The modern world is characterised by a focus on technology, one that might be characterised as an addiction, and the trend is towards an ever-greater technological reliance. Environmentally speaking, the associated impacts are proving to be substantial. Engineering structures are usually built outside the human scale, and one-size-fits-all applications of technology are often homogenous rather than being tailored to the local environment via an intimate knowledge of how it functions.
In recent years, alternative visions have sprung up. One is Low-Tech Magazine, an online and hard copy resource put together by Kris De Decker, a blogger based in Barcelona. The idea behind the publication is not rejecting technology, but judiciously eschewing the newest and shiniest option in favour of older and often simpler alternatives with a lesser impact. In the Low-Tech Magazine world, “dumb” phones are in, and the internet would have a speed limit in order to curb its voracious demand for data centre energy.
Parallel with this, another paradigm is being explored, one that looks at how technologies developed by indigenous populations may be relevant to the modern world. Often going back centuries, and still in use today, these approaches have demonstrated substantial resilience and longevity, something that cannot be confidently claimed for the high-tech world.
Julia Watson, a teacher of, which was published by the German publisher Taschen in 2020. Despite the similarity in the language, Lo-TEK is not the same as “low-tech”; instead the “TEK” part stands for Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a term that has been in circulation for at least a decade. The book crosses between a range of different habitats that are occupied by humans, including mountains, forests, deserts and wetlands.
