 Today is Earth Day and it's helpful to remember that the answer to many sustainability problems isn't necessarily more technology. When it comes to food, electricity, water, heat, cooking, and many, many other aspects of our lives, we already have solutions that require less resources and can be created locally. We can understand these under the rubric of low-tech solutions. And while we aren't alone here with our ideas at the Institute, we're part of a larger community. And yesterday, I was lucky enough to be included on a panel to discuss low-tech innovations for sustainability problems. This is the Low-Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome! I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 48 on April 22nd, 2022. Coming to you usually at the Low-Tech Institute's gardens behind me, but it's raining today and here in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us. Today we're going to be listening into a panel discussion on low-tech innovation that was hosted by the French Embassy's Office of Science and Technology. This event will be a two-part podcast with the second half to follow next week. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno, like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. And this is where I usually make a short pitch for you to visit our Patreon page and support the Institute. But instead, this week I'd like to call attention to those organizations represented in these presentations. You can find links to all of their respective organizations in the show notes. Please check them out and consider supporting them directly. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. So I am Linda Michi. I'm currently Deputy Attaché for the Office of Science and Technology of the Embassy of Friends, which is based in Washington, D.C., and in six other consulates, like the one we have here in Houston, Texas. So our general mission is to strengthen partnerships between French and American researchers and organizations from academic or industrial fields and facilitate the transfer from technology from research to industry. So energetic transition and solutions for climate change are one of the priorities we needed at our office. And so for this reason and for in the context of celebration of Earth Day, we organized this event about the promising topic of low-tech innovation as a vigorous action needed for a sustainable environment. So this conversation is composed of two parts, and we feature speakers from both the USA and France in various fields. So it will be moderated by the issue associated director of academics at the MITD lab, located in Boston, and a specialist in obscenitation and water treatment. Just to mention it quickly, the Q&A session is dedicated at the end of each part, and you may ask questions in the chat in the meantime. And one last detail, this event will be recorded. And so if you cannot attend the whole event or if you want to share it with your colleagues who are not here, don't worry, it will be shared with you afterwards. So without further ado, I will give the floor now to Libby, who introduced the speakers and what are the sessions. So enjoy. Thank you so much, Linda. Hello everyone. Welcome and happy Earth Day. The term low-tech can be surprising to hear at an event hosted by a science and technology office, let alone in the context of climate change. The 2030 sustainable development goals, which are promoted by the United Nations, provide a blueprint for peace and prosperity around the world that includes ambitious targets for innovation and for R&D. So you might be thinking, well, climate change is a pretty complex problem. Shouldn't we be marshaling our most cutting-edge high-tech resources to address the consequences of climate change being faced by people and societies around the world? Well, the group of experts assembled here today are looking at these issues from a very different lens, and they challenge you today to adopt this lens in your own thinking. Our panelists disagree with the idea that innovation has to follow a high-tech path that may be using expensive resources and infrastructure. Instead, they apply the principles of low-tech innovation to achieve sustainable solutions to climate change. And they recognize that there are billions of humans who have lived on Earth who have already identified many technological solutions to the questions we're asking ourselves about climate change. If only we can amplify those ideas and spread them to where they're needed. So we're going to be talking about low-tech today. And just to share my screen for a moment. The definition for low-tech that we're using to frame today's conversation is based on three overarching principles of sustainability, resilience, and transformation. So strong sustainability refers to these principles of efficiency, simplicity, durability that can be leveraged during the design process to create environmentally responsible solutions. Collective resilience refers to finding solutions that are easy to use, that are easy to maintain, and that are made with local materials to ensure that they're available to everyone who needs them. And the concept of cultural transformation pushes us to explore the context of technology in societies around the world and empower individuals while also contributing to societal health. So as you can see, all of these principles are intertwined. Keep this image in mind because a thoughtful creator or disseminator of technology is considering them together. And this graphic that you see is certainly not the only way to define low-tech. You'll discover other thinkers who are using terms like frugal innovation or humble technology to describe these same approaches to innovation. So today you're going to hear from creative thinkers who are based in France and the United States who have traversed the world listening to and learning from diverse cultures as they see to answer these scientific and engineering questions about climate change and hearing to the principles of low-tech. So they're thinking hard about the process of technology creation and how it can be more inclusive, and not just the end product because they believe that the process is also as important as the as they as the outcome. So we're so thrilled to see all of you here today and we look forward to an excellent conversation. You can type your questions in the chat and we will answer some of them during the Q&A sessions. Our first set of four speakers is going to dive into this question of why low-tech. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our first panelist, Philippe Buie, General Director of Management Research and Interchange. The acronym in French is RF. So Philippe, please take it away. Thank you very much, Libby. I hope you are hearing me well. I am not in superconditions in terms of network, but it seems that the high tech will help us today to communicate a little bit. And I apologize for my poor English or American. So I will try to share my screen. I think you should have it more or less now or it's coming. Okay, Libby, it's okay. You can see my screen now. Yes. Yes, super. Okay, so let's go for it. So I have a very difficult task, I think to be the first speaker and to try to dive into this low-tech introduction or low-tech definition and I think that there are as many definitions of low-tech as there are speakers or people talking about it. So anyway, I will give you my own feeling, but it's also the richness I think of these alternatives into innovation that create really the interesting discussions. So basically I have just a few slides. One is about why low-tech and then about what is low-tech and I think that I have about 10 slides. So in that in case I'm still on the Y after five or seven minutes, you can shut me down. So let's go for it. I think there are a few elements, basically let's say three, four big reasons for my point of why the high-tech promises are not so great and not only to address actually climate change in terms of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or even adaptation. It's also the question of resources, geo-diversity, I think it's not about just addressing climate change in a broader way. The question of the high-tech promises, like we can let's say go forever with the green growth and have electric cars and smart cities and smart objects that will help us to be more and more efficient and consume less and less energy and be in a kind of zero-zero-two world that would be more or less the same as today but with better solutions and there has been so many progress. We have to admit that the chemistry of batteries, the type of materials we have developed lighter and so on and so on, gives us the idea that we can still struggle with any kind of challenge and be able to overcome it the same way the humanity has done it in the past. But in fact, there are a few elements that should make us very, very prudent with these promises. The first one is the fact that these high-tech solutions are consuming more and more resources, non-renewable resources, especially metal resources, about 60 different metals that we're introducing in all our, let's say, batteries, renewable energies, electronics, IT solutions, etc. And I think that about 10 years ago nobody was really speaking about that. I think that now, especially with the COVID-19 crisis and some stops in the value chains at the world level, but also with the events in Ukraine nowadays, it is also putting on the top of the questions this conception of resources and there has been, I've put here a few, let's say, resource elements possible, the International Energy Agency, the OECD, the World Bank, everybody now is pointing the fact that we are going to make a gigantic extraction of resources to be able to feed the transition towards renewable energies and towards a more digital world. And it's sometimes when I say gigantic, it's something like times five, times 10, sometimes times 30, times 50, and the quantity of, I don't know, lithium, cobalt, nickel, many other metals, copper that we will need to extract in the next decades to feed this transition. So this is the first challenge. The second challenge is that once we have extracted these resources, we should be able to say, okay, guys, keep cool, we have extracted very much, but then we can just make the circular economy, we can recycle all these metals. The problem is that the products that we are conceiving that we are defining, and especially the electronic products, but not only, they are more and more difficult to recycle. It's quite easy to understand that because if you put something like 40 different metals, just in the smart smartphone, 40 different metals, sometimes just one milligram or even less, then it's very difficult at the end of the of the utilization of the smartphone to really recycle everything. We are engineers are very strong, are very, are very smart and clever, but not as much as being able to extract and separate and split up to 40 different metals in so many small quantities. And the proof of this is that about half of the metals today, something like 30 different metals on the total of the 60 metals we are using, they are today recycled at the rate of zero. Less than one person says scientific people because they are prudent, but it's something like zero. So, the more we are introducing high tech in our objects in our buildings in our infrastructure in our daily life, let's say, the more resources we need sometimes rarer and the more difficult to recycle everything. The third point about high tech promises is that, of course, we are defining designing or imagining a word where everything would be much more efficient like smart greeds to be able to exchange electrons between renewable producers renewable energy producers and consumers. We imagine smart cities we imagine smart cars, autonomous vehicles that will be able to to reduce at the end the number of cars because we will be able to make much more car sharing very easily, etc, etc. The first thing is that to install this and to make this gains in terms of environment footprint. We also need to install another work which is a digital work with very, let's say, consuming 5G or 6G networks telecommunication networks and data centers to store all this. And to be able to make the calculations and so on and so on in a very, of course, everything in real time, and all this is consuming, of course, also energy and resources and the premise that we don't know really the balance we know that we are consuming more to be able to install the digital work or to increase the digital work, but then we don't really know what we are going to save with these autonomous cars that will come maybe 2030. So there is a problem here and you know that the digital system, if you include manufacturing if you include powering and cooling the data centers and and your computers at home and all this is already consuming something like 10% of the electricity worldwide. So it's something like the greenhouse gas emissions from more than the more than the that transport by air. So it's really something quite big it's like 1 billion tons of CO2 per year. So this is what we are installing, and we don't really know how we are going to use it. And the last point, really in the limits of high tech is the fact that there is also the rebound effect that's something coming from the 19th century that every time we make something more efficient the product more efficient or service more efficient, consuming less energy consuming than it is cheaper. And if it's cheaper, we use it more and economists know very well this story so that means that today the aircraft engines are much more efficient than 20 years ago no problem. So every passenger is consuming less, but the premise that, of course, they are much more passengers, same for IT system, every, every bite of information is consuming less and less to be stored in the data center or to be transported into the networks. Again, there are much more much more bites to be transported and much more bites that are created and stored everywhere. So this rebound effect is limiting the real capacity to catch the efficiency the technical efficiency that we are doing. And it's it's not really materializing into into the real world. So what would be high tech and low tech then then low tech for me is just at the beginning was just a provocation against high tech to say it's be careful because high tech promises are not so great. And by the way, I would say that if you take the sanitary crisis COVID-19, of course there has been a very high tech response, which was of course the vaccines that have been developed so rapidly and and maybe you remember at the beginning there were some robots cleaning the streets in China and some drones delivering food at home and it was very high tech response but at the end 99% of the response of humanity has been just very low tech or fully low tech I would agree in this case but it was not about the behavior like coughing into the into your elbow and staying at home and not not seeing people and etc but it was it was really low tech and I think the resilience you know this this capacity to answer to any perturbation was really for me the complimentary of high tech and low tech so this is something that maybe should inspire us for for future. So for me low tech is is difficult to define because I think an object can never really be low tech like a bike could be low tech but even a bike is it comes from very high tech industries and just to make the cables for the brakes and this is very complex, complex objects so so for me it's more about an approach and the approach should be to ask basically three questions why what and how why should I produce something what should I produce and how. So the first question of course is that the question of the why why should I produce it so it's about the question of sufficiency of frugality we could say, but what do I need at the end because of course every time I would produce something. I know that recycling rate will not be perfect so I will waste some resources for future generations so what what should we do really and should we try to focus the resources the precious resources where they are really necessary. So we can imagine that in the cars we could of course go biking but every, we cannot all go biking tomorrow because the cities have been transformed around the cars, but we could do lighter cars less powerful vehicles, we could reduce the speed limit and to make smaller and smaller cars that would, at the end more or less delivers a service and would really reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, almost immediately very easily. We could build buildings we could build less we have so many buildings already already in place that we don't use so well actually, sometimes because they are under occupied sometimes because we could share some, some, some, some functions and maybe the schools can also become the clubs in the night I don't know if you can imagine everything you want to increase intensify the, the utilization of the, of the buildings and you can of course also lower the heating or the. Air conditioning, of course have a better insulation but you can also just say that you will, you will hit less and insulate the bodies instead of insulating the building so you can imagine many things in consumer goods, you can ban this disposable objects, make reusable packaging, many, many many different ways to use innovation about this nowadays in France for instance. Internet, Internet of course you could reduce the video or reduce the definition of the videos, you just less the videos and the data transfer in mobility because it's very costly. It's easier with cables if you want to have a to download a film or movie, etc, etc, so we can imagine many things to have a kind of sufficiency approach. Once you have said that I may keep the washing machine because okay I don't want to avoid the washing machine then you come to the second question which is the what shall I conceive which type of object and here I think it's really a play field for engineers, for technicians, for many people to try to build repairable modular reusable objects easy to dismantle at the end when there will be at the end of life, privileged the robustness, the simplicity, a single material approach. Every time you mix different materials I think this comes to the smartphone example I was giving before try to avoid some kind of metal incompatibilities, alloys incompatibilities and as much as possible reduce electronics because 820s is generally a nightmare when you come to the recycling. So here I think you will have plenty of examples with poser panelists for sure and the last question is the how I would say that how should I produce and here it opens also questions regarding the type of production should I go in very big factories, giga factories or can I have other approaches not for everything of course I think you need for steel production for a refinery I don't know you need the kind of a certain scale of course we don't imagine that some people will come and produce a steel in every village like in the Middle Ages that's not a question but for many types other types of production like let's say daily objects tooling etc. Yes many types of things you can use in a daily basis this could be built into let's say smaller factories very close to the production to the consumption markets and also it opens the question of the place of the machines because of course it's very practical to replace a human by a machine because it will work very well it will not go on strike super it can work at night and a day yes sure but it's also consuming resources so today we're let's say facing it's a new promise of transforming intellectual work into data center work with I don't know lawyers that will become based on on machine learning and so on and so on but this is also replacing renewable resources which are humans by by consumption of machines so this is something we should think about and have a kind of techno discernment or technological discernment that is to say okay let's put machines where they are really necessary for instance hospitals every by the dentist everything you want but maybe not just to to be at home with a refrigerator just shopping for you on internet and this is where we should we should think about the usefulness and I think the utility of what we are designing and I think something that will I think for many people at least I know at least some panelists it's a very important criteria a criterion to define low-tech so that's I think I've done my 10-15 minutes I'm still there so Linda I think you get me the time so let's say that yes to go to a kind of of yes sustainable civilizations from a technical point of view resource point of view and to to be able to address the changes we have I think that we need to orient it's not about ban banishing innovation or even technical innovation but I think it's just to say let's put innovation with a certain goal and these goals should be the reduction of the environmental footprint should be the resilience and we are far from that look at the the tens of thousands engineers that that Mark Zuckerberg is hiring now to make the meta the metaverse world I think which is just something crazy that we don't really need to be happy I think and by the way we'll not save anything including the planet but we'll consume for sure many many data and even if there are some some progress and technical steps in the way the data centers are consuming energy so I think this is something that we should think about that we have a kind of let's raise the right questions just not designing something just because I can sell it no we should think about the usualness we should think about the goals I think that innovation is something else that just technical innovation it can be organizational cultural innovation for example for example just having let's say emptying cleaning empty bottles and and and putting new new new stuff into into the bottle is something that is has no technical challenge for that I mean cleaning the bottle is very easy but just putting people together consumers producers and logistic chain storing etc all this then becomes quite complex and then that means that the solutions we should develop as engineers and as everybody as marketers and so on we should develop socio-technical solutions not technical solutions I think the behavior having people on board will be very important and this is I think what what low-tech DNA is more or less thank you thank you so much Philippe for that excellent introduction and for posing those three questions to us to think about as we continue discussing low-tech so without further ado we'll move on to our next speaker Correnton de Chateau de Ronde who is the co-founder of the low-tech lab and is speaking to us from outside New York thank you so much hi can you hear me yes yeah okay and okay thank you Linda for the presentation so yeah I'm a member of the low-tech lab which is a non-profit a French organization and the goal of the low-tech lab is to find low-tech innovation to test them to document and promote them so that anyone can replicate them the idea is to focus on local entrepreneurship so that people all around the world can take those knowledge and adapt them to their local economy to the local culture with the local means resources and everything and yeah we want to our definition is as you said Linda on what explained Philippe it we use exactly the same and we condense it into three words useful accessible and sustainable and so we started our next next one Linda please thanks we started in 2013 by creating a website which is a kind of a wiki that means it's open source and collaborative and there are tutorials on it on each technology that we document there are like something like 150 different technologies or no house and it's called low-tech lab.org if you want to have a look and in 2016 next slide please Linda we started a journey around the world with this boat it's a kind of floating laboratory we are now on board with close to New York and we'll cross soon the Atlantic ocean to go back to France and we started in 2016 and we've been in 25 countries documented more than 50 different low-tech so I won't explain the 50 low-tech that we found it would be too long but I've selected three examples next one in Dublin one of my favorites was the black solder fly it was we studied that in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur it's a fly that is really incredible because the larvae of this fly can transform very efficiently organic waste into fertilizer and we can harvest the larvae to feed animals and they were using it at a quite large scale in Kuala Lumpur they were transforming 300 tons of waste organic waste every day into fertilizer to grow food and also to feed some fish with the larvae and it's good for different issues the waste management because the organic waste are burnt or put with all the kinds of waste in the in the ground so thanks to those larvae it's it makes two resources one side the fertilizer on the other side the food and another issue is that feeding fish or chicken with those larvae avoid to overfish in the Bay of Bengal over there and also it creates a local economy so it's a good example also of low-tech we discovered because you can spread the knowledge at a small scale we even have on board on the boat a small black solder fly a fly farm to treat a very small quantity of organic waste but you can do it at large scale so it's good for local entrepreneurs that can start with just a few dollars a farm and then raise it and another example Linda can you put the next slide was the bio digester this one was in Nicaragua but we also found bio digester in many countries like in France in Brazil in South Africa in Madagascar in India in Cuba and that was in Nicaragua and it also transforms organic waste but it makes gas for like cooking gas and so energy and also fertilizer and it so combinations I mean a collaboration with nature because it uses bacteria and microorganisms to produce the the gas and the next slide Linda oh yeah this is it was in Cuba about communication over there they don't have easy access to the internet it's quite expensive it's not affordable so they they made quite huge local networks it's internet that means they install antennas and people can send data like if you send an email a picture to someone like if you want to send it in France to your neighbor it will go to your data center to the data center of your email I don't know host or something and then it will be downloaded to another data center of the email provider of your neighbor and then it will be downloaded to the computer of your neighbor thanks to this kind of antenna that then install in Cuba there you can directly send it through this antenna to your neighbor and so next those are only three examples but so we we met many people on many solutions we documented many solutions around the world and at the end of the tour and I was trying to find in a few words what we learned during this tour about all those low tech and I found four things so next next slide Linda please the first one is that we are more and more convinced that it's good to focus on local entrepreneurship and just spread the knowledge because it's much more resilient and sustainable to do like that because people can adapt the knowledge and implement the technology regarding their own culture and economy and way of life and everything and it's much more resilient and number two is the next slide um yeah it's again the I like this supply and we've I'm a mechanical engineer and I didn't know anything about nature before starting this journey and I found that collaborations with nature like this larvae but also with the microorganism with the mushrooms with vegetables with many living things are much more efficient than made men made machines and so we should reinforce our links with nature if we want to keep the low tech philosophy in our progress and which is not actually reinforcing our links with nature is not really the current trend and number three is the the next slide one of the main obstacles of the low tech we found is they are not very well designed and they are not very convenient and this is a picture about the movie about the the first computers it remains me actually the first computer because we see in each of those low tech a huge potential but most of them are made by geeks in their garage and there we have to work a lot on designing them and making them more convenient and the next slide Linda please is it's not a low tech picture but meaning that as I don't know who said that but it's it's smart I think that presents is the consequence of the future actually the way we imagine our future has a huge impact on our everyday decisions and so if we want that people adapt low tech I think we have to design a real low tech future that is not like this picture but I mean it's much more than a technical challenge it's also designing a way of life of philosophy around it and that can drive people to adapt low tech and I think for the moment it's more like a bit too much geeks in their garage and so we I think we we need to to evolve in that that's all I learned in to be short great ending thank you so much Quentin and thank you for for sharing your just a slice of your amazing travels with us our next panelist is Scott Johnson co-founder and director of the low tech institute in Wisconsin moving across the Atlantic to the US hi thank you let me share my screen here one second folks all right should be sharing yes okay great uh thank you so much for having me uh on this discussion today and I realize in such a short time none of us can really get too deep into detail of all the work we're doing and I feel like we're just scratching the surface so today I'm going to talk about food which for me is one of the most important legs of the stool that supports complex societies the French Revolution French Embassy will remember coincided with a weak crisis so food is very very important for everything we're talking about and with this group I don't have to go into detail to describe how dependent our modern agricultural system is on fossil fuels and long-distance transportation I don't need to say how it decreases our resilience in the face of unexpected catastrophes both manmade and natural and that governments have no realistic plans for large-scale transitions so today I'm going to talk about ideas to encourage redundant resilient regional food systems that is small-scale transitions and that's plural transitions because there's lots of different options we could use the truth is we've lived in a very unusual historical period few of us have known food insecurity on a national scale and while this is truly lucky for all of us it makes our society so susceptible to hubris when it comes to food we don't think that famine could happen to us so many large nations have gotten rid of their strategic grain supplies for example in the United States we sold our strategic grain reserve under Reagan the idea was to put the money in the stock market thinking that during a time of famine we could just buy more food from somewhere else I tried to come up with a polite way to say that this is idiotic but it's just so stupid I can't wrap my mind around it this is hubris on an international scale and so I run the Low Technology Institute which is a research and education nonprofit in the United States and our guiding principle is that fossil fuels are a finite resource and we should plan for their end as soon as possible in the case of oil we're talking 25 years of usable reserves there's more but we're not going to dig it all out this change then is coming in our lifetimes and this is going to radically change how we transport people and goods around the globe it'll radically reduce the amount of fertilizer for crops and it will radically reduce the motive power of the tractors and things in agriculture and so we advocate for people to build locally redundant systems into their lives now so they're able to transition smoothly to a future without fossil fuels and we talk about this for not just food energy construction methods and materials clothing everything else we need to thrive today in our lives and right now I'm going to outline briefly what we've been discussing as one viable way for future communities to feed themselves it's not the only one but it's kind of what we've been talking about and I'm going to focus on why things need to be local seasonal and personal and for me it all comes down to redundant resilient and above all local systems if you source your staple food from farther away than you can walk or ride a bicycle or a horse you are dependent on external transportation for your food and maybe maybe we'll be able to electrify the transportation networks to such a point that local food is indeed redundant but until that system has been in place and well tested through natural and other disasters for many years I'm not going to risk the health and food of my family and community on this new system and that means people have to start growing more food personally and I found this great French postcard of the future of agriculture I was an archaeologist once upon a time and so I often looked to the past and I know that in past societies 90 percent of humans living in sedentary societies were full-time food producers peasants and farmers only a tenth of society was able to get by on crafts and administrative work and I don't think we have to go back to this type of severe ratio of farmers to craftspeople because our understanding of the natural world and agricultural science in particular have advanced but we would be able to feed ourselves and maintain a complex economy if most adults were to split their time evenly between skilled labor and home food production and provision and that doesn't just include growing the food but also preserving and cooking it again that's adults working maybe 20 hours a week in food production preservation and preparation and 20 hours in the skilled trade and if you think about it that's kind of what we used to do we used to have one person working out of the house and one person working at home this split is not impossible for a high functioning economy and I know this division would work because we tried it we did it in January 2020 before we knew that COVID would become a worldwide pandemic we decided to see if we could grow all our own food locally and without fossil fuels we chronicled it all on our youtube page also on our website you can find that under foodmageddon my wife worked 40 hours a week and I grew all of our food and in that year I was able to grow all of our food for an entire year in less than 40 hours a week and while this is only a simulation it provides a lot of useful data and it's anecdotal but it's still data and it also let me check out the opinions and theoretical constructs I had been talking about for so long and put them into practice and so it would be entirely possible to spend your morning working on a skilled trade and I ran my nonprofit in the mornings and in the afternoons I would grow food and we did this on a small plot we don't live on a large you know we live in the country but we live in a pretty tight community and so we don't have 20 acres to do this our entire property is only three quarters of an acre with an additional half acre next door the total land under cultivation is less than three quarters of an acre or three tenths of a hectare and on that plot we grew everything from wheat, rye, potatoes, corn and oats as our staple crops and we also grew a lot of our typical garden plants to make our food more exciting to eat warm tomato soup in the middle of a wisconsin winter is a really great way to end your day and we were able to grow much of this food without mechanization and using less of our time than you might think we grew more than a million calories in a year and we actually grew a lot more than that we didn't know what was going to happen with covid so we actually grew thousands of pounds of potatoes because we didn't know if we'd have to be giving them to our neighbors in the fall we ended up giving them to a food pantry but the easy ability for us to produce such a large amount of food in such a small amount of time and space speaks to the underutilized resource that is a lot of the space around us even in a suburban american neighborhood which you think is very unsustainable they have a lot of space around them they could be growing a lot of food to support themselves this type of food production is only possible if we have the right variety of plants available and meals also to reflect the seasonality of our planet my first year harvesting wheat for example was done using varieties created for industrial production and they didn't really lend themselves to hand harvesting i learned that the hard way and furthermore the wheat that came out of these varieties had a really high brand content and so it wasn't very good for making flour since then i've adopted heritage wheat and other heirloom varieties that not only breed true but were developed at a time when heavy fertilizer additions were not available if you're familiar with the open source seed initiative one of the things they're into is just like open source software being able to share seeds that are reproduced without their non-hybrid seeds that if you share them you have to promise that you will let anyone else breed them and share them as well and home production lends itself to seasonal eating without long distance transport we're relying on fresh foods in the summer and fall and stored foods in the winter and spring and they say in english absence makes the heart grow fonder and at this point in the year we're almost out of potatoes which is good because we eat potatoes almost every other day or every day and i need a break but by the fall i'm going to be excited to eat potatoes again just like i'm excited to eat lettuce now even though by the end of the summer i'll be sick of it seasonal eating keeps things exciting another thing to consider is the learning curve it's taken me many years to figure out how to feed our family from our plot and we cannot wait until we're facing a crisis to try and start doing this we can't wait until we're transitioning away from fossil fuels and long distance transportation of our stable crops if we wait and face a crisis it is too late we have to start to plan and build redundant systems now for example this fall i anticipate the wheat market is going to be severely disrupted by the embargo on russian wheat and the destruction of the ukrainian wheat harvest which is 15 of global wheat not to mention the loss of russian and belarusian fertilizers on the international market which is causing problems already with this year's crop by growing staples at a local level we create redundant systems and english we have the saying uh don't put all your eggs in one basket and this means to spread out your risk to avoid losing everything when you drop that basket and by having diverse dispersed agriculture failure in one locality doesn't spell disaster for everyone redundant systems though are not economically advantageous and i don't know about you but i can't eat economic advantage every year there's more evidence and more reason to think about transitioning and building more redundant and therefore more resilient systems locally now um and i do realize i'm getting to the end here so i want to end with this thought um nobody is self-sufficient and i'm trying to stop using that phrase a friend of mine bill rubishard pointed out to me he's more poetic than i am nobody is self-sufficient we all depend on one another and healthy ecosystems around us uh in the future we're going to have to depend more heavily on local communities um and it's not only important to be able to do these things for yourself and your family but also to support those around you and show them how and now is the time now is the time to convince and show other people around you that this way of life with local personally grown food it's not only possible but it's it's better it's attractive we grow most of our food in less time than most people think they see my garden they say jeez how much time you spend it's it's a few hours a day if that and we eat really well because we have the luxury of being able to make it all at home we don't have to worry about paying a premium for organic or other eco ecologically friendly farming practices it's built into our system because we don't use fossil fuels sometimes we feel really alone when we say these things so it's nice to hear from other folks on this panel singing in the same choir even if we are far apart but finally I do want to point out that we need to think carefully about those who don't agree with our approach because we can convince you know a few people here and there but we need to get a societal change happening and there's a lot of people in our societies that willfully disregard the fact that we're facing a real problem and it's coming sooner than I think most people understand so with that I'll end and thank you so much for your attention and I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say and share so please stop sharing. Thank you so much Scott that was a fascinating presentation and thank you for teaching us the term foodmageddon that will certainly stick in my mind so thanks for sharing your your remarkable experiment with us. We have a lot of questions coming in we're going to have one more speaker and then we'll take about 10 minutes to discuss some questions so our last speaker for this set for this first hour is Cedric Carl of Atelier 21 the the founder and director of this organization in France. Go right ahead. Hi thank you Libby thank you everybody for the invitation do you hear me well hello yes we can hear you yeah you hear me okay okay great so I'm the director of Atelier 21. Atelier 21 is an NGO that is working on energy transition for a long time and because we are looking for a long time about energy transition about climate chaos versus resources we we find out that there was a lot of forgotten patterns in the history that was just sleeping and we decided in 2015 before the COP 21 in Paris to to make a website and to make crowdsourcing with a with a lot of people expert and non-experts to find out all these patterns about I mean energy uses and also food water mobility and not only focusing on energy production as electricity or force so the goal of the project is to identify past and present frugal innovation uh forgotten patterns and to put them uh in in the in the for the public for the engineers for the energy makers and transitioners so the paleo energetic is uh is already five years of research and many invention uh exhumated there is a volunteers and participant uh it's already translated in uh five languages uh also so arabic and japanese uh spanish um we have a great researcher around us that is um working with us and also we like to work with retired people because they have a lot of knowledge they have time they have money they are connected so more and more we try to connect retired people around us to work with us on this topic and here you can see the the website um is paleo energetic dot org I think my friend can share it in the in the in the chat and um we find out a lot of crazy invention uh all techniques uh that is uh that is already in public domain for a long time and public domain means open source and public domain mean uh also that uh it's it's big longing to everybody so um here you can see the solar printer of Augusta musho that is working is is a pioneer of solar energy of solar concentration energy um uh we got this uh first Porsche was electric also so uh to to to um to say like Corentin we need narratives and this project is a narrative that is showing that we are facing a big problem climate chaos resources problem no uh Ukrainian war and uh and we have solution already so we don't have to wait for another technology so it's a positive narrative that it is possible because we have no also fab labs um we can share a lot we have um mechanical engineers and we are not like opposing um making opposition between high tech and low tech we are facing an issue that is uh that that is putting our uh society in danger so we have to answer quickly and the low tech the retro tech the public domain can be a response to that perhaps there will be also an high tech coming for batteries I don't know but uh we have to also take uh low tech and open source uh in the in the ground so um we are thinking also that we have to develop a business model based on open source and based on uh public domain because it's a key to develop and to scale the the the oldest network of knowledge and sometimes our uh capitalistic world is not able to take this open source pattern because they say yeah oh can I do money with open source it's not possible so after five years of research we think that we need a workshop about uh open source economic model and to to to scale and uh one of four of our economic model of us is to sell our books in french in japanese and now in in in english in english it's called retro tech and low tech uh all forgotten patents can shake the future because we think uh it's uh it's um it's a ponder a box uh uh in energy but in water also we are thinking already to make a paleo h2o because in water resources we have so much problem that we have to exhumate it uh a lot of resources and uh and patents so um of course the idea is to to talk with the people and to not uh make a war between low tech and high tech because this is not constructive we need to have a consensus on technology we need to make techno critics we need techno ethics that we don't need to have two uh but two a sort of uh team the team with the low tech team with high tech and the people they they make a war uh all together so so uh uh also the we have to critique of course innovation we have to uh accelerate low tech innovation if we can so that's the goal of the project and the project is a trans media project so there is the website but also we have a timeline a low tech timeline that we can put in the for a workshop uh and we we ask the people to participate we have different uh paper white paper is a old invention uh green paper is what we are doing now uh is a ongoing project a red paper is uh a bad ideas so you you know we are sharing best practices but baddest practices we are not sharing it but we have to blacklist some practice so now we make this red uh paper and the yellow paper is what we can do in us in the future in the but in a quick future because uh as the sheikh told we have three years to make something for the climate so we have to accelerate so and to accelerate we have to to have a goal we have to have a schedule so the the project is also we use the timeline and we use the schedule to 220 to 250 and we can um make some step and write some step so uh for example we we got a consulting two weeks ago about GRDF that is a bigger gas logistic uh company in france and we have this project i i hope it will happen that we have to to see into the datas of the of the patents so the project is to to put the people on the on the table to put us to put GRDF and to put experts and to scan in the patent office what is about biogas what is about uh low-tech hydrogen and what is about like what we can do with the gas okay so uh with the ukrainian situation the the situation is no a real crisis it's not perhaps we have a risk of uh missing energy or something but no it's the it's the point our agriculture is uh is um is uh is under attack and the and the resources electricity here in france and to to warm the hospital and everything's this is a real topic for for europe now because of the gas and the petrol coming from russia and we've got our brother i can say our master navira jew that is talking about frugal innovation and he's talking also about our project he said that we are making a circular economy of knowledge and of course there is a lot of patents sleeping uh in the in the in the patent office um i will not take a definition of low-tech but just to say it's a past challenge already so it's an old story we are talking about it's a story about crisis uh we know the earth the world earth's catalogue we know the limit of growth limit to growth we know the small is beautiful that is talking about appropriate technologies so it's an old story but no it's perhaps time to to scale and i show you some uh uh example for uh uh the project so we we take back uh an old uh technique that is able to recharge non-rechargeable batteries and it's an old patent we take it back know it's a called region box it's a DIY project but no the project is changing uh it's a new scale now because we want to run a company and to make something uh for a regular product for the people so in hydrogen uh in direct combustion we have a lot of example old people making this during the second world war uh really easily really quickly they retrofit a lot of vehicles uh with a so gasogen and hydrogen uh air transportation it's coming back also the balloon is coming back because it's slow it's really efficient and you don't need a lot of infrastructure of course because you don't need so much road you can go uh under the sea under the mountain and everything and also to refreshing the buildings there is a lot of old products uh um coming from Mediterranean and here there is people engineered they are taking back this for the Tour Montparnasse in Paris for the retrofit of the Tour Montparnasse and they are using the turbulence of the wind to make uh ventilation inside the building so it's a project to uh to to follow and of of course there is the straw project the straw buildings the straw is a huge potential to insulate the building into retrofit and here you can see on the right on the left there is a north building in France and I know in United States there is a lot of old building in straw so it's a sort of a really tradition uh also in the United States in some part of United States and on the right side you can see a project where I was an interior designer uh it's eco 46 and it's a project of an administration in Switzerland and it's project only for since five years there is a dry toilet inside um almost uh zero uh plastic product inside because we we build everything with the wood in the common so the really local wood local products um uh to be um in maximum resilient and to finish my presentation uh we are looking for making a museum uh because uh we have a lot of archive now picture books uh old batteries uh stuff like this and uh the project of the retrofit museum um because of the covid is uh is uh is waiting uh but uh then we decide to make a street project a sort of open museum in the street so we make some printings uh with real size people and with QR code the people they can scan it and they can make the three dimension the the the uh the machine appear in the telephone or in the street so here you can see it's our workshop in Paris uh in front of the workshop you have different paleo arrow and arrow in uh you have uh the people and a big picture and they can scan it and understand what is happening so it's uh it's a part of the our exhibition system our transmedia project here you can see the the process then you can scan the QR code and then it makes the machine upon in 3d and it comes also because we make a virtual museum because we was in the covid period we was not able to welcome the people in the real uh in our real place and then we design we make 3d modeling and we make a steeling engine uh idrally cram uh solar concentration to uh to to to melt the to melt metals we make the the the 3d model of the solar printer of of um our friend uh musho there is the the Edison car with the nickel iron batteries that was running one thousand miles at at the beginning of the century so so it's a really interesting project now this project is uh really uh uh innovated by the delft institute of technology also so there is really uh interesting uh stuff uh that we exhumated with the with the crowd with the people and uh inside the museum you have some uh audio guide that is uh that like this you can you can hear the ghosts talking to you uh and the idea is to make the the to take the ghost out of the cave to take this uh high potential uh technical out of the cave and uh thank you for your attention and uh we are always waiting for new invention new patents new old patents thank you for everything thank you so much cedric um we are just going to answer a few questions and then uh we're going to give you a five minute break um understanding that we have so much to talk about we'll just take a quick break before we resume um but i do have a few questions that i picked from the chat for our speakers the first one i have is was for Core intent um asking if you could share an example of local entrepreneurship that you found interesting and and tell us whether you think that example might be applicable in a place like france or the us um yeah can you hear me yes okay great um so we found many examples like there are more than 50 and on the platform there are like more than 150 so there are many good examples and it's true that the example that are used in reach of poor countries in countryside and in cities and let's say for example in new york because we are in new york we met people that are growing spirulina you know spirulina it's a micro algae that you can eat it's full of proteins and vitamins and minerals and you can grow it very easily with a few resources and it grows in new york in brooklyn and it's us we we studied that in madagascar because it was a very great project to help people especially children to to eat better to eat better and um yeah but uh it's difficult to sum up because there are so many examples but yeah about food we have that about communication i was speaking about uh low-tech uh internet about uh energy biodigestor can be used also in in the cities and um yeah uh treating water is also like we do it in the boats uh doable with uh fito how do you say fito oppression like with plants and microorganism yes so there are many on you you can have a look at the website lowtechlab.org because there are many other examples excellent thank you so much um this question is for felipe um asking if there are any tools or organizations that you think might help in implementing raw material constraints in industry you're implementing raw materials what sorry sorry if there are any just any tools um or or organizations you would recommend that are helping sort of think about these raw materials and what materials we use in industry um that might help some of our some of our attendees and thinking about yes okay i think there are some general resources that maybe we can change the chat like us us geophysical survey so now the international energy agency is providing many details on all the raw materials that are used in the various energy production systems all types of tv solar systems all types of of windmills all types of even hydro everything is is really well detailed and and i think at more and more uh companies try to uh let's say an idea of their exposure to to raw materials because of course this is this can really be a problem in your in your in your supply chain and but it's it's it's quite difficult for them because uh the production is generally based on tier one uh subcontractors and then tier two tier three tier four subcontractors so so it's not it's not so easy for the moment so except the the very general um yes resources i think the british geophysical survey is also providing a few resources but generally speaking once we come to the to the industry it it often becomes uh uh secrets business uh business secrets so it's it's really difficult to to get access to what what are the right raw materials used in search or search and search device and coming to uh to very high-tech products it's also so generations are going so fast that once you have finished the first study you you are already uh not really uh at the point yeah uh question for scott um how can your project be scaled to support a small community any thought on that well my projects are only scaled for small communities uh so we we don't advocate for anything um anything on a national scale right because especially in america everyone's such a rugged individualist uh national scale things are difficult whereas when you do it in your community actually works better because you can see the results of it for yourself it's the potatoes you grew it's the the tomatoes you grew it's the the corn that you grew right so uh it's it's it's easier i think on a smaller scale and so for example uh we did it mostly for our household but like i said um we grew over was over a thousand potato plants because in addition to the food again that we are doing as a study covid was happening and i wrote to my family and said you know at what point are you going to leave chicago and come out and stay with us and they said well there's no food in chicago because we didn't know in the beginning what was going to happen and so like i said we grew thousands and thousands of pounds and luckily uh we were able to give it all to the food pantry um and so you know using green spaces using these spaces around we could grow a lot a lot of food locally um in and and those are good on a small community scale parts of parks in the next two roads places that are green spaces that aren't necessarily being used uh for for food production could be brought into production on a small community scale and you could grow quite a lot of your food even staples yeah yeah and i guess that's that's a question i could extend to the hope to anyone in the group you know um a lot of the examples that have been discussed are very well suited to small scale um small scale situations um you know thinking about the numbers of people who may really benefit from some of these technologies do you have any thoughts about about mindful scaling and how can we um yeah just how can we how can we spread these ideas more effectively and keep them sustainable believe i see you just got on camera do you have an answer to that yeah maybe it might it's a key issue because it's you know what i was talking about the garage and the the very simple people making a few things and it always looks like very yes micro scale and and what we need is of course uh at least the miso scale something in the middle or even a macro scale and think about that's full full systems of energy supply for instance so i think from my point of view i think we need some energy let's say innovation from let's say yes people like the panelists we've seen and and you can inspire people and there can be very interesting very small and micro initiative but in the end i think that the the this should be supported by the the public authorities at the end because the only way why why why do we use so many high-tech things instead of instead of low-tech it's because they are quite practical and they are not expensive and they are not expensive because they they come they're content in energy they're content in greenhouse gases they're content in in the roses is is is not counted for real i mean it's not valued i mean in a smartphone you have only two euros of of metals okay the 40 different metals that we are spreading out and and wasting after two years of utilization it's only two euros so if there is no value to make it uh say or be be be repaired and and transmit it to the next generation or whatever for two euros nobody cares so there is a question of for me of of public authorities which would change the games of the the rules of the game in terms of fiscal decisions what should be taxed or not taxed what should be subsidized what should be supported in terms of also prescription i mean what the public the public companies the public the the local authorities and so they buy services they buy products and we could integrate things to support local initiatives to support local supply chains to support the services and products that are less impacting the environment so so for me it's a mix of let's say citizen willingness maybe enterprise companies willingness but i think enterprise is very difficult to to take an initiative if your competitors don't so it's better and easier if the public authority supports and change the rules the the rules of the game and and then all the companies will follow that's that's a feeling but it's maybe too much french centric well that that actually ties into a question i had for centric about what role the patent what role patent offices might play do you think that there's a there's a role for particular institutions like the patent office to um to crowd source and share innovations yeah yeah of course because to protect a patent it's the it's the states with with doing this so it's a it's a public affair so now there's public domain so the public domain must must must be re uh re put in the front of the people because it's it's begun it's it's it's it belongs it belongs to everybody so it's like a a a a a a ponder our box it's a treasure and we have to open the treasure and no there is the people that because of the itek we have now the digital uh power we can uh we can digitalized all the archive so it can gives us the the power to take it really like uh quickly for the engineering school and for the innovation today for tackle climate change and resources problems so i'm i'm really sure the the the data the patent office have have a role to play yeah great well um given that it's 1115 in boston 1015 in houston um i'm going to um have us take a short five minute break um before we before we move on to our second set of speakers who are actually uh we're already starting to reference some of these innovations that our second set of speakers are going to talk about um in the chat to offer some some very concrete solutions so please um take five minutes feel free to continue chatting um here on zoom or or get from your computer and we'll see you again in five minutes for a few more speakers thank you that's it for this extra long episode part two comes next week the low tech podcast is put out by the low technology institute at the moment the show is hosted edited and distributed by me scott johnson this episode was recorded in the low technology institute institute uh as you can subscribe to the podcast on itunes spotify google play youtube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast and if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up 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 mine is on social media and you can reach me directly i'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org our entry music was early sun off the album bittersweet endings by crowander that song is under the creative commons attribution and non-commercial license 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 is if i hold her if i put her down she screams so she got to be on the podcast today and she was very quiet and hopeful thank you