Alternativas para vivir: Foro Nacional de Tecnologías Apropiadas

This last month I went to a Forum for Appropriate Technologies: ideas, equipment and attitudes for the good life (http://www.unitierra.org/foro/), held in Oaxaca and organized by, among others, Gustavo Esteva and Rolene Walker (the pilgrim for Walk with Earth, a walk from Australia to Chile, for the beauty of Earth). The purpose of this forum was return technology to the people, was human’s appropriation of technology.

Since industrial revolution technology somehow changed the role to serve humans, it went from a tool to a goal; was transformed into the salvation, the wellbeing, rather than a mean to achieved that. The result? We forgot that the goal was wellbeing for all and replaced it by access to internet or a shopping mall right outside our door.

So in this forum you could touch technology and take its arrogance away by transformed it into the tool. When you do this you can actually see the goal – ex. clean water – and then see the opportunities in your environment, your resources. After, you have several ideas that will be leaded by the attitudes of who will benefit from the technology. In the end we all need clean water but that doesn’t mean that we all have to have the same water management, rather, you should think about how to do it with respect to the environment. As different ecosystems have different abilities to deal with the same problem – water management – we also should think that different societies act likewise. What are the dimensions of this obsession for uniformity? What are the other faces?

The western society is obsessed by uniformity – we should all eat the same, do the same, hear the same, feel the same, see the same; in the end, buy the same, since that is the goal, that’s what we are. It is an unhealthy behaviour and this is clear when one can see we are ecosystem, we are earth, and we all make part of the same thing. And like “monoculturing” earth is killing it, do the same with societies is also destroying them. We should rather be cultivating biodiversity.

Only a biodiverse world can provide the conditions for all life, including human life. Whenever we try to do otherwise we create diseases. Social systems aren’t different. Whenever we try to make everyone be the same all over the world, we create diseases as anxiety, unhappiness, violence; we are creating negative externalities, as we do with our economy. But there’s no such thing as externalities, since we are all in the same earth. So we’re living with these externalities, in other words, we are poisoning ourselves.

So we should grow biodiversity – of nature, of ideas, of dreams, of people, of movements, of costumes, of common sense (as Descartes amazingly identified as the most best distributed thing in the world, since we all have it, but each one have its own!). So we should stop wanting everyone think the same, fight for the same, react the same, dress the same, judge the same. We have to grow integration, integration of us all, of all our differences and stop poisoning ourselves by uniformity and exclusion.

But how it is a world that we all make part of it?

Project aside

Of course I don’t even know where to start!

As expected, community didn’t accepted very well the project – the house, the ecotechnologies, the backyard, in the end, what were we doing there. On top of that, the person that was supposed to live with me in the house never arrived. The best scenario to start over and do it the way it feels right to me.
The house the committee gave us is just beside the secondary school teacher’s house. There are three of them living there: the teacher of agronomy, farming and manual work; one woman, two men, from Monday to Wednesday. So I decided to stay with them, those three days, every week.

Since I arrived the community there was something I couldn’t bare: garbage everywhere. You cannot walk in the woods without seeing a coca-cola bottle. And this isn’t only in this community. Why? What happen to the concept of respecting Nature?
I realised then that there was a new recycling project in the secondary school so I went to present myself to the director and volunteer myself to make part of that project (after all I’m an environmental engineer!) and started to get involve in this problem. So what is happening?

Beverages such as coca-cola where introduced in communities something like 30 years ago. It seems like they have more sugar content than in other markets and also they are cheaper. Nowadays these communities (even in the middle of Lancadona jungle) really believe that Coca-cola makes part of the culture. As well coca-cola bought several water supplies (I can’t drink any water from México that doesn’t belongs to the coca-cola company) and they don’t allow governmental campaigns against beverages and “junk food” since they give job to an important percentage of population. Older indigenous people of Lancadona jungle tried to implement a project where whatever bottle that comes in, has to go out by whoever brought it. Coca-cola Company didn’t accept it so it was a failure.

So we have an average of, minimum, one bottle per person per day. Where can I recycle my PET bottle? Where can I recycle other types of plastic, aluminium, batteries, etc? Well, I cannot! There’s no recycling in Mexico at all. The most you can have is selling PET and aluminium to people that then sell to other countries. All the rest you produce goes to a dump without any type of environmental standards. And this is the very best you can have; in my community all the schools have the garbage at open sky, next to classroom.

If you walk in a very clean community in Mexico you can be sure that what they do is burning what they produce immediately or putting in a hole in the land (wherever they find the place) and burry or burn it, since communities normally don’t have access to municipal collect once they don’t pay taxes…

Why? Because there is no such thing as garbage. The word doesn’t exist as we conceive. All that God gave us is from Him, so it belongs to Him; this means that earth is going to embrace everything as it does with organic remains. There’s no concept of recycling, no word for it also because it also doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as environmental managing. Tseltal doesn’t have translations for these new concepts of living. And one cannot go back to what it use to be, we have to find out an intermediate solution, one that respects community way of living and the environmental standards of world globalization.

So now I’m trying to develop an environmental project within this school, with foreign teachers that doesn’t speak their language, don’t believe they are going to change, don’t recycle; building a recycle project in a country where recycle doesn’t exist. Project aside, this is also what I am doing!

And I still didn’t share my first glances about this community… well, hopefully in the end of this week!