I have addressed appropriate technology many times throughout this blog. For the developing world it is easier to see what extra technology will do to help people that are in many cases living at or just slightly up from preindustrial age technology. Do they need iPhones and upper end Tesla cars? In the developed world this kind of extra luxury has sadly become a normal aspiration. I’m not proposing that the only way to ‘save the world’ is where we all suddenly go out and start living a neo-preindustrial age existence – not my idea of lifelong fun.
What we have to do is start evaluating all our current technologies to understand what we truly ‘need’ to live in a modern world. We must assess what technologies are inherently always destructive and whether there are alternatives, and if not do we really need these technologies? If we ‘need’ them within a modern developed context, how can we work to change the system in which these technologies exist such that they do no harm to us or the planet. I believe that in many cases harmful technologies do have more benign options but financial expediency gets in the way. We have to think life beneficial, and not profit only, as a reason to maintain a technology.
Back in the 1980s I was watching a program about how the Nepalese government, helped by some NGO groups, were trying out a method to curb deforestation in the foothills of the Himalaya. It was becoming increasingly normal to hear, that during the monsoons, whole villages were being washed down the mountain because of the lack of trees to impeded the run-off and exposed soil no longer held in place by the trees. Now there are several ways to tackle this problem. The simple and more intriguing one was to stop the reason the forests were being removed – by the rural villagers needing fuelwood to cook their meals. In the villages used for the study, women and children had to walk miles across rocky mountainous terrain every couple of days to collect enough wood to carry home so they could eat warm food. It wasn’t a timber company or anything sinister like that, just people needing a basic necessity that was in short supply though overuse.
The remedy was to change their energy source. You can’t get more preindustrial-age than using wood as your only source of energy. The animal excretions were needed to fertilize the fields, so couldn’t burn that crap either. The solution was to give each village family a bio-digestion tank next to their home. In it went all the feces and vegetable/crop scraps to be bio-digested down. What amazed me wasn’t just the simple technological and appropriate technology but the reactions of the villagers. What was notable during the program was how connected all the villages were to each other as they went about their gender roles in life (men and older boys doing the hard physical labor in the fields while women or younger children did the hard physical labor of wood gathering or chores around the home).
The men interviewed open a valve at the bottom of the tank and out poured this solution of rich think digested nutrient. The men looked so excited as they explained how much better this digested mixture was in raising the yields of all crops in their farms on tiered terraces that had been build centuries ago on the extremely steep hillsides. For the women it was something different. The old smokey fireplace had been replaced by a gas ring connected by pipe to the top of the bio-digester outside. The women turned a valve by the burner to start the flow of methane gas that was intense enough to cook meals on. But it was much more than that. The women said how the air quality in the house was so much better without all the wood smoke, and how much more time they had now that they didn’t have to walk so far every couple of days. And with great excitement, showed the cooking pans that didn’t need to have the wood smoke soot vigorously scrubbed off the pans after every meal – the pans were clean on the outside. This extra time was used by the children to do more schooling and the women to create crafts that they could walk down to the towns to sell to the tourists now coming through the region. The extra income from crafts and extra food grown allowed them to buy items that helped their daily lives.
Unless you have done a lot of back-country camping over a open fire, you might not readily see the reason that this is so wonderful. It wasn’t just the replanting of trees that kept the soil in place, but how a singular technology had changed the lives of the villagers for the better. They still live their traditional lifestyles, which already had a high quality, but the increased standard of living made their lives easier with the ability to spend more time together. The technology addressed the most basic of their needs. They already had a high quality of life with great connectedness and cooperation, but lacked the time to do anything more as necessary daily chores could be brutal and time-consuming.
I use this example to show a couple of things. Love, compassion and cooperation as a basis of living, and appropriate technology for the place in which they lived. Now the philosophical question that arises is, how much more do they need versus how more could they now begin to want as a basic level of affluence begins to creep into their lives? This question of needs and wants is a crucial one (e.g., see earlier post Getting to Transformation 1 – Choosing Wisely – the path of a spiritual warrior {July 2018}) since our destructive and competitive consumer society is predicated on addressing wants that are well beyond anything that simply meets our needs. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to be said for many of the luxuries and comforts we take for granted that a Himalayan foothills farmer would find amazing and desirous. But how much of our craving for luxury is based on how we perceive the rich live.
There is a comedian that once said, “I’d rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable” and therein lies in the problem. We have the illusion that the rich are always happy because they can have whatever they want. There are a lot of people who are monetarily wealthy but are not happy at all – they simply run from one craving to another with excess – often taking drugs to dampen the despair and boredom in their lives. The amazing thing about many people in these preindustrial-age cultures is that they are happy despite having very little materialism in their lives. Given some technology that helps ease their lives makes a big difference. In many places in the world, small scale wind and solar power helps villagers have enough electricity to light the house at night and recharge some batteries. Does everyone need to have a luxurious electric car to drive around town, or would a simply electric motor scooter or electric bike suffice for short distance travelling, especially if they had their own lanes to protect from larger motorized vehicles?
Hopefully you see what I am getting at when I say appropriate technology. We get so entrenched in a set way of thinking that it seems more like tunnel vision to us in the developed world. Most people who have travelled in developing countries sees westernized technology within the cities and then simple technology in the rural areas. In Taiwan I recall riding in an airconditioned Coach on my way to the Taroko National Park and I was observing all the farm fields with the typical big tractors plowing the soil, when suddenly in a small field there is this man in a loin cloth with round pyramid reed hat behind an oxen and a wooden plow. While in Marakesh in the modern western section of the city I was looking down from the balcony of my big hotel to the wide avenues designed for motor traffic and saw a policeman on traffic duty arguing with a man on a wooden wagon being pulled by a donkey coming the wrong way down a one-way street.
Much of the world is still living with pre-industrial revolution technology even though modern technology is around. One of the reasons is the great variation of wealth in developing countries (extreme poverty being normal outside the cities). One problem with developed countries is that everyone has been so infiltrated with consumer technology that even in poor regions the poor no longer have access to, or any desire to, use pre-industrial technologies. Obviously, the Amish are a unique exception, but they are not poor, they live a pre-industrial way by choice.
This week’s post is getting long….
To Be Continued……………..
0 Comments