 Thank you so much and good evening everybody. I'm gonna share my screen and present. So I wanted to begin this evening by actually acknowledging that I'm speaking to you today from the traditional land of the first people of Brooklyn of New York, the Lenape people, past and present and honor with them the gratitude for the land and for those people. So myth, it's an ancient Greek word that comes from mythos which means story of the people and it's guided mankind for millennia. And 300 years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment, they constructed a mythology of technology that was influenced by a confluence of colonialism and racism and humanism. And the map here, it shows you this, it's from the 1700s that really perfectly captures the ideology of the time. It has the aristocracy of imperialism up the top and it has colonialism throughout of territorialization of the globe. And then at the base, it caused curiosities and innovations of the day, all of these different instruments and tools which were thought of as innovative and technology. And it was this type of mythology that ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation and deeming it primitive. And this was a mythology that feasted on the felling of forests and the extraction of resources. And it powered the age of industrialization and it distanced itself from nature, favoring fuel by fire. And today, this is the legacy that still haunts us. And we consider the architectural artifacts of dead cultures as incredibly invaluable like the 4,000 year old pyramids of Giza. And that's something that I'm not disputing. But what we do is we also erase living cultures. And here we have two images of the same ecosystem. One is of the floating islands and these mobile housing technologies of the Medan people who live in the Southern wetlands of Iraq. There are 6,000 year old civilization and they were displaced by the draining of these marshes by Saddam Hussein. So over the past few hundred years, only a sliver of the technologies that existed at the time of the Enlightenment were actually valued enough to be shepherded through to the present. And meanwhile, that has been this alternative mythology of technology that's existed for a very long time since well before the Enlightenment. And while modern societies have been trying to conquer nature in the name of progress, indigenous cultures have been learning to work with it. And so today we're faced, as we all know, with this really uncertain future where we're confronted by these climate events that we can't predict and species extinction that we cannot arrest and ecosystem failures that we cannot stop. And then humanity, we're tasked with this incredible problem that we must protect the wildernesses that still exist. But we also must adapt the way we consider and transform the civilizations that we're constructing and have constructed. And so responding to this particular challenge and really trying to extend the grounds of how we think about climate resilient design, low tech is a reframing of local technologies and cultures as an evolutionary extension of life in symbiosis with nature. And in 1966, the architect Cedric Price asked, technology is the answer, but what was the question? And this was incredibly evocative. It provoked our field of design to question the impact of technology on architecture, on cities, on societies, on what we thought of the built environment. And today, I think we're still asking the same kind of question, but it's similar, but we're asking it about sustainability and it's very relevant to be asking it about sustainability. Because when we keep on going up higher and we keep on going out wider and we keep on going deeper to extract, to what end will sustainability actually serve us? And when the very origin of the term sustainability can be traced back to the great law of the Iroquois and their seventh generation principle, which means to consider decisions today in view of the next seven generations ahead, how have we actually even taken upon those principles and really considered them in our built environment, the way that they were first conceived? And so we seem to be in this moment where we're drowning in this seemingly incredible age of information, but we're also starving for wisdom. And it's this new mythology of technology that consistently changed the conditions by which we inhabit the earth that is gonna be critical to advancing this coexistence which we need to evolve between nature and humans and the way that we develop. And it's also gonna affect our term of existence on earth. So I wanted to just introduce sort of my context a little bit. I grew up in Australia, I grew up in an inner city neighborhood. This is the big intersection in the inner city neighborhood. This is inner city. It's called Hillend, it's in Brisbane. And it was actually originally, it was a part of a much larger district that was owned by the Jagira and the Turbo people. And it was called Carilpa and that meant place of the water rat. And this particular part of Brisbane, it's very much an Aboriginal place still today. But this marking on the street which exists now is an Aboriginal flag. It's on a street called Boundary Street. And that street was the boundary, it was a curfew area where Aboriginal people had to remove themselves from the inner city after 4pm and weren't allowed into the inner city. So this is the kind of context around which I grew up and around sort of like what happened in the city that I grew up in. And I went to school, to architecture school here. And that's where this particular research into Indigenous technologies actually began in my second year of architecture school. I took a seminar course that was actually required by every single student who was studying architecture. It was called Aboriginal environments. And it was through this seminar that I first became interested in how Indigenous local architecture and infrastructure in the built environment was actually designed to work symbiotically with nature. And that was really different to all of my other courses that I was being taught at the time. And I think it's actually really incredibly, it was an incredibly innovative model of education at that moment in time. What's really interesting is I haven't found that model of education about Indigenous architecture and technologies anywhere else that I've taught. And I think it's something that actually should be adopted within the discourse of the built environment and architecture and landscape architecture. But that's partly why I wrote the book. But this example, this particular image which could be anything in the world, if you can imagine, it's a little bit hard to decipher exactly what it is, but it's actually the oldest human-made structure on Earth. And it's one of the images that really stuck with me from that seminar course. It's 40,000 years old and most likely no one has ever seen this particular image which, you know, let's question that really. It's what it's called, it's the Berwerina fish traps. And it's this fish trap system that's about a third of a mile long. It sits on this large natural rock bar on the Barwon River in New South Wales just on the bend of the river where there's a town called Berwerina. And in this system, there's large and small rocks that were formed 40,000 years ago to create these small pools. So in certain times of the year and flooding, fish would actually come into the system and they would get caught in the pools and then they would be hand-fished. And so last year, I was home for the summer. It was during a time when 21% of the forests on the entire continent of Australia were actually on fire and they were burning in the worst wildfires that had ever been seen. And these wildfires, they were caused by a couple of things. It was seasonal drought, it was delayed rains. These are all conditions of climate change, also underfunded prevention but also century-old bans on indigenous cultural burning practices. And what happened in the midst of all this catastrophe, this interesting thing came about that it was observed that the ancestral lands that had still practiced cultural burning that's also known as fire stick farming, they actually survived as the fires raged around them. And so I just wanna talk a little bit about pyrotechnology because it's something that's probably not familiar to everybody but it is definitively an ancient technology that we see as an ecosystem management for ecosystem management across the globe. And so these trees survived because of this practice of cultural burning that is very slow, cool burning that's guided by something called traditional ecological knowledge or T.E.K. And that is knowledge that's been passed down for generations and it guides the practice of how one burns in a particular ecosystem and this is an image of burning in gum tree country. And so as I said, this pyrotechnology, this is a global phenomenon for managing ecosystems and it's a relatively undocumented example of something called simultaneous innovation. And so here you can see in this image two different ways that pyrotechnology is used one by the Kayapo who create the Apeta Forest Agricultural Islands in the Amazon. And that's a forestry system and also down the bottom is the Milpa system and that's created by the Mayan and that's another different type of agroforestry system that we find in the middle Americas. So this term simultaneous innovation, it's an interesting term, it explains the hypothesis that scientific discoveries made independently often occur simultaneously. And the most famous slash infamous example of this was the co-discovery of the theory of evolution by Darwin and someone who's much less known, so Alfred Russell Wallace. So this phenomenon of simultaneous innovation was a really unexpected discovery or something that I encountered through the research over a time that I was doing for the book. And it turned up again and again in all the various typologies when I was looking at these local technologies that were developed by communities who had had no form of contact. And so in finding one particular system in Fiji, the same particular system in Hawaii, the same system in Australia, I came to the conclusion like there is optimal designs to nature-based technologies that are responses to climate extremes. And so over the past 20 years, my design focus hasn't really changed that much from second year architecture school, but since then I have been traveling a lot looking at these types of technologies and also looking at different types of sacred landscapes across the globe because I've had the suspicion that these sustainable innovations that we're looking for in the built environment already exist in their rooted in cultures who figured out solutions to climate extremes a millennia ago. And so scientists have acknowledged that we're in the sixth grade extinction, but what they haven't acknowledged is that species extinction alone is not going to be the 21st century's greatest loss because those same forces that drive species extinction, they endanger local technologies that actually may hold a key to our survival. And these are technologies that are not even looked at as technologies yet that have been developed in response to flooding and fire and drought and sea level rise and climate extremes and extreme weather. And so they're the same crisis that we are facing today. And they're incredibly well adapted to their environments and they actually play a really critical role in conserving biodiversity. That's why you'd get that relationship of biodiversity loss, technology loss. And so these are the types of nature-based technologies that I write about in low tech. And if you're not familiar with the word low tech, I'm going to explain that to you. It's a word that I actually coined, I made up. And it's actually a combination of two words. It means local and T-E-K. And I mentioned T-E-K before. It means traditional ecological knowledge. But low tech was also a provocation. It was meant to expose our biases towards cultures, local cultures, and these types of technologies. Because I'd been teaching technology for 10 years. And I kept on finding that mentions of these technologies were called low tech. And this definition of low tech means unsophisticated and primitive. But everything I could find out about these technologies as I researched them, as I spoke to communities, as I came to understand how complex they were, made me understand that these technologies are not low tech. They're not primitive. They're incredibly sophisticated. And they embody all of today's sustainability principles, like low embodied energy, and low impact, and low cost. And they form closed loop systems among a few of the ways that they're inherently incredibly sustainable. But not only that, they're derived, as I said, from T-E-K, which is traditional ecological knowledge. And that is defined as the cumulative body of multi-generational knowledge, practices, and beliefs. And it's a system of knowledge and science that has been universally ignored by the scientific community. And I would say overlooked, ignored, by the design community as well. And T-E-K can be understood if we want to diagram this and sort of classify how one might look at this holistically as a system of nested concepts. And we can imagine that the individual is at the top. And underneath that is the local knowledge of their land and animals and ecosystems. And then below that is your resource management systems, both land and sea. And then beneath that is your social institutions. And then beneath that is your worldview. And radical indigenism, that's not a term that I made up. That is a philosophy of Professor Eva Marie Garoud. And she's a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. And she teaches at Boston College. And she argues for a rebuilding of knowledge through explorations of indigenous philosophies that are capable of generating new dialogues for indigenous communities. And so in low tech, I took these ideas and applied them to design sustainability, arguing for a new look and indigenous knowledge and technologies to inform how we're thinking about sustainability and resilience. And so low tech, I'm talking about it as a movement to rebuild an understanding of local knowledge technology and vernacular design to generate these sustainable climate resilient infrastructures and conversations. And so we're at this moment where we can either continue this very narrow view of technology or which distances us from nature or we can reconceive of this mythology of technology and even within our profession, we can understand that there are other ways for humans to live and to design with nature. And then talking about climate change, if we're really gonna get serious about climate change, it's considered that most effective way of combating climate change or approaching climate change or thinking a solution is not by just replicating a small number of high tech and costly solutions that are developed by wealthy nations, which inherently are only accessible to about 30% of the world. And so if we keep doing that, we're just perpetuating that mythology and that leaves 70% of the global population vulnerable and kind of continues to amplify the biases of this universal inherited understanding of technology. And so thinking resiliently, the most effective way to mitigate climate change and to consider how can we extend our impact is to recognize that a solution that's embedded in traditional ecological knowledge in community and their environment is actually an incredibly effective way to form resilience at scale. And so I wanna take you through a couple of examples from the book of different types of systems and different types of regions and ecosystems to show you, to give you sort of broad breadth understanding of what I'm talking about. So this is a Kanaat system, it's found in Persia and it passively cools buildings while moving aquifer water across really vast distances and those pox marks that you can see on the screen, that's an indication that there's an underground aqueduct called a Kanaat, which is traveling beneath the surface of the earth. And one of the features of the Kanaat system is this wind tower, it's called a Yachachal and what it is, it creates an evaporative cooler that works to store ice in the summer that's made in the winter by wind that's coming through these wind chimneys but also underneath this building is the Kanaat. And so water is being channeled and it creates this environment that allows for ice in the desert. And the system has been in use for 3,000 years. You can see within the sort of cutaway axon, you can see that there is this slope and there's this tunnel and it moves from the mountains down into the villages and to the cities and into the agricultural fields. And this slope, it's so meticulously designed, it's one to 2% across kilometers. And this system was first constructed by the Persians and it was constructed to source and direct and transport water underground from mountain sources, underground mountain sources to cities. And what's really interesting about the Kanaat, it began in Iran, it sort of made its way across the Middle East, made its way across parts of Europe and Africa, Canary Islands. They've found that it just traveled across the world, this particular technology, but in each location it has a slightly different name. So this is an example of this mass migration of a technology across different environments and across the globe. And these Kanaat tunnels, they're several kilometers long, they have these vertical shafts which are these pock marks that you see on the ground. They're about 20 to 30 meters apart. They're used in the construction but they're also used as a form of maintenance to maintain the system. Because water conservation obviously in these environments is an incredibly high priority. And what the Kanaat does that's different to say a well is it extracts water but has checks and balances. If there's too much extraction of the aquifer, the Kanaat system slows down. So it's inherently sustainable. And then at its end, it spills the water out into agricultural fields and that can actually go back down into the aquifers system. So it's regenerating the aquifer at the same time but it's also cooling public spaces and creating these different types of conditions within the built environment as well. So really close to where we can find where the origin of the Kanaat came from, we find this other system in a wetland. And it's the Altala and the Madif houses of the Madan who live in the southern wetlands of Iraq. And they make these houses and floating islands because these islands are, these houses are actually on islands that are made of a single species of reed. And so the Madan, they make these living reed fences. You can see this is a series of diagrams that shows the construction of these islands and these houses. They fence off a living reed fence and then they dry the reed and they use mud and reed to layer the system until it becomes a buoyant island. And on top of that, they create these houses. And they found that this type of imagery of this particular type of house has been found in Sumerian Uruk imagery that it's six and a half thousand years old. And so this Kassar breed, this is a video of one of my friends took of men constructing one of these Madif houses. They're gonna put these columns in the ground and counterweight them to form the beautiful arch. But this is the Kassar breed. They create the houses, but it's also integral to every single aspect of life. It's, they create food and flour for humans. It creates fodder for water buffalo. And then it says biodegradable material for creating houses, but also the islands that they live on in the wetland. And these houses are constructed in as little as three days and taken down. So they're a mobile architectural technology. So here's an image of a house in construction. And this material is so versatile. It can be bundled into these really large columns. It can be woven into the walls and the floors and the roof system. And then you can see this twine across the archways. It's twisted to form the twine that is then used to bind these, literally bind the buildings together because these buildings are, by road, these buildings are built without the use of any nails. And so these Medan villages, which I showed you before had been drained. They're now being the dike that was built by Saddam Hussein that drained the marshes. That's been taken down and there's now a huge restoration effort to bring back the water, which is coming back and then bring back the half a million Medan people who were displaced by the draining of the marshes. There's about 10,000 people living in this area now. And these marshes, they've been constructed for six and a half, these islands being constructed for six and a half thousand years. And these islands stay afloat for 25 years. So that's their life cycle is one generation. And the last example I wanna show you is the berry agriculture system of the Bengalis in India. And so in other parts of the world where rivers are just contaminated with sewerage, there's one city in India that actually uses its floodplains to treat its sewerage water. And it does this through a combination of sunshine and sewerage and the symbiosis that happens between algae and bacteria. And that's the way it cleans its wastewater that comes in about 95% water and about 5% waste from the center of the city of Kolkata. And it does this through a series of ponds that eventually are just settling ponds that then turn into fish ponds that in a process of cleaning that takes about 30 days. And so the system sits on the edge of the city of Kolkata. It is flanked by the city's largest pile of trash that's just sitting there and smoking and it's ribbon by highways. And then in the background it's all this new development going up being constructed around it. And then you have this indigenous technology like 300 fish ponds sitting on this new development zone just outside of the city that's cleaning the city's water. It's also producing the city's food. And so this innovation it's not just this chemical and coal power free purification system that provides also 100,000 jobs for the residents of the city. Kolkata's center has no formal treatment system so it's actually the only way to treat the water coming out of the center of the city. And so as designers, you know, our work is about having conversations with other designers and other allied disciplines. And, you know, there's a book from the 1960s. It was an exhibition at MoMA, Bernard Rudofsky. He wrote and had this exhibition, Architecture with Architects. And it was a really seminal exhibition that really influenced the generation of architects. And so the conversations we have, we're having conversations with the past and we're projecting conversations into the future. But what I'm talking about and what I think this pneumatology or technology is needed is that we need to have broader conversations. And those conversations need to be happening with disciplines beyond ours, beyond the traditional sciences because we're also good at that that we need to start involving indigenous knowledge holders of traditional ecological knowledge and have those conversations. There's a series of interviews in low tech which are conversations with indigenous knowledge holders and people like Jim Anote, who's of the Zuni, he's a Zuni tribal elder. And he's director of the Ashui Awan Museum and Heritage Center. And Jassim Al-Assadi, who actually gave me the video before that I showed you of constructing the Marif House in the Marshes. He was born there. He grew up in the Marshes. He's an engineer. He's a scientist. He leads an organization called Nature Iraq which is restoring the ecosystem of the Marshes. He provided imagery for the book and he was interviewed and in all the interviews for the book we actually interviewed in indigenous language first and then we translated that to English and then we published it that way as well. And that's the idea of working with local communities and these existing nature-based technologies that's a really different, a point of difference in the discussion that's been had till now. I think we have to wrap up. So I might go quickly through a few couple more slides. But low tech suggests that our nature-based solutions to climate change, they don't have to be passive conservation areas because that's the way we're thinking right now. Like protected wetlands or protected forests but they can be really active, adaptive coexistences between human and non-human species that use biodiversity as a building block for our future. And they can be indigenous technologies that are best suited by local communities. Like this Akaja system, this is a system on a lake in Benin in West Africa. It's a city that's completely lucas-train and around it are these squares that you can see. This is 12,000 fish pens. It feeds a million people who live around this lake system and it forms an artificial reef. So it looks like a reef to attract tilapia but it's completely artificially made. It doesn't really successfully. So earlier this year in the Guardian, there was an article that was written for a case for dumb cities and it was protesting that for many of our challenges, we don't need new technologies or new ideas. But what we need is the foresight and courage to look the best of the old ideas. And it was talking about smart cities and how, you know, we envisioning smart cities but all these algorithms can be really complex to manage and they have all these inherent vulnerabilities and so there's, you know, we need to start thinking about what are the other alternatives that we have rather than just envisioning smart cities. And over the summer, there was an interview with a tech forester, Peta Hassendahl, for this is a design, this is an innovation magazine and technology magazine, which was really interesting. It's Danish called Mandag Morgan and Peta and I came up with, you know, he sort of looked at the body of work and he came up with this list of general principles about what these nature-based solutions are. And they are symbiotic. They utilize natural ecological processes. They inherently think humans are part of the system. They are long-term and they're designed to function for generations, very different point of view of how we design now and they're adapted to local conditions and they're cyclical, they follow the seasons. And then an article came out in the New York Times by Nikhil Saval and he said, amid pandemics and environmental disasters, designers and architects have been forced to imagine a world in which the only way we move forward is to look back. But low-tech is not about looking back. Low-tech and thinking, you know, we're gonna live in traditional ways, but it's looking at what we can learn from nature-based solutions to climate change and symbiotic systems. Thinking, and that type of systems, thinking that is really predictive, that is really adaptive, and it's based on placed-based observation. And so low-tech is this movement that's seeding creativity in crisis because that's where these technologies come from. They're born of climate extremes. And so as designers, we need to find this new ground for a really positive engagement with nature that supports a new mythology of technology because we're not going backwards. We can't go back and fix everything. We can't go and change all the activities that have exacerbated climate crisis, but we can go forward and we can rethink and rebuild in a way that supports resilience of communities and cities while addressing these inequalities that we see that distance us from nature and they support these current systems. And so climate change is really showing us that survival of the fittest, that, you know, our survival is not dependent on survival of the fittest, but it's dependent on this idea of survival of the most symbiotic. And that's a really critical first step that we need to re-engage this understanding of symbiosis with nature. And really low-tech is a provocation to say, let's look at thousands of years of knowledge and local technologies and let's talk to people who hold this knowledge and ask them to share this knowledge with us because there are people who, you know, our knowledge holders who are incredible scientists and engineers and designers and they're not being given an opportunity for us to work together. And so really it's a call to conceive of a new narrative to reframe the context of how we think of technology and our relationship with nature so that we can create a new context through which we can evolve these ideas. Thank you. I'm sure that there's many questions, Julia. Amazing talk. I would propose anyone just like mute and share your questions with Julia and comments. But maybe a petition to start with Julia. I mean, you open so many different lines of inquire and discussions, but before we get there, I would ask you if you could tell us a bit more about the methodology that you've been developing to basically explore these knowledges and also the way this knowledge travels through the world and the way that it's been archived. I think that you're understanding also the material world as something that is capturing and acting knowledge collectively. And I think that also probably requires a different methodology. So I would like to ask you about specifically the difficulties and the methodologies that you had to unfold to develop this and in particular, so I would like to ask you about this unique example also that you used to conclude your talk. And that also is in the cover of your book, which is this amazing bridge and that is part of the, if I'm not wrong, of the Kashi people. And I mean, these two things for me, it could be amazing. Yeah. The methodologies are actually the work began because I was working on projects, conservation projects. One was a conservation project in Bali looking at the SUBAC system and designing a tourism management and conservation plan for that system that was becoming a World Heritage Area, let it become a World Heritage Area. So working with scientists and mostly scientists who are from Bali and looking at understanding how to sort of create a management system for that and looking at this is a sacred landscape and then understanding that sacred landscape was actually inherently about human survival and the human survival is dependent upon the technologies within that system, but they weren't considered technologies. It was just part of this agricultural system, but this agricultural system, there was these several layers and shrouds of sacredness and cosmological understandings and the whole system was actually guided by priests who controlled the water management system from these water temples. And then the second project that I worked on was actually with the Madan, creating wetland wastewater treatment parks that would actually bring water from the cities around the marshes that had been drained, water from the terrestrial cities, take them through a marsh land and clean the water and then funnel it into the marshes to help to restore the marsh land. So a completely different type of technology that was taking place to help restore the indigenous technology into that system. And then a lot of the sort of methodology has been, well, some of it has been sort of looking at wastewater treatment systems or forestry systems and then looking at what other ways is this still happening? We look at regenerative agriculture, but what other ways are there these systems that are occurring around the world? And I've been looking at indigenous communities since my early 20s. So it's kind of a side sort of big interest. And it was interesting because there's so much scientific literature about this and I read so much dry scientific literature I can't even explain. There's no diagramming. There's no, the visuals are photographs from like the National Geographic where it's kind of like othering and sort of romanticizing. And it was like, well, what are these systems and how do they work and how intelligent are they? And I would look at the, to sort of document it, I would look at an image and I'd read the literature and they would try and find an image with a human form in it so we could understand scale. And then we would contact someone, try and contact someone from the community to get them to start talking to us. And so there's all these different ways of kind of piecing together the puzzle to create the visual that the reach to understand the system and then to understand the system spatially and temporally and then to document that and then to confirm it and then to write about it. So the book took seven years. I thought it was going to take six months, but it took a much longer time. And it evolved as well, like my research evolved, my understanding of how to do the research evolved, my relationships with different communities evolved. Some of the relationships are still in place. I'm working still with the Madan. I've now sort of working with the Living Bridge community. So the Living Bridges and a lot of these sites I traveled to. So the Living Bridges, I knew a Kasi person here in New York. He's a really famous guitarist who played with the, he actually played with one of the guys from the Strokes. He's gone back to live in India, but I'd been there before I met him. I traveled there, I'd photographed there. I walked down the 8,000 stairs to reach these bridges and I'd like hug them and you literally put your arms around them and you knock on them and they're hollow, like they're alive. And this system is like a 1500-year-old system that was migrated from Laos and it was migrated and brought to this particular location. It's basically like a highway initially for the trade of bead or nut, but now it's the only way you can get between the villages in the monsoon when all the waters are full. And what's interesting about, so I have a long-term relationship with them, I'm now helping them understand how they can navigate world heritage to this, which is being proposed for this particular system. But I think what's really interesting is that there's always this tension between, in all of these systems, between Western understanding and also national governance of these systems and what the community actually want to do and how the community want to work with this system. And so that's probably another topic, but a lot of these systems are actually quite threatened internally by occurrences that are happening in the countries which they exist, because they're not particularly valued there either. There is a question from Emily. Maybe Emily, you wanted to unmute and read it yourself. Yeah, you had mentioned that your perception of research had changed from when you started the book versus when you ended. And I guess I want to know exactly what had changed or like how you approached the research differently. I think working and speaking to, I'd always worked remotely, so I'd worked in Asia and I'd work mostly in Asia actually and India and hadn't worked in the Americas and hadn't worked in Australia very much. And there's very different histories and there's very different relationships and how knowledge can be conveyed and what knowledge can be written about and what knowledge can be translated by someone who's not indigenous. And so over time as the book has come out, and also before that, there's always this understanding of like, there's some knowledge that can be shared and there's some knowledge that is not going to be ever shared and you have to be allowed to have access to knowledge. Through research, there's a responsibility by the researcher to understand that and to make that clear and to create guidelines around how the research actually happens. During, when writing the book, we would always contact communities and ask for input and ask for relationships and collaboration, wasn't always successful, but we would try and now in the writing that I'm doing now, we're always getting that collaboration and we're getting collaboration by multiple different peoples who are deeply, you know, have been devoted their lives as scientists or designers to studying these systems to just understand that the level of accuracy that's required to translate these systems and talk about them needs to happen from an indigenous person. So that's kind of like being the really big shift that I didn't understand as much eight years ago as important as I understand how important it is today. I have a question, sort of, I think you touched upon it a little bit about maybe that's another conversation, but I'm really curious about how, you know, for a lot of, it's a little bit difficult for me to sort of pin down because the variety of projects is so vast and, you know, there's such a richness and a beauty to the projects, but in a way, did you ever have conflict with, say, separating the technology from maybe the conditions, like the social-political conditions from the context in which it originated from? You know, you sort of described a little bit of, you know, this, in the Medan, the lake right in southern Iraq, the change sort of mostly from, I guess, you know, this, the Saddam and the Daik, it's sort of like an external sort of, sort of a thing that was done onto the community, but, you know, there are sort of ways in which within, you know, within the technology, the people who sort of hold that knowledge, you know, the technology and ways of empowering them, but also really like different, how do you, sorry, I'm phrasing this really terribly, but how do you sort of, you know, account for the different, yeah, social-political contexts in which all these very, very, very different technologies and very, very different communities sort of take place and how do you know what to sort of emphasize that, what do you know to sort of, not to tell, but sort of de-emphasize? I mean, that's a really great question. I've never been asked that question. That's a really, really great question. That's really led by the community. And so, you know, we're doing writing now about a community in Bangladesh. And it's really interesting. There's always these scenarios unfolding that make the system contested in some way. Not always, but usually there's some sort of like land rights or there's someone trying to come over and take over the land or not being recognized that it's the ownership, or there's often like situations that are happening. And so for this particular community, the community is scared of the government because the government has hold so much power over them. But there's all these things that are, you know, people being removed and not being talked about and homes being burnt down. And the community, they're like, we can't say anything about that. And so the person who I'm writing with, she's the one who's telling me like, this is happening, but we need to figure out how to write about it in a way that no one will be affected. I won't be affected, but you can have a voice. You can give the voice to the community. So there's often these weird social, you know, weird, but really contested social political conditions surrounding these territories. And I think it comes inherently with that, the fact that you're dealing with Indigenous communities and Indigenous communities, even in their own, you know, countries often are being displaced, especially in conservation areas. That's one of the sort of hidden, latent understandings of conservation. We think conservation is really incredible movement and hasn't done incredible things, but it's also been one of the biggest removalists of Indigenous people from their traditional lands across the globe. And so there's just all these inherited, you know, inherent contestations about these systems based upon a lack of recognition and about technology. And also sort of just a following of this understanding that there is a way to progress and develop, and we all have to do it universally in the same way. And it's kind of like the, you know, the global north way. But we got us here. And the global south, there's a lot of governments are following that pathway. And so there's also, there's a lot of issues with governance and sort of this lack of recognition of how incredibly innovative these systems actually are. And that some of us are sort of saying, you know, these are types of systems that we need in our second and third growth rings of our cities. And we need to consider how we can introduce them. Did that answer your question? Yeah, I mean, gave a really good context to, to kind of the methodology to, I think that Andreas touched upon earlier, it's sort of finding the balance of, you know, almost like documentarian versus like a more activist or sort of engaged role. And it's sort of, ultimately there's like a judgment call on where that sort of the larger picture or, you know, the focus of the work is. So I think that it must be incredibly difficult to say the least. I have a question if I'm allowed to ask one or is it too late? Thank you for the way I bought your book two weeks ago and found out about this event like yesterday. And I was just so serendipitous and I'm so grateful. Also, I love what you said about. Not considering low tech as looking back, because it kind of implies that there is a hierarchy to history when things are happening at the same time, ancient things are happening today. So it's not this year history. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And I was looking at your site studio red. And I said that you both have like, you know, New York city projects as well as kind of products all around the globe. And just when you're talking about stakeholders between the community and national governments and. Other stakeholders, how are you able to, I guess, Well, I really want you to walk us through the design process of like working with like specifically like New York city clients. And just thinking about like bringing these technologies that, you know, aren't seen as like American based or like, you know, post night 1492 American based. So I guess, yeah, like how do you incorporate low tech into communities and countries that like are deemed as super developed? And how do you convince them to take on these? This is kind of more traditional knowledge that that makes sense. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the evolving project really. And. But I would say in a more in a different way, because low tech isn't about saying, okay, I see as technology in Northern India. And I think that technology can be taken and put in New York. And, and there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of questions about whether that's the appropriateness of that type of thinking. Like a direct, oh, take this and put that here. There's appropriateness of ecologically, whether that system would work and whether it's appropriate. There's, there's, and also each of the technologies are really different. So say for the East Calcutta wetlands, that was created a hundred years ago. And so that has a very different sociocultural context. And, and doesn't have the same sort of spiritual context, though it has a community context of they're all fourth generation fishermen. And you can't just arrive at the system and start fishing. You have to be born into the system. So it's complex, but I think what low-tech is saying, and I kind of said it in the beginning, that there are optimal responses to climate extremes. And we can, I can see it because we've now looked at over 250 different technologies from around the world. And you see the same typologies occurring to respond to flooding. Like what do you do when water is coming in and how do you, how can you respond to that? There's not just one way, it's kind of in the built environment. Our profession, we think of like one way and we look to the Dutch and we say, well, you know, polterdike systems and, and war and like, you know, barriers. But what I'm finding is that the Chinese have a polterdike system that incorporates mulberry and silkworms, that the Indonesian have a polterdike system and incorporates agriculture that's also works with freshwater and saltwater. And, and so if you keep on looking across the world, and then I'm looking, we're looking at another system in, in Southern India that's called the Kuttanad that is also a polterdike system that has agriculture and then it shifts to agriculture different times of the season throughout the year. So they're incredibly adaptable, but we, we're not looking at these types of systems and saying, well, that system works really well. We're actually going to Jakarta and saying, you have to put a, you know, a Dutch type of system in here, because that's technology and that's really innovative. And so I think that the question is sort of like, you know, we see what's appropriate, but what's already there. And as designers, I think that we come in and sometimes we sort of, we come in as experts and we, and we start to displace. And we're not, we're not just so much displaced in community. We talk all about that a lot. We're displacing culture and technology and environmental systems that actually really work rather than thinking or recognizing, you know, what's the next way we can do it? What's the next way we can scale it with construction or different types of material technologies? So I don't know that it's, I don't want to be the proponent of an adoption, extraction and trans transplantation, but an idea that this is going to be a very, very important thing. So I think that, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's going to be, you know, but an idea that this is going to be a source of inspiration to open up conversations and to open up ideas and also to say that 70% of the world is not going to be able to afford these technologies that we're saying are the only technologies that are going to be available. There has to be another way that we approach them much more socially, environmentally equitable understanding of climate change. And I think that this is one way that we can do that. Thank you. Julia, I think that we're talking about the extension of many of these technologies that the same factors that were behind the extension of many species were also, maybe you can develop on this and another part of that, I think it's the difficulty of preserving probably systems that are leaving systems that require the whole kind of social environmental system around that, that they're integrated in larger systems that are also in crisis. crisis. So the possibility of preserving this culture and this this technological diversity as well. Yeah. Um, so what's interesting is like, if you look at islanding technologies, I talked about an islanding technology, the Madan, and then in the book, there's another islanding technology, the Eurus in Peru. Similar, the Madan layer and stack, and the Eurus, they create mud bricks, and then they stack. And they create one uses one type of decomposition for buoyancy, and another uses two types of decomposition for buoyancy. But in doing the research, I found now 43 different communities who use islands and create islands and live on islands. Some of the communities, those 43 can use in existence now that I've been able to find, but they used to be floating islands in Italy, in Germany, in China. So I found documented evidence of where these were once similar types of systems, but then were erased because of land transformation, because when we build cities, we go and put all the the spoil from digging into the wetlands, and then we remove the types of ecosystems that would mean that we would have lucustrine built environments. And so that's just been a sort of a model of progress and land transformation and agricultural transformation that has occurred over time with progressing and colonialism and all types of different forms of development. So that's where you kind of see these extinction of technologies. But now, you know, for the East Calcutta wetlands, that system provides a free service to the city. It saves the city about $22 million in operating costs for a waste water treatment plant. But the government is, you know, selling off the land and developers are buying it and putting houses, filling it in to put houses because the government can't tax unless you have a house and you can tax a property owner. So there's incentive to follow a traditional model of home ownership and taxation that for some reason is is deemed more valuable than a free system of purification that doesn't, you know, use water that provides jobs that provides recreational areas that provides carbon sequestration that cleans water and provides 20% of the food for the city. So it's just a new model that we people don't understand what's a quantitative value yet of this system and don't really understand infrastructures as having multiplier effects and a multitude of beneficial relationships to ecosystems and to communities, and as services, free services. So this it's like a mindset that has to, you know, really shift. And so I guess the sort of preserving the system, the difficulties in that is just, you know, the lack of recognition and value and always thinking like, you know, in India, there's just this one singular minded and Modi's understanding was I'm going to give a toilet to every single person in India. That was like one of the ways that the government was run. I'm going to offer modern technologies of sanitation and infrastructure. But, but there's other ways that that can happen. And there's a system that exists that is sitting there. There's actually being replicated, it's been replicated in Germany. But it's, but it's just not valued in situ at this point in time. And it's, and it's really hard to preserve. And I think that's the same thing that's happening across the globe, especially in government, that sort of have the power to displace these technologies, is that it's just seen that they stand in the way of progress in a way, or on the opposite spectrum, say in China, where there's some really interesting new models of ecological civilization and what that would mean. And how do you what's the countryside and what's the city? And, and, you know, how what's the distinctions between those areas? They're, you know, around the world, some of these systems are called guys, which is globally important agricultural heritage sites. And that one issue with that is that you're just deeming it as heritage and agriculture. Yet these systems are not just heritage and agriculture, they actually, if you were to scale them or to think of them and redefine them for the ecosystem services, they provide so much more. So some of these sort of understandings, which are, you know, United Nations and then the organizations that are preserving these systems are using these sort of tools as ways to keep them, but also they're limiting them in a way from understanding them as incredibly scalable technologies that have the potential to really shift how we're approaching climate change and how we're approaching biological infrastructures that work with our built environments. Sorry, I know we're almost out of time. After it's had one more kind of question is, is there ever sort of difficulty or like, or how do you consider how to define something as local, especially as like, you know, we're discussing this idea of like scalability, or what is that term the simultaneous development innovation, you know, or I think that you also gave that very specific example of, is it the, the the Reed houses and by the Medan people, it came from the technology from Laos or via super sorry, I forget which one, but it was like a different source that was, yeah, I think, yeah, that it was the living root bridges that came from Laos, the, the community migrated them as the community migrated, and they brought the technology with them. I think the term local is synonymous with talking about the indigeneity of the technology. And you find so that, that technology being local, it's placed based, and it's based, it's place based, and it's based upon observation of local ecological environmental interaction. So safe, a pyrotechnology system, in a particular part of Australia, that's responding to soil conditions, wind conditions, seasonal rainfall conditions, when grasses are drier, when, when the hot season comes, flowering times, animal breeding times. And so they're really the, these take a symbiotic with a lot of a complex system of ecological relationships, which localizes them. And, and so the technologies, while you know, there is a methodology of slow burning that you see across all the Americas, and you see it in Australia, and you see it in other parts of the world. There's very particular styles in particular locations of the what you would understand and the conditions by which, when you would light a fire and how you would control that fire. The definition of the indigeneity of the system. I think this is, I mean, I think this, this was really a beautiful way of explaining local because you were explaining local as something that was related to enactments or like local as localized. And I, I really love that, because in a way it's making very complex, the, the notion of local, not as something that is necessarily, let's say, opposed to transnational or opposed to something that could be scalable, but rather something that is situated environmentally or situated ecologically and situated culturally. And maybe for me, with regards to this, and you touched something that you didn't develop that much, but that I find it really important that like you were talking of the, of the, those sacred parts of certain ecosystems or systems that were the ones that were key for survival and the survival of the humanity at certain points. I love that you could explain a little bit more your reading of the sacred and in a way, what is the role of spiritualism, rituals, beliefs in this, in your research? And so this is sort of a definition of sacred, which I'm not going to say is a tribute to anybody or anybody else's understandings, but from what I conceive of the research, and that is, and I conceive of the research that is about nature-based technologies. And there are lots of different other definitions of the sacred. But for this particular definition, I would say it's very much about preserving or supporting systems that allow for the survival of communities, but a survival, not just of the human community, it's about the survival of a much larger understanding of community. So the community of trees, the relationship to preserve the relationship of trees to humans, different animals, the water. So it's much more about living the living systems and the relationship to all living systems. And that that survival holistically, that it's all interdependent. And that's that's what's sacred. And what was that? What was the second half of the question? No, I was, I was very interested to have seen kind of a ecological reading of the of the sacred, which is kind of mundane in a way, like even secular to a certain extent, when you see that it's also catering to the, yes, you said like the preservation of a living system. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's really interesting, because some I mean, it gets and I also don't think that I know, you know, a lot about what there's so many layers of understandings. So if you're working in Bali, the sacred, the terrace is sacred, there's a part of the terrace that gets planted first, that's sacred, there's a temple in every single terrace, and there's a larger temple. And it keeps on moving out to where there's different parts of the whole island, that are sacred and divided in a tripartite division of like mountains, middle, and then lower. And so it just becomes this whole, and that's what's different is that the technology is knowledge and it's understanding and its practice. And it's also a whole construction of a belief system around a landscape and around a world which is, you know, mind blowing when you conceive of technology like that. Oh, the other thing you asked was ritual. So ritual is really interesting because ritual is this way of remembering to remember acts and understandings and relationships. And so you'll find that there'll be, you know, a planting cycle and the cycle of the year for a particular system might be based upon the cycle of a grain of rice. And all through that period of time, which I think is 140 days, there'll be different celebrations throughout. So the sowing, the growing, there's a celebration in the SUBAC system called the singing to the baby rice. So they're singing to help the baby rice grow. And then there's all, so there's celebrations to remember, to remember to do things at certain times, and they're triggered by different types of seasonal relationships when the rains come or when temperatures drop or so there's a whole understanding about environmental management and ritual and ceremony that is completely intertwined. That is, that is, I think, I mean, I don't think that's too different from how we sometimes think about rituals and festivals and celebrations. I think, though, that we've removed ourselves very much from, from those larger, deeper understandings that are contextualized, that they might still be there, that they're probably really latent within some of the understanding, understandings and celebrations that we have today. Julia, thank you so much. We could, you could, we could be asking you questions forever and, and discussing your work. And I hope that we can, we can go on with the discussion very soon. But thank you so much. This was really amazing. Okay. Thank you so much, everybody for coming. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you. Good luck with the semester.