 You might be forgiven for thinking that I'm a pessimist, that the Low Technology Institute's blog, podcast, publications, and presentation often focus on the coming collapse when fossil fuels are less abundant, that we are giddily awaiting the crash of our energy-intensive way of life, and that we cheer on each figurative piece of straw put on the camel's back as the inevitable break approaches. But at heart, we're optimists, and a future that has less energy available doesn't have to be worse, it just has to be different. We argue that the sooner we embrace this future, the sooner that we can create a more sustainable, resilient, and local life, the better. And we're not alone in this way of thinking. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 49 on June 10th, 2022, coming to you out of the, usually out of the Lotech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. But today it's raining. 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Today we'll be listening in on an interview I had with Dr. Ashley Colby and John Kearns on the Doomer Optimism Podcast. Their podcast is quote, dedicated to discovering regenerative past forward highlighting the people working for a better world and connecting seekers to doers and quote. They put out two episodes a week and while you can find all their offerings at doomeroptimism.com, the podcast is available under the same name on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, Google and others. They've drawn from a broad swath of people who are actively working towards a more sustainable and resilient future and their message will resonate with anyone listening to the lowtech podcast. Okay, let's get right into it. Welcome everybody to a new episode of the Doomer Optimism Podcast. Today Ashley and I are talking with Scott Johnson who is the founder and director of the Low Technology Institute. Scott, why don't you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of your back story and how you came to find the logic and the kind of stuff that you guys work on. Sure. So, well, I guess in the beginning I started in northern Minnesota that's where I'm kind of lived all over through an exchange year abroad and in Germany and then came back into college in Boston and then New Orleans for grad school and that was all archaeology. I'm an archaeologist by training and I finished my PhD in anthropology which is kind of the umbrella for archaeology and a couple other social sciences and I was teaching and just was on the adjunct treadmill which I'm sure we don't need to get into today. And I just kind of started thinking about society in general, large scale, rise and fall of ancient civilizations and I was writing a book at the time called Why Ancient Civilizations Failed which was not my title. I wanted to call it hubris which is something we can talk about if you want but basically my idea was that societies become so enamored of themselves that they stop paying attention to changing environmental factors. I don't just mean climate environment, I mean things around them, they're surroundings and then when they stop paying attention to their surroundings things change and then they collapse because they think, oh, we've farmed this way for a thousand years and it's worked so why would we change, right? And then, of course, being the all saying I have sour on myself, I looked at these ancient civilizations, bad word, I know complex societies and then I looked at our own and I thought, well, we're kind of addicted to fossil fuels and we haven't planned for the end of those and I kind of got depressed and found places like the Dark Mountain Project and others who were kind of on the same page and eventually I said, okay, enough of this academic run around, I'm going to start doing something where I can do hands on research projects and center them around small scale DIY solutions to a lot of how we're going to live after fossil fuels are no longer around. So there's, I guess, kind of the doomer part, my depression about where we're going and the optimism part about, hey, there are things you can do right now that not only make you more resilient in a future without fossil fuels but also today when prices go up, it's like, okay, grocery store prices are going up. I don't care because we grow a lot of our own food and it's not like we have a lot of land to do it on. You can grow a lot of your own food in your own space. So stuff like that, that's kind of what we're all about. We're a 501c3 nonprofit and we have a research wing and makes it sound very grand, a research wing that does research on everything from growing potatoes, solar hot water and breeding bees and growing food, a lot of it's food related. And then we have an education wing where we have classes on a lot of the topics we cover. Next year we hope to do a whole series on timber framing as we build a building for our institute, things like that. So we're trying to do a lot of stuff, hands on local small scale stuff. That's basically what we're all about. Well, that's a great sort of 30,000 foot view. Super interesting stuff going on. I want to mention the low tech institute website, low tech institute, great website. I've been exploring it. I think a person could easily spend a month looking through all the resources you got on there. You've got videos, you've got podcasts, you've got a lot of how-to stuff, you've got descriptions of the projects that you've worked on, you've got white papers and other sort of philosophical materials and stuff. So I definitely encourage everybody to go see lowtechinstitute.org and check out the stuff you got. I want to step through things a little bit slower and maybe ask you questions about your process and things that were formative for you. So you did your PhD in archaeology and anthropology and you worked a lot with Mayan communities in Mesoamerica, Latin America. So could you give like a little description of the kind of stuff that you were doing with those communities and maybe some salient experiences that you had, what you learned working with those communities and how it's affected your past? So what you guys were talking about on a previous episode actually resonated with me because I know you've had lots of people on who have worked in different parts of the, I guess you'd call it less industrialized part of the world, which is I think a better phrasing than say more or less developed because as soon as development is required. Yeah, so I lived in Guatemala for a while. I also lived most of my time working in the field was in Mexico in a small village just south of Chichen Itza, which is many people know. I was 15 minutes south of there, but kind of a world away because 15 minutes away was Chichen Itza where they had the buses coming in with thousands of tourists every day and very first world sort of experience. And then I was 15 minutes away, but never went to town to get a cell phone signal. I had to climb up the tallest tree on the tallest pyramid and then I could call home and so, you know, so still connected but barely. And so, you know, we had like one outlet in our in the house we lived in. And so this was an experience that that touched me a lot because people have been living in so many different ways across the ancient world. And today that it makes me so disappointed that sometimes we get such a narrow view of what it is to live a good life and I don't want to romanticize living the way that they did or that they do in rural parts of Mexico because there are, you know, access to health care and over influx of process sugars and processed foods nowadays has given rise to high diabetes and a lot of health conditions. So that and education and many, many I could list, right? There's there's a lot of difficulty. So I don't mean to romanticize it. But the fact that, you know, if if something terrible catastrophic were to happen to World Trade, I think they would continue to live a lot more comfortably than many of us would. And that made me happy and sad, I guess. But I don't know. I think about I think about it and I try and draw ideas from them and then from not only only them, but across the world both today and in the past and and take those ideas and analyze them in a bit of a more scientifically rigorous way with a control and an experimental plots of different vegetables or different plants and growing or methods I'm using to kind of get a comparison. There's a lot of people in the alternative agriculture or alternative energy or alternative XYZ community. They'll say, oh, this is a great idea. I'm going to try it. They try it. There's no control. So you don't know if it's if it's doing better than than than it would otherwise. So so yeah, I try I try and draw from them and and draw from that type of idea. But also, you know, I'm not opposed to technological solutions when they're necessary. And for example, we're on Zoom right now. And I don't think anyone listening on a podcast would be able to listen to two of these ideas if we didn't have the communication infrastructure that we do. So there are some things that I think are important to try and preserve as we move in transition into this brave new world that's coming at us, whether we like it or not, whereas some things that I think we can jettison pretty easily. So people hear that you're an archaeologist and that you're living and working in the Yucatan. They're going to think that you're maybe going around digging up bones and old pyramid sites and stuff like that. So when you're there working with the communities there, what running around digging up bones and stuff? Or were you studying contemporary practices? Are you studying ancient practices or what were you focused on? Sure. So for me, at least for my dissertation, which has the actual topic of my dissertation had only in a very broad sense, anything to do with what I'm doing today. I was looking at a complex political change in the past. And so, yes, I was going around every day. We walked two kilometers out to the site from the village I was staying in of about 300 people who grew up speaking my as a primary language and then learned Spanish in school. And so we'd walk out to the site every day and we would first, we had to survey, so we had to cut straight lines to the forest and use survey equipment and identify where all the structures were and the topography of the land to kind of recreate what this this little tiny village looked like. It was about the same size of the village we lived in now. And then the next year we did surface collections and excavations to get pottery. We were primarily focused on pottery because pottery sequence changes over time, just like, you know, if you were digging through a trash bin or a trash pit from the last century, you'd see different coke bottles because coke bottles change over time and you could then date which each layer was, right? So we basically were doing that with pottery. That was a thousand years old. And what we were looking at with all this, you know, just little mundane bits of everyday pottery that, you know, John Q. Maya just kind of threw out when it broke was actually a really interesting change in that for four, five, six hundred years, there was a local large scale, more or less sociopolitical control or regime. And then after what's called the Maya collapse, which interestingly affected two interesting points in the Maya collapse, which some people like to talk about. Number one collapse is kind of a loaded word because the thing that collapsed were the upper levels of societies, the people that were building the large pyramids, the rulers, the the people that were not subsistence farmers. Subsistence farmers largely just scattered into the forest and picked up and continued living. So there was a lot of resilience and it affected 10 percent of the population a lot. So saying it was a collapse is a little disingenuous. And number two, it happened more in the southern area. That was more dependent on rainfall, where I worked just practically a desert. It was a scrub. I forget the exact couple designation of it, but it was a scrub forest near a desert. It was it was pretty it was kind of like Texas. It was pretty hot, dry limestone, no water stayed on the surface, very little soil. Anyway, so these people weathered the drought really well because they already had drought resilient strategies. So they just kind of kept chugging along. And then what happened to them was a maritime empire that Chichen Itza represents came in and was an intrusion. And then they so I was looking at this little village that was equidistant between almost equidistant between Chichen Itza and the old capital. And I wanted to see how did this so-called massive shift from one regime to another manifest itself on the local level for small everyday people. And it didn't really. I mean, they just paid tribute to someone else. So they didn't care. I mean, as far as I could tell, very little change. So a lot of times when we think of these big catastrophic world ending changes, a lot of that doesn't affect the little people. Now, this was at a time when people were subsistence farmers and could go out into the landscape and create their own living, which is kind of different than most of us today. You know, maybe present company excluded, but they're there for the majority of population a disruption of that level would be catastrophic to their daily way of life. And so that in addition to other things, kind of pushed me to say, OK, well, can we build this resilience into our lives now, knowing that we do have this change coming, you know, make ourselves more resilient and more self self-sufficient also is a word I'm trying to get away for, maybe locally, locally resilient or locally sufficient rather than self-sufficient. Because I think in America, we all like to be think we could be self-sufficient. But nobody's self-sufficient unless you are able to get or out of the ground and become a blacksmith and do all these things. You are not self-sufficient. Like, you know, yeah, and do that with everything. You are not self-sufficient. You are interdependent on other people around you. Yeah, even as a rugged individualist out on the frontier. Yes. OK. This is so good. I can totally see the straight line between your research and the Lotech Institute, because it's basically like in the in the situation where there's like complex systems collapse, people can still thrive if they're able to sort of like meet their needs on like a local or community or a bio-rational level. So it's so it very much ties in with all the a lot of the stuff we talk about is just I think a lot of people who have studied history or lived in the developing world think this similar or less industrialized world. Think in a similar way, which is like, you know, I think realizing how precarious our lives are. Those of us who don't have these skills and have very little ability to provide for our own basic needs. And so like preparing for that in advance is smarter than not doing it. This is there's so much overlap, too, with my experience and maybe Josh's experience, too. It might be interesting. We talked a little bit about it on your podcast or, you know, when we interviewed you, Josh. But I do think there is something to spending time outside of the developed world, like the hyper industrial world to give you a set of perspective, like, you know, a perspective about how other people live, how, how it's pretty accessible to live sustainably and with low resource input on a community level. And it's you realize, like, you don't need a ton of resources to get by, to eat, to have warm water, a place of warm and dry place to sleep. I I traveled to Guatemala and had this similar kind of insight at the Pyramid Tikal. Do you know that one? And just like just seeing like, yeah, there was this complex civilization and, and, you know, it it it sort of went away. But, you know, like, we persist throughout time. So, OK, one thing that a lot of people who are, I think, thinking in this type of way, had this kind of set of experience interested in in complex societies of the past are like trying to figure out what can we draw from the past? What can we draw from anthropology? The study of past civilizations, like what's relevant for us? And what's what should we be modeling? But obviously, like in the modern context. And so one thing that has been coming up a bunch recently is and this would be great to get your opinion on before we get into, like, the more modern work that you're the work you're doing at LTI. But is are there like would you call what the the the Mayan civilization or the Mayan society you were studying? Would you call that a civilization or not? And I there was some debate recently on Twitter about whether or not a civilization, if once it gets to the point where it's a civilization, it's necessarily unsustainable. And I like I feel like there are lots of very extremely varied examples of complex societies in the past. You might call them civilizations that lasted like very long, very like thousands of years with decent amount of complexity. And they only collapsed because of some change in the ecosystem or change in the climate or, you know, the Ice Age or the Ice Age going away. These kinds of major changes. So I'm wondering like how do you feel like it's important to make this distinction like civilizations are unsustainable? And because then that has implications for us, right? Because I get a little frustrated sometimes where people are like any amount of complex organization among humans is going to be unsustainable. And then it's like, well, where does that leave us? I mean, do we have to like simplify to such an extent? You know, and I think it's a little bit like this fetishizing indigeneity of the past and stuff like that in it too. So I don't know, I've been curious to hear your thoughts since you're trained in this area. Sure. So I'm just taking notes because there's like seven complex questions. Yeah, we could. So first of all, yeah, so OK, so civilization. So the term itself, civilization, it's in the title of my book. But like I said, that's not my choice because civilization has become at least an anthropology, a dirty word, because you may already know your listeners may already know that civilization comes from a tripartite division from anthropology and like 150 years ago when there was a lot of European colonialism and they put everybody in the world into three categories. You're either a savage, a barbarian or civilized, which is really not. We don't want to use those terms anymore, although civilization has stuck around and become really. Really really difficult to shake. So we so that word is still here for better or worse. I try not to use it. Like I said, I prefer the term complex societies or large scale complex societies. And that just refers to when you have a lot of people living together, it becomes incredibly complex because it's almost like an exponential growth of complexity, the more people you have grouped together closely and communicating. And so to say, for example, we talk about maybe a service, services divisions, band, tribe, chiefdom, state as ways to talk about how many people are living together. And the important thing, the important difference is from the savage, barbarian civilization idea was there was an arrow. Everybody started out in the savagery and then you moved to barbarism and then you moved to civilization. So you, a lot of the colonialism was to try and pull these quote unquote, I apologize for using this word, but this is, I'm just historically speaking, they said, we are going to these places of savagery and trying to bring them into civilization. So that's again, why we don't use that word. That's the language of the past. Yeah, so it's really problematic. I guess if you want to be, yeah, historical about it. Anyway, so band, tribe, chiefdom, the important difference there is there is no presumed movement from band to tribe, from tribe to chiefdom from chiefdom to state. That's sometime how it progresses, but that doesn't have a value judgment on it. State isn't necessarily better than a band. Bands are egalitarian. Bands move across the landscape. They're largely nomadic hunter-gatherers. Bands have, people in bands have long life spans. They have really good health because they're not living in the same place polluting that one environment. They're moving around. They're eating a very diet. They actually bands. When you move to a tribe or chiefdom, those are usually agricultural. And when you move from a band to sedentary agricultural lifestyle, you see shorter stature, which is kind of an indication of poor nutrition, really, because it's only in the last 50 years that we have attained the height of average hunter-gatherers before agriculture because we have such a robust industrial food production system right now. So 50 years before that, everyone was a lot shorter. Going back 10,000 years because they were eating monocrop wheat and things like that. So yeah, we're trying to get away from that value judgment. So yeah, so that's civilization. That's why I try and use the term complex. So my question is then, once you get to chiefdom state level, is it necessarily unsustainable? At that level? No. No, but it's easier to be. Okay, that makes sense. When you have, so I like to say, for example, because my big bugaboo is fossil fuels. I say that fossil fuels kind of hypercharge all the best and the worst about us, right? They help us produce tons of food, but they also help us destroy the environment at an increased rate. One person with an excavator could cause so much soil damage and erosion that they could completely destroy a wetland ecosystem easily. A single person, right? I mean, that's only possible because of fossil fuels. It would be hard to do that with a shovel possible, but it would be a lot more dedicated. Anyway, and similarly with hundreds of four thousands of people working together in pre-industrial societies, you know, canalization is a big one. Deforestation is a big one. These are ways that, you know, more people living in a concentrated area, it's a lot easier for them to destroy their environment or change their conditions in a way that make it unsustainable in the long run. That doesn't mean it can't be sustainable. And a lot of people like to romanticize, for example, Native Americans, First Nations societies here. And they forget that when Europeans encountered Native Americans in many places, it was right after a plague had killed off anywhere from 15 to 90% of the population. And so you had a very diminished population living with the infrastructure and the large resources of a much larger society. And the same thing happened in Europe after the Bubonic plague. Because land is finite. As the population increases, there is less resources, or less land and less resources available for each individual person. And so after the Bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europeans, you know, suddenly there's extra land for growing food, there's extra housing, there's all this extra availability because all of the dead people don't need it anymore. And so people actually had a boom, an economic boom, and a high quality of life after all these people died off. And so it's easy to romanticize. And I'm not saying that we can't learn a lot of really good lessons from Native American agriculture and even social organization. You know, my favorite anecdote was that a lot of Native societies would divide property rights were matrilineal, they passed through the mothers to their daughters, and then a lot of the other societal organizations were patrilineal, they passed through men. And so women on the land, men provided a lot of labor. And so it was kind of a, there had to be more mutual respect, right, between the two, rather than men owning a lot of the land and providing a lot of the labor. And then, yeah, it's easier to be less egalitarian. And so sometimes when the Europeans would meet, they'd want to talk to the, you know, whoever was ruling that village. And they would think that the woman was acting as a translator for her husband when she was actually in charge. And they kept talking to the man and he'd be like, well, ask my wife. And there's a lot of cultural confusion, let alone language confusion. So there's a lot of really useful things. And I don't mean to disregard that, but yeah, it's important to keep everything in perspective. So can large scale civilizations be sustainable? Yes, they can, but they have to be very self-reflective. And I feel like as societies become more powerful, they become less self-reflective in a realistic way. And they feel that they have the answers. This is how it works. And if we don't, and we don't need to change, we can change the world around us. And I feel like this really feeds on to our technophilia. You know, we will, I was just hearing a story on MPR this morning about a hedge fund or some sort of thing on Wall Street where they bundle a lot of investments for a very technological future, a very, you know, a very bullish on technology saving us. And, you know, the anthropologist James C. Scott has the idea of high modernism. And this is a robust, almost religious belief in technology going to save us. And I have sympathy for this. I have family members who think we're going to innovate our way out of this. And I say, okay, maybe, but until that happens, I'm going to plan for things that I know work, like growing lots of potatoes, you know, like growing wheat, growing things locally doing, being locally self-sufficient. That's what I'm going to focus on until we have, you know, carbon capture that is energy neutral and all of these wonderful things that people are trying to work on it. You know, everybody has an electric car that doesn't have a really terrible supply chain for its lithium batteries and all of these things. That's what it's going to be, right? No. I can't predict the future, but yeah, I'll work. I'll focus on things that have a proven track record and make them better and more obtainable rather than, you know, refocusing on something new that's going to save us because the new has gotten us into this problem. Right. Yeah, I'd like to, if it's cool, I'd like to jump in. If you want to hear the rest of the interview, find the Doomer Optimism podcast on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google, and other venues. Have a look through their back catalog for other great interviews. And if you want advanced access to their episodes, you can also support them on Patreon. And now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the Institute. And unfortunately, COVID swept through my family, which lives here at the Institute. First, my partner got what seemed like a cold with congestion and fatigue. She quarantined after testing positive, but the next day my son was feverish and also positive and joined her in quarantine. Two days later, my infant daughter and I also tested positive. So on the bright side, we all got to quarantine together. Thankfully, all of our symptoms were mild, but with caring for people in quarantine and the usual childcare and my own illness, we've mostly been shut down for the last two weeks. I point this out not to complain, but to highlight the type of redundancy and resiliency we try and build into our day-to-day lives. By having food on hand and other necessities available, a two-week illness is easy to weather. We didn't have to have emergency shopping trips done for us by our neighbors. We just had to think about how to keep ourselves healthy. We're working on a systematic way for folks to approach building resiliency and local subsistence into their lives. The beta version of this site is up, which you can find at lowtechinstitute.org slash transition, and we really welcome your feedback. That's it for the week. The LowTech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson. It's also co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you've enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our Forrester and Land Steward level members, Marilyn, Skirpon, and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute, membership, and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly, Scott, at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music was high on lounging off the self-titled album by Wax Lyricist. That song is under the Creative Commons license, and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share-like license, meaning you're free to use it and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks and take care.