AI in Environmental Practice

A Non-Technical Working Session

Nearly everyone in this field is using AI.

Almost no one was taught how.

If you tried it and the results were underwhelming, you were not doing it wrong. You were working with a fraction of what it needed.

No technical background needed. What makes the difference is deep knowledge of the work, and you already have that.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026

7:00 to 8:15pm Eastern

Three things, in this order, because each one depends on the one before it.

What AI actually is

A pattern recognition and prediction technology with no original thoughts of its own. Nearly every disappointing result traces back to a mental model that got this wrong.

Why context is the foundation

Everything good is downstream of this. If it does not understand you and your work, it cannot produce anything worth putting your name on.

Where it fails, and where your judgment stays

Hallucination, confirmation bias, and a framework for deciding what to hand over, what to keep, and how to tell the difference.

Who's running this

I'm Mike Lynn. I have spent 15+ years in environmental and ecological practice and I still do the work: Ecological design with United Designers International, stormwater inspections for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, watershed management projects, and professional development teaching nature based solutions for landscape architects and engineers.

I came to AI the way most people in this field did, with too much work and not enough hours, and got the same underwhelming results everyone else got. What changed things was not a better tool. It was understanding what it needed from me.

I am not a technologist. I am a practitioner who went looking for where this actually helps in our kind of work, and where it does not.

Where I stand

If you have hesitations about using AI in this field, you should. Here is where I stand on three of them.

Nothing replaces your judgment.

AI is strong on complicated problems and weak on complex ones, and ecological work is mostly the second kind. It does not make ecological determinations, and I will never teach it as a substitute for what you know.

Footprint gets counted, not waved away.

The energy, water and community costs are real, and they are also widely misunderstood. A great deal of what runs through a data center has nothing to do with AI, and the range between one use and another is enormous. Much of that footprint is something you control rather than something you absorb. Intentional use is the lever, and I will show you where it is.

You will not be asked to put anything sensitive into a tool.

Not during the session, not afterward. If your organization has no AI policy yet, or has a restrictive one, that is a normal place to be and the session is built for it.

Save your seat

Wednesday, September 16, 7:00 to 8:15pm Eastern.

  • Everyone who registers gets the replay, whether or not you can be there live.

  • You will also get the Four-Quadrant Framework, a short guide to deciding what to hand to AI and what to keep, to read beforehand.

  • I will send you the session details and a reminder.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you at the workshop.

Mike Lynn, Ai & Ecology