It’s a preferred concept that the trail to sustainability lies in high-tech options. By making on a regular basis gadgets like cars electric, and putting in sensible techniques to observe and cut back power use, it appears we’ll nonetheless be capable to benefit from the comforts to which we’ve turn out to be accustomed whereas doing our bit for the planet – a state often known as “green growth”.
However the dangers of this strategy have gotten ever clearer. Many fashionable 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 massive quantities of energy are required for his or her extraction and processing – producing vital emissions.
Plus, many of those units are inherently difficult to recycle. It is because to make them, complicated 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 route our society is taking – and to develop a burgeoning curiosity in low-tech solutions. These options prioritise simplicity and sturdiness, native manufacture, in addition to conventional or historical methods.
What’s extra, low-tech options usually concentrate on conviviality. This entails encouraging social connections, for instance by means of communal music or dance, somewhat than fostering the hyper-individualism inspired by resource-hungry digital units.
“Low-tech” doesn’t imply a return to medieval methods of dwelling. However it does demand extra discernment in our selection 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 like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford. However it was the western energy crisis within the Seventies that actually popularised these concepts.
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British economist E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 guide Small is Beautiful introduced a strong critique of recent expertise and its depletion of assets like fossil fuels. As a substitute, Schumacher advocated for simplicity: domestically inexpensive, environment friendly applied sciences (which he termed “intermediate” applied sciences), like small hydroelectricity devices 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 Magazine has been cataloguing low-tech options, similar to windmills that use friction to warmth buildings, since 2007. Specifically, the journal explores out of date applied sciences that would nonetheless contribute to a sustainable society: like fruit walls used within the 1600s to create native, heat microclimates for rising Mediterranean fruits.
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Within the US, architect and educational Julia Watson’s guide 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 therapy.
And in France, engineer Philippe Bihouix’s realisation of expertise’s drain on assets led to his prize-winning guide The Age of Low Tech. First revealed in 2014, it describes what life in a low-tech world may be like, together with radically cutting consumption.
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Bihouix presents seven “commandments” of the low-tech motion. Amongst others, these cowl the necessity to steadiness a expertise’s efficiency with its environmental influence, being cautious of automation (particularly the place employment is changed by elevated power use), and lowering our calls for on nature.
However the first precept of low-tech is its emphasis on sobriety: avoiding extreme or frivolous consumption, and being happy by much less stunning fashions with decrease efficiency. As Bihouix writes:
A discount in consumption might make it rapidly attainable to rediscover the various easy, poetic, philosophical joys of a revitalised pure world … whereas the discount in stress and dealing time would make it attainable to develop many cultural or leisure actions similar to reveals, theatre, music, gardening or yoga.
Historic options
Crucially, we will apply low-tech rules to our each day lives now. For instance, we will simply cut back power demand from heating through the use of heat garments and blankets. Meals, if it’s packaged in any respect, may be purchased and saved in reusable, recyclable packaging like glass.
Architecture affords a number of alternatives for low-tech approaches, particularly if we be taught from historical past. Utilizing historical windcatcher towers designed to permit exterior cool air to circulate by means of rooms lets buildings be cooled utilizing a lot much less power than air-con. And storing warmth in stones, utilized by the Romans for underfloor heating, is being thought of in the present day as a method of coping with the intermittency of renewable power.
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Design and manufacture for sustainability emphasises lowering waste, usually by means of avoiding mixing and contaminating supplies. Easy supplies like plain carbon steels, joined utilizing detachable fasteners, are easy to recycle and domestically restore. Buses, trains and farm equipment utilizing these steels, for instance, may be way more readily refurbished or recycled than fashionable automobiles stuffed with microelectronics and manufactured from refined alloys.
In some locations, the rules of low tech are already influencing city design and industrial coverage. Examples embody “15-minute cities” the place retailers and different facilities are easily accessible to residents, utilizing cargo bikes as an alternative of automobiles or vans for deliveries, and inspiring repairable merchandise by means of right-to-repair legislation within the EU and US.
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In the meantime, in Japan, there’s rising curiosity within the reuse and recycling practices of the Edo period. From 1603 to 1867, the nation was successfully closed to the surface world, with very restricted entry to uncooked supplies. Subsequently, in depth reuse and restore – even of issues similar 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 the whole lot from paper lanterns and books to footwear, pans, umbrellas and candles.
By following examples like these, we will make discerning technological selections a central a part of our seek for sustainable methods of dwelling.
