, human monitoring, and DNA sampling. It needs to be able to verify that a human has completed a paid task – currently a manual process, which the company hopes to automate.
The model is also primarily focused on long-term needs – it’s unclear how well an AI proxy would respond to a specific, pressing need, such as an extreme weather event or an injured animal. And although a non-human AI sentinel offers potential to take some of the human bias out of conservation decisions, there are plenty of examples of AI tools absorbing the inherent biases of the human sources they are trained on.
RELATED ARTICLE
The risks and rewards of a free market for nature
Aside from concerns about AI, some argue that trying to integrate nature into the economy will inevitably be detrimental to wildlife. (Perhaps they’re recalling the pigs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who went quickly from overthrowing their greedy human masters, to selling out their fellow animals for drinking money.)
Former World Wildlife Fund president Pavan Sukhdev told The Guardian in 2022 that Ledgard’s vision is “steeped in the underlying belief system of so-called free market capitalism, which is that markets are the solution to all problems. That is wrong.”
Wich, the primatologist, says this is the main concern he sees from others in his field, too: that money inherently corrupts. “Whenever money gets involved, you have risks of unequal distribution, theft, free riders, and so on,” says Wich. Moreover, the gig economy platforms from which Tehanu takes inspiration, have had more than their share of scandals regarding ethics and workers’ rights.
What would gorillas do if they had money?
If you cut down a tree and sell the wood, does the money you make equal what the tree is worth?
But Wich says that a fixation on the novel notion of bank accounts for animals is missing the point: “Tehanu is better explained as a transparent, largely automated mechanism through which you can more efficiently and directly provide money to aid Indigenous communities and save endangered species.”
Many conservationists, like primatologist Anna Behm Masozera, are convinced new approaches are needed. A former president of the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, she advised Tehanu on their gorilla project, and has seen the limits of the status quo. “The reality is that no one person, no one organization, not even any one country, has all the right answers,” she says. “We have to keep an open mind. That’s what is extremely compelling about Tehanu. It’s not just business as usual.”
Ledgard is the first to admit his project is a “multigenerational” effort. Who knows if it will prove feasible at scale. But “if the untoward effects are negative, we can always pull the plug,” he says. As for the danger of corrupting the natural world by trying to assimilate it into our human economy, he is unconvinced. After all, the environment is already being monetized – and animals are getting a bad deal.
“I’m not worried,” Ledgard tells me, smiling. “My hunch is that you’re far more likely to corrupt money with nature, than the other way around.”
Imagine5 Volume 4 is out now. Cover star Madame Gandhi on the sounds of the Antarctic, free climber Alex Honnold reveals his biggest challenge yet, actor Rainn Wilson embraces his soulful side and much much more!
