TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

“In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology.”

Here in Hawai`i, traditional nature-based fishing, weaving, building, and textile industries reached a high level of sophistication while remaining within the carrying capacity of the land.  Indigenous cultures curate many solutions we can respectfully learn from and emulate.  Permaculture draws from and credits Indigenous tradition, while judiciously incorporating modern understandings and tools to creatively enhance community self-sufficiency.

 

From the INTRODUCTION to the 2021 book, Lo-TEK . . .

“From the Greek mythos, meaning story-of-the-people, mythology has guided mankind for millennia.  Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology.  Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, the mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive.  Guiding this was a perception of technology that feasted on the felling of forests and extraction of resources.  The mythology that powered the Age of Industrialization distanced itself from natural systems, favoring fuel by fire.

Today, the legacy of this mythology haunts us.  Progress at the expense of the planet birthed the epoch of the Anthropocene–our current geological period characterized by the undeniable impact of humans upon the environment at the scale of the Earth.  Charles Darwin, scholar and naturalist who is seen as the father of evolutionary theory, said “extinction happens slowly,” yet sixty percent of the world’s biodiversity has vanished in the past forty years.  Coming to terms with an uncertain future and confronted by climate events that cannot be predicted, species extinctions that cannot be arrested, and ecosystem failures that cannot be stopped, humanity is tasked with developing solutions to protect the wilderness that remains, and transform the civilizations we construct.  While we are drowning in this Age of Information, we are starving for wisdom.

Only a sliver of the technologies that existed at the time of the Enlightenment were valued and shepherded through to the present.  Meanwhile, an alternative mythology of technology has been with us since well before the Enlightenment.  It is unacknowledged, existing at the far ends of the Earth, with its contributors deemed primitive for centuries.  While ‘modern’ societies were trying to conquer Nature in the name of progress, these indigenous cultures were working with it.

Indigenous technologies are not lost or forgotten, only hidden by the shadow of progress in the remotest places on earth.  While society values and preserves the architectural artifacts of dead cultures, like the four-thousand-year-old Pyramids of Giza, those of the living are displaced, like the six-thousand-year-old floating island technology of the Ma`dan in the southern wetlands of Iraq.  Extending the grounds of typical design, Lo-TEK is a movement that investigates lesser-known local technologies, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), indigenous cultural practics, and mythologies passed down as songs or stories.  In contrast to the homogeneity of the modern world, indigeneity is reframed as an evolutionary extension of life in symbiosis with nature.”

Images from Lo-TEK by Julia Watson