Prerequisite to Climate Tech: Eco-Consciousness
Eco-consciousness must accompany climate tech use
Spoken by Bowie Yin Sum Kung at the United Nations’ 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women Parallel Forum. Watch all the speeches here.
I want to tell you a story about two friends who reversed desertification using technology. In the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people died from famine in the northern regions of Burkina Faso, because of severe desertification from poor land management, overpopulation, and drought. Many people left their rural homes to find livelihood in cities. But Yacouba Sawadogo did the opposite. He went back to the arid, desertified rural areas. Together with his friend, Mathieu Ouedraogo, Yacouba started to observe the land and landscape, and to do some experimenting. First, they placed fist-sized stones across the fields, then they dug deep holes in the dry ground and filled these holes with manure and organic matter. The manure and organic matter in these holes attracted termites, who dug tunnels deep into the earth to further break up the soil.
When finally, finally, it rained, the stones they placed and the holes they dug slowed the flow of rainwater and allowed it to seep into the dry and bare soil, and the termite’s tunnels helped water penetrate even further, slowly filling up the water table. If you visited Yacouba’s farm in the 70s, all you would’ve seen was desertic, sandy landscape. By the 80s and 90s, it was a green, lush, food forest, home to more than 60 species of trees and bushes as well as a variety of wildlife and biodiversity, feeding thousands of families.
What Yacouba and Mathieu did was use traditional, indigenous technologies, applying them in an ingenious, elegant, and regenerative way.
Yacouba showed us that technology doesn’t have to be connected to electricity or WiFi, that the appropriate use of technology comes from nature’s wisdom, and that in achieving climate justice, technologies must be used to preserve and restore, and not disrupt, nature’s processes. Yacouba’s story shows us how to use technology with eco-consciousness. So how can we do the same?
I’m going to try to answer this big question by taking us on a journey.
First, let’s journey into the nature within ourselves. In our modern, capitalist society, many of us have become misaligned with nature; we forget to listen to our bodies; we learn to ignore the ancestral wisdom within us. We have become fragmented with intergenerational trauma from a violent economic system, from violent histories, and from a violent society that has defined us and put us into boxes and categories. We’ve been told what’s normal, what’s abnormal, what we want, even what we need. Amidst all the chaos and confusion, how do we heal ourselves? How does nature heal itself? We are nature, so surely we have an innate ability to heal, too. Maybe we can start by having a healthy relationship with all living beings around us.
I was looking out into my garden one morning and noticed that the corn I planted months ago started to flower. Without me asking for it, the 2-metre-tall corn has been donating shade, breaking wind, holding soil intact, providing shelter and food to birds and insects, pumping carbon and water into my small front yard garden, and soon it would be giving me 3 ears of delicious corn, too. Swaying in the wind, the corn seemed to be asking me, what is my role in my little front yard garden ecosystem? How can I have a reciprocal relationship with all the other living beings?
That morning, I made a promise to the corn. I would make sure that she thrives, that she gets pollinated properly, that when she gives her life, the rest of her will be composted and recycled, and that she will continue living through the seeds she gives.
When we realise we are nature, a part of nature; when we stop trying to separate ourselves from nature or dominate nature; when we stop extracting and taking, taking, taking without giving anything back, we will realise that we can live in harmony with all other beings. Humans have lived for millenia in harmony with the environment, as many indigenous peoples have shown and are showing us. Technology isn’t new to us, or to nature, for that matter. We, modern human beings, just have to unlearn some of the things we’ve learned from an extractive capitalist system and remember how to truly live, because that knowledge and wisdom is within us.
Now let’s venture out and into the natural world around us. Like many indigenous peoples and regenerative farmers, we can start by recognising every single thing in our surrounding environment as unique individuals making up a community. The Native American Anishinaabe peoples count trees as people, ‘the standing people’. Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that if we were to carry out ‘biologically inclusive census of the people’ in our neighbourhoods, then animals, insects, trees, and plants would surely outnumber humans by a lot. What would decision-making in a town, city, or country look like if we took their voices into account?
We need to step out of our anthropocentric worldview. When I started to learn about the lives and the importance of every living thing around me, I stopped killing spiders at home because they kept the mosquito population at bay; I stopped pulling out weeds in my garden because they provided insects with food and were part of the ecosystem; I started to appreciate the community of microbes residing in my gut that’s keeping me healthy; I started to compost food waste to feed the soil, instead of sending it to the landfill.
In terms of technology, nature has a super repertoire of them. Beavers’ dams, swallows’ nests, bees’ hives… The best technologies flow with nature. Take composting — wise humans have learned to cooperate with nature’s army of microorganisms and macroorganisms to decompose dead organic matter and recycle the nutrients back into the soil. Or companion planting — observant humans have learned to grow different plants together to enhance their health, defences, growth, and flavour. Or medicines — curious humans watched what kinds of plants animals ate when they got sick and what plants animals rubbed their wounds against, and used these plants to cure their own diseases and injuries. All we have to do is be humble students of nature.
Finally, let’s explore the intricate relationships that link everything. As with many of the big climate, environmental, social, and economic problems we try to solve, they are undoubtedly complex. What makes them complex is that there can be multiple perspectives, layers, and solutions. They’re nested within ecosystems. There are relationships involved, between human beings, more-than-human beings, like animals, plants, insects, soil, water, and air. For every one of these big problems we’re searching for solutions, there is a place, a community, and a context they exist in. We need to recognise the complexity before even beginning to problem-solve.
We are used to the mainstream, Western mindset in the past century, which is a mechanistic way of thinking, reducing everything down to its individual parts — to an atomic or cellular level — so that we may try to study, manage, and control everything. Similarly, a lot of technologies aim at solving only one part of the problem. For example, when we use chemical insecticides on farms to kill insects eating our crops, we are also killing bees, wasps, butterflies, and other pollinators, thus endangering our whole food system. So when you don’t see and appreciate the whole system, and learn to design for it holistically, you don’t see the unintended consequences of your actions elsewhere in the system.
To conclude, eco-consciousness is fundamental to everything we do, and even more fundamental when we are trying to make big decisions that will affect other lives, more-than-human beings, and future generations. We can grow our eco-consciousness by appreciating our own role in the regeneration of our planet, by recognising the agency of all lives, by seeing beyond the anthropocentric worldview, by embracing complexity and whole-system seeing, feeling, thinking.
Because without eco-consciousness, we will keep solving our biggest (and smallest) problems with shallow band aid solutions. If we keep on disrupting nature’s processes, we are inevitably disrupting our own processes and digging our own grave. There are different ways to use technology — to extract, to destroy, to unite, to regenerate, to connect — and it’s up to us to choose how we use technology. Do we want to use technology to preserve, restore, and honour nature’s processes, or will we continue using it as a tool to destroy and extract from Mother Earth and ourselves?
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