It’s a preferred concept that the trail to sustainability lies in high-tech options. By making on a regular basis objects like automobiles electrical, and putting in sensible programs to observe and scale back vitality use, it appears we’ll nonetheless be capable to benefit from the comforts to which we’ve develop into accustomed whereas doing our bit for the planet — a state often known as “inexperienced development”.
However the dangers of this method have gotten ever clearer. Many trendy applied sciences use supplies like copper, cobalt, lithium and uncommon earth parts. These metals are in units like cell telephones, televisions and motors. Not solely is their provide finite, however giant quantities of vitality are required for his or her extraction and processing — producing important emissions.
Plus, many of those units are inherently troublesome to recycle. It is because to make them, advanced mixes of supplies are created, usually in very small portions. It’s very costly to gather and separate them for recycling.
Amongst others, these limitations have led some to query the high-tech course our society is taking — and to develop a burgeoning curiosity in low-tech options. These options prioritise simplicity and sturdiness, native manufacture, in addition to conventional or historic methods.
What’s extra, low-tech options usually deal with conviviality. This entails encouraging social connections, for instance via communal music or dance, relatively than fostering the hyper-individualism inspired by resource-hungry digital units.
Opposite to fashionable perception, sustainability doesn’t must depend upon excessive tech options. We will simply scale back vitality demand by utilizing low-tech, even historic, strategies
“Low-tech” doesn’t imply a return to medieval methods of dwelling. Nevertheless it does demand extra discernment in our alternative of applied sciences — and consideration of their disadvantages.
Origins of low-tech
Critics have proclaimed the downsides of extreme expertise for hundreds of years, from nineteenth century Luddites to twentieth century writers comparable to Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford. Nevertheless it was the Western vitality disaster within the Nineteen Seventies that actually popularised these concepts.
British economist E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 e book Small is Lovely introduced a strong critique of contemporary expertise and its depletion of assets like fossil fuels. As an alternative, Schumacher advocated for simplicity: regionally inexpensive, environment friendly applied sciences (which he termed “intermediate” applied sciences), comparable to small hydroelectricity units utilized by rural communities.
Schumacher’s mantle has been taken up by a rising motion calling itself “low-tech”. Belgian author Kris de Dekker’s on-line Low-Tech Journal has been cataloguing low-tech options, comparable to windmills that use friction to warmth buildings, since 2007. Particularly, the journal explores out of date applied sciences that would nonetheless contribute to a sustainable society: like fruit partitions used within the 1600s to create native, heat microclimates for rising Mediterranean fruits.
Within the US, architect and tutorial Julia Watson’s e book Lo-TEK (the place TEK stands for Conventional Ecological Data) explores conventional applied sciences from utilizing reeds as constructing supplies to creating wetlands for wastewater remedy.
And in France, engineer Philippe Bihouix’s realisation of expertise’s drain on assets led to his prize-winning e book The Age of Low Tech. First revealed in 2014, it describes what life in a low-tech world is perhaps like, together with radically reducing consumption.
Bihouix presents seven “commandments” of the low-tech motion. Amongst others, these cowl the necessity to stability a expertise’s efficiency with its environmental influence, being cautious of automation (particularly the place employment is changed by elevated vitality use), and decreasing our calls for on nature.
However the first precept of low-tech is its emphasis on sobriety: avoiding extreme or frivolous consumption, and being glad by much less stunning fashions with decrease efficiency. As Bihouix writes:
“A discount in consumption might make it rapidly potential to rediscover the numerous easy, poetic, philosophical joys of a revitalised pure world … whereas the discount in stress and dealing time would make it potential to develop many cultural or leisure actions comparable to exhibits, theatre, music, gardening or yoga.”
Historical options
Crucially, we are able to apply low-tech ideas to our day by day lives now. For instance, we are able to simply scale back vitality demand from heating by utilizing heat garments and blankets. Meals, if it’s packaged in any respect, could be purchased and saved in reusable, recyclable packaging comparable to glass.
Structure affords a number of alternatives for low-tech approaches, particularly if we be taught from historical past. Utilizing historic wind-catcher towers, designed to permit exterior cool air to movement via rooms, lets buildings be cooled utilizing a lot much less vitality than air con. And storing warmth in stones, utilized by the Romans for underfloor heating, is being thought-about at this time as a way of coping with the intermittency of renewable vitality.
Design and manufacture for sustainability emphasises decreasing waste, usually via avoiding mixing and contaminating supplies. Easy supplies like plain carbon steels, joined utilizing detachable fasteners, are straightforward to recycle and regionally restore. Buses, trains and farm equipment utilizing these steels, for instance, could be rather more readily refurbished or recycled than trendy automobiles filled with microelectronics and manufactured from refined alloys.
In some locations, the ideas of low tech are already influencing city design and industrial coverage. Examples embrace “15-minute cities” the place retailers and different facilities are simply accessible to residents, utilizing cargo bikes as a substitute of automobiles or vans for deliveries, and inspiring repairable merchandise via right-to-repair laws within the EU and the US.
In the meantime, in Japan, there’s rising curiosity within the reuse and recycling practices of the Edo interval. From 1603 to 1867, the nation was successfully closed to the surface world, with very restricted entry to uncooked supplies. Subsequently, intensive reuse and restore — even of issues comparable to damaged pottery or utensils with holes that we’d now regard as waste — grew to become a lifestyle. Specialist repairers would mend or recycle all the pieces from paper lanterns and books to sneakers, pans, umbrellas and candles.
By following examples like these, we are able to make discerning technological decisions a central a part of our seek for sustainable methods of dwelling.
The author is Senior Analysis Fellow in Engineering, College of Bristol
Republished from The Dialog
Revealed in Daybreak, EOS, February twenty seventh, 2022
