JULIA WATSON

Lo-TEK is my attempt to promote alternative, nature-based technologies and advocate for a more globally inclusive approach to sustainable design. The research that underpins the book began with my studies in landscape architecture. I was fascinated by the stories of colonial and indigenous landscapes, how they intertwined, diverged, and how they could be represented. I saw this as a design challenge, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has emerged as a more contemporary and decolonised evolution of this thought process.

At Harvard, I became intrigued by the way different protection levels provided by UNESCO World Heritage sites have affected indigenous communities. After seven years of professional work in London and Sydney, I attended Harvard to delve deeper into contested cultural landscapes. I questioned why indigenous territories fared better than those under Western conservation frameworks and why so many conservation refugees were being displaced from their lands.

A significant revelation came from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment mapping. The findings highlight a correlation between global language diversity and global biodiversity. I realised that these diverse species and ecosystems are being safeguarded by indigenous communities that faced displacement by formal conservation regimes.

While teaching, I began to look deeper into the relationship between indigenous cultural practices and positive ecological intervention. Alongside Charles Waldheim, Pierre Belanger, and Neil Kirkwood I became immersed in landscape and environmental urbanism. UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the cultural landscapes of Bali and the southern wetlands of Iraq’s Marsh Arabs, revealed workable systems of integrated cultural food production within civic communities.

Later, while teaching design studios at Columbia, I realised that our approach to landscape design was predominantly Western-centric, despite alternative solutions in other parts of the world. I started investigating a topic termed ‘landscape eco-technology’. An example of this is a wastewater treatment system in China that integrates mulberry trees and silkworms into the process.

These insights have led me to question why we focus on one hemisphere’s technologies. This line of thinking eventually evolved into the concept and the book that is Lo-TEK. Its focus on alternative, nature-based technologies and advocacy for a globally inclusive approach to sustainable design is its main rationale.

A significant difference between traditionally developed systems and western industrial technologies is their codevelopment with culture. The framing of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as technologies was designed to familiarise the Western reader with the potential of these systems. However, unlike industrial technologies, the traditional wisdom related to these technologies is deeply entwined with stories, codes of conduct, mythology and community participation.

Traditional cultural wisdom is constantly evolving with ecological systems that are in flux. It is a system of knowledge that can change according to context but is inherently stress-tested and re-evaluated to preserve relevance. Knowledge is transferred through stories told and witnessed by multiple generations. For example, a storyteller would share a story with a grandfather, a father, and a son who would all witness the passing of knowledge and be able to protect the authenticity of the story periodically, ensuring it is passed on accurately. The son and the grandfather might correct the father if he alters or forgets the story, and the most relevant parts of the story are reinforced and preserved. This method ensures the story’s accuracy but permits evolution through the generations. It’s a system that can change according to context but is inherently stress-tested and re-evaluated to preserve its relevance.

Integrating codependencies and relationships into Western culture involves a shift in priorities. Traditional systems prioritise ecosystem health, land stewardship, and community—a complete inversion of the typical Western framework. You can see these frameworks causing harm even if applied with good intentions. Labelling something as ‘heritage’ tends to stifle its growth and adaptation to a modern context. Take the boundaries of global classification systems like UNESCO and FAO that label indigenous food systems as heritage agriculture. This classification tends to diminish them as relics of the past centred only around growing food, neglecting broader implications, including water security, ecological stewardship and trade patterns. We need to redefine and modernise these systems while preserving their core values and methods to allow them to evolve and thrive in the present day. This shift might involve disrupting capitalism and globalism, fostering regionalism with governance models more deeply connected to our relationship to the land and ecology.

Introducing ecological knowledge into primary education is one of the areas we can focus on to foster relationships that benefit local food production and community behaviour. Coming from a somewhat biased perspective it is encouraging to see grade four students design urban technologies based on these systems. I’m working on a curriculum based on Lo-TEK for our school systems and it is providing some hopeful outcomes.

Another realisation from my work in education is the importance of learning from the systems and practices in the home countries of my international students. In my 12 years of teaching, I’ve taught over 1000 students, yet only five were from urban marginalised backgrounds. It made me question who and what we’re teaching. Why aren’t we educating students in high school about what they can do to change their cities and influence their futures? I see this as a gateway to introducing the reciprocity required for symbiotic urban systems in Western cultures.

In response to this challenge, we formulated a special project to incorporate indigenous Lo-TEK systems to address modern issues in cities. This specially commissioned Lo—TEK work titled “The Symbiocene” was part of the Our Time on Earth exhibition in 2022 at London’s Barbican Centre, and didn’t have a client or budget. I was one of the 18 artists who contributed to the exhibition which is now touring the world for the next five years. In the exhibition, we collaborated with three communities and experts from a Western engineering practice to explore potential future technologies. Experts from these three communities on their Lo—TEK technologies workshopped with engineers with specific expertise from Buro Happold, to develop hybrid technologies for future cities that were based on Lo-TEK thinking. These would be hybrid high-tech / Lo-TEK systems that address problems in contemporary cities. While they wouldn’t precisely replicate the indigenous systems, they aim to incorporate and adapt the principles of the systems to modern contexts.

A potential method of collaboration between a traditional community and governments and the private sector is the establishment of an agreement governed by the community. Knowledge sharing needs to be consensual. The exchange should not be a one-sided process, but a reciprocal interaction that appreciates the value of diverse perspectives and experiences. I would love to see the establishment of an agreement governed by communities determining how they decide to share. Lo-TEK can be a version of this; we already see other glimpses of this effort.

One way we can credit expertise and ensure its continued development is to couple a decentralised financial system with regional stewardship. There are new forms of blockchain financial systems related to crypto—and I know that’s a sensitive topic these days—but they are decentralised systems of finance and economics that can be coupled with regionalism and stewardship. Around these, we can formulate a government system more aligned with the kinship system of indigenous communities. Using blockchain technology, a secure and transparent method of recording transactions, I co-designed an innovative legal tool called the Smart Oath Of Understanding (SOOU). This system is based on a smart contract, and it uses blockchain technology to ensure transparent and unchangeable reparations to the communities involved in sharing indigenous knowledge to create contemporary technologies.

Another idea for crediting indigenous knowledge is to establish decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). The role of these organisations, now under development, is to distribute funds to indigenous communities after reparations, particularly from biotech and biomedical industries. These new forms of transparent and equitable funds distribution models aim to replace traditional top-down financial control systems.

A benefit of these novel financial systems is that there is no need for patent applications. We can use genetic codes in these currencies to denote ownership. For instance, a specific living bridge system created by a community through a unique combination of soil, vegetation, and climatic relationships can be encoded. This way, we don’t have to force cultural heritage and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) into a Western patenting framework. The community that provided the information and knowledge would own the system.