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?