Julia Watson

“We need a new mythology of what technology is. We need nature-based technologies that will lead us towards a new form for not being saviours of the earth, but living with Earth symbiotically” 

In this second episode of series 2, creative studio Accept & Proceed's founder David Johnston meets with Julia Watson, an Australian designer of urban, indigenous, and spiritual landscapes and author of Lo-TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism. 

Johnston and Watson discuss why we need to redefine the meaning of technological innovation, the importance of diversity in building resilient environments and why nature-based technologies can help us live symbiotically with nature.

Transcript

EVA8_JuliaWatson

 
David [00:00:11] Today, I'm honoured to be in conversation with the fantastic Julia Watson. Designer, activist, academic and author of Low Tech, Design by Radical Indiginism. Julia is a leading expert in the field of low tech nature based technologies for the built environment and climate resilient design. She teaches urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. What fascinates me about Julia is her highly creative and conceptual interdisciplinary thinking. She approaches design through an Anthropological and Ecological lens, to build new narratives and ideas around the problems we're faced with as a species. 

David [00:01:00] I'd love to hear where your interest in indigenous innovation began and what were some of the early practises you were introduced to? 

Julia [00:01:09] So the work actually started way back when I was an architecture student and I studied architecture in Australia, in Brisbane, where I grew up. And I had the great opportunity of going to an architecture school, which was the only architecture school in the city. But it had this really forward thinking programme and it was called the Aboriginal Environments Unit. And in that unit, there were teams just dedicated to researching, assisting indigenous community, working between government and indigenous community, working on research projects to really explore the Aboriginal built environment, the evolution of architecture, the evolution of the, you know, urban form in both traditional and contemporary settings. And that particular you know, it was like a lab in the university. It was there was a subject that was required by every single architecture student in the second year of architecture to take a course. And the course was a seminar and it was a research seminar. And it was you know, it was called Aboriginal Environments. And, you know, I you know, I grew up in Australia in the 80s. And, you know, I was at university in the early 90s. And, you know, it was it was a different place to, I think, what it is now. And I had no formal education with anything to do with Aboriginal heritage, Aboriginal culture. I had had a lot of interaction with and had grown up having friends and playing with kids in my neighbourhood who were Aboriginal and half Aboriginal. So there wasn't like a social distance, but there was a really big educational distance. And I did this course and it literally just kind of like talk about it, like it lifted the veil of what I had kind of seen before in terms of our landscapes and our built environments. And it really kind of changed the complete course of direction of my career. And after that, I, I did a couple more years in architecture and I decided I wanted to go and study landscape architecture because it's really interested in exploring this idea of how people relate to their environments and relate to nature. But not just, you know, the contemporary or the Western or, you know, the the types of formal architectural mainstream discourse that I had been learning. But it was, you know, how many different people across the whole world relate to nature and to the world. And so that's kind of where it all began and where the interest started. 

David [00:04:08] And these incredible innovations have been around for thousands of years. Can you talk a little about the confluence of influence, which is deemed indigenous innovation, primitive for so long? 

Julia [00:04:19] When the book first came out and I first started talking especially to a lot of different indigenous leaders, scientists and and designers having... doing sort of public speaking, there's no surprise. You know, I was I was I was talking about in the book that, you know, all these all these indigenous technologies are complete innovations. They're some of the thinking is design. That's beyond what we are capable of conceiving at this, the complexity of the designers that, you know, that the consideration of seasonality, the consideration of time scales, the understanding of complexity and how to preserve natural systems and flows, we have trouble designing that. And I teach at the best schools and I really do teach sort of cutting edge technology in the built environment. But when I talk to, you know, indigenous community and indigenous people, they were they were not surprised. They were like, yeah, of course, we we know this is incredibly innovative. We've been saying this forever. Like, thanks, great. You got on board. And I was like, right course. Right. I mean, I've been researching stuff that's written by indigenous scholars or indigenous non-indigenous scholars who worked with indigenous communities who've been realising that. Um, and I think what's really interesting is that now all of these innovations, they're born out of very specific conditions surrounding the technology. So they're born out of scarcity. They're born out of having to respect limitations of resources, they're born out of, you know, innovations that take place based knowledge that's evolved over very long periods of time, that's really about observances of nature and interactions with nature, both human and all different types of species. And that's you know, it's low cost. It's it's very low impact because there was an understanding that if, you know, if you have high impact to your natural systems in your environments, you'll inadvertently impact yourself. And so those types of technologies, that's you really on the opposite spectrum to the way that we would see most technologies, high technologies, mainstream technologies, how they've emerged. They emerge under conditions of endless amount of resources, no real limitations in terms of like what can you do with this technology? Where will it get us? It's about efficiency, all these different sets of conditions. So these technologies really are born out of in somewhat, you know, extreme events or crises or having to deal with environmental issues already. So it makes so much sense that we would be understanding them in the conditions in the times we're in today, as incredibly innovative and as incredibly relevant to deal with the same types of conditions from which they were born. 

David [00:07:24] Yes. I mean, it sort of gives you a new perspective on what actually high technology or cutting edge technology you mentioned there, actually means and you've talked previously about the impact architect Cedric Price had on your field by his statement 'Technology is the answer, but what is the question?' How did this shift thinking within the field? 

Julia [00:07:44] It was a really important question because it really led people to think about, you know, how is technology impacting our cities? How is technology impacting our societies now? How are we using that? And I think there was always you know, there's always been this idea that technology is about growth and technology is about efficiency and technology is about streamlining. And it it allows growth to happen. But the growth isn't, you know, is the unknown or indirect impacts of that growth or of that manufacturing or that industrialisation or that, you know, changes to land use, that's never factored in to those equations of, you know, why or how or how should technology be really impacting our society. So we really kept on going along, sort of. On on this mission of, you know, efficiency and infinite growth and and then leading to globalisation and infinite amounts of interactivity, and I think, you know, at a certain point in time, it was the 70s, we first started seeing people responding to that, understanding that, you know, in the mainstream or maybe a little bit more on the fringe, that things weren't going as planned. And in the late 80s, people started to say, OK, we have infinite growth. We can see the destructive effects of that. We haven't accounted for responsibility. We haven't accounted for the environment as a high priority. And inadvertently, we haven't accounted for our human health and our response to human health. We've forsaken a lot of these more humanistic ideas for, you know, innovation and this idea of sort of living in a modern world. And so this term sustainability emerged and it was real because it was kind of a response to technology and the impact of technologies. But, you know, I sort of asked this question now is like if sustainability is supposed to be the answer, which it was, what was the question? Because we haven't really shifted our views of technology. We haven't you know, we see, you know, big technology giants today, whether it's in social media or, you know, whether it's in industrialisation, talking about responsibility and social equity, environmental equity. But in the end, when things roll out, we don't really see that type of a result. And, you know, there's been a huge discussion in the technology sector itself questioning the efficacy of some of these ideas of technology, just wanting to be this, you know, this great somewhat of a saviour for humanity, how it's fallen so far short of that. And so I think, you know, at this point in time, I really talk about, you know, what does sustainability mean to us? Because we you know, we keep on we keep on building more. We don't actually sort of systemically try and change the means by which we're progressing. And the only means by which we've really systemically changed has been the impact of the virus. And that's systemically changed how societies, how we function and and that has had an inadvertent climatic effect upon the earth. But, you know, we're not really putting in place on a large scale measures by which, you know, we're going to push us towards beyond what we say, like sustainability as a Band-Aid for progress and our fast paced development and our impacts on the Earth's environment. 

David [00:11:46] I think, well I like to think that this kind of the great pause is sometimes called, that we've been afforded through the pandemic has allowed a lot, a lot of people to be reflective of either their roles or  their businesses may be or their activities. Certainly that's been the case with with myself and my business. Thinking about the future has never been, you know, more front and centre of my mind and really thinking about why we exist and whether we need to grow or, you know, what the intent of our business is longer term. You know how we intend to show up in the context of this changing world that we live in. I'd really like to unpack, though, that, you know, low tech as in tech, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable as as we've just spoken about, resilient nature based technology. And can you explain what low tech stands for and what the catalyst was for starting this movement? 

Julia [00:12:49] Yeah, so low tech, it's it's not a familiar term. It's a term that I completely made up, you know, in the course of writing the book. And it's it was actually kind of like a tongue in cheek having a go at, you know, what we consider low tech, low tech, as opposed to low tech ELO. And so I've been teaching technology for the last ten years and technology in the built environment. And I was teaching courses where everything was about high tech or, you know, high tech, industrialised, manufactured type of high tech in the built environment, or it was soft systems, which is generally a characteristic of low tech tech, but they were not attributed back to having any lineage to any type of cultures or any types of previous systems. And so I started doing a little more research on these different types of systems that are emerging in local technologies from particular communities, and every time I would speak about them, people would talk about them as primitive number one, which really immediately fires me up when people call them primitive. And then secondly, you know, people were talking about them as low tech, which in itself is defined as primitive, unsophisticated and emerging from industrialisation and manufacturing processes. And these weren't that either. And I was like, you know what? How can we what is the terminology? What, why are people getting so confused? How are people dismissing these? Like, what are the biases? What are what are the, you know, intentional forms that people or decisions that people have made to trying to race these technologies and these cultures? What are the inadvertent means by which people are dismissing or ignoring.So I kind of, you know, pulled this book together, um, through research and through working with different communities to try and identify a whole new form of, um, innovation that works with nature, with humans, with community, um, that hadn't really been identified within the built environment industry before. And so it's really about local technologies. And that's kind of the other side. You know, it was tongue in cheek, kind of like joke at, poking fun at, you know, people's refusal to acknowledge these as sophisticated technologies, but also talk about local technology. So local and tech was low tech and tek stands for traditional ecological knowledge. And, you know, that's a classification. It's, you know, a discourse that you can study within found sort of human ecology. And it's looking at, you know, the knowledge systems, the practises, the technologies and the belief systems of communities of India, usually indigenous communities. But these local technologies that have built up over time and we talk about it as deep time, time that's really long, that has evolved these technologies. And that's kind of something that I find so fascinating about these technologies, is it's not just, you know, something that you hold in your hand like an iPhone. And, you know, you can access information from around the world. You can use it as like a calculator at a phone, a tablet system that has, like, you know, all these different multiple uses. These are practises. These are composed of incredible amounts of knowledge. There you the technology is such a different form of technology to sort of the way we we talk about technology. But it is kind of, you know, um, it's a means by which you can interact with your environment in such a symbiotic way that we that it kind of starts to shift the playing field upon which I think it's such a shift. The playing field upon which we conceive of the idea of technology itself. 

David [00:17:10] Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it, the way that we label or give perspective to to things through words like primitive or feelings that things are naive, and it happens over the course of even just one lifetime? I've been reflecting recently how much I'm learning from my children's perspective on the world. They're sort of you could say it's naive, but in fact, they're so seemingly close to closer to consciousness without without the kind of interference of of all the kind of grown up noise that can sometimes come about our minds. And I was fascinated in listening to a conversation recently around things like just even footway, you know, we've evolved evolved to to think the footwear is obviously advanced technology, but in fact, it's sensory deprivation zones. Yes. For your feet or it creates that and furniture. Of course. You know, Itoh Patel describes the furniture as the enemy of good posture. And in fact, it's just not natural to sit at desks or even, you know, on most furniture the way that we do as humans. You know, it's kind of much, much, much better for us to to sit on the ground and, you know, be getting up and down off the ground 20 or 30 times a day for so many reasons for your health and posture and and all manner of things. And I don't know, I was reminded recently, there's this advert. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it was it was actually around in the 80s in the UK. It started as a campaign for PG tips, and it had chimpanzees dressed up as as humans. And, you know, they were they were undertaking human roles like builders, or they'd be delivering cups of tea and things like this. And we are great apes at the end of the day, and we kind of dress ourselves up as something different and think with something different and think that we're very advanced and and kind of. Yeah. Further down the line than probably we are. It feels like we're going backwards in so many ways. 

Julia [00:19:00] I was reading something just the other day about exactly the idea of the sensory deprivation of wearing footwear and not and that sort of depriving us of the ability of feeling vibrational energies that come from the earth, especially vibrational energies that come from places that people would consider sacred. And, yeah, that that that we are detaching ourselves. And and, you know, it's interesting. I've also done some work on footwear recently, and there was a discussion about why one of you know, one of the way back, one of the indigenous tribes in the United States, one of one of the leaders of a particular indigenous Trivett, said to somebody, I want to walk around like I'm walking on cushions. And that was sort of apparently the fable goes that that was the impetus for the creation of the moccasin for that particular community, that they didn't want to feel the earth and wanted to be cushioned from the earth. So then the footwear, the idea of the footwear can see for exactly that first sensory deprivation. So that's such an interesting, interesting type. But it also deprives us of this, you know, this really close relationship with the Earth and conceiving of, you know, a lot of these relationships, a lot of these technologies. They're about energy exchange, whether, you know, it's energy exchange that changes sewerage into clean water through processes of algae and bacteria interacting under the condition of sunlight. It's an energetic exchange or, you know, all these things are about the or it's, you know, an energetic exchange of feeling the energy of a particular place and understanding that the power in a place which would be the idea of a sacred space there. These are all different energetic responses. And that's in the end what we're dealing with. We're just dealing with energy exchanges in that are not sort of removed or not created through extraction and combustion, where we're talking about different types of energy exchanges. 

David [00:21:11] So, Julia, you have also, of course, published a beautiful book. And I would like to talk about the design of that later. But through the book, it spends 18 countries from Peru to the Philippines, Tanzania to to Iran, exploring millennia old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature. And the book never looked at indigenous people with this romanticised othering that you touched on a minute ago. You know, instead, it was really this serious consideration of their process and application around food and water through the lens of an architect, crucially, which is what you are. I'd love to hear about your research process of working on the book,. 

Julia [00:21:50] The real research for the book..It really began when I started working with a scientist who'd seen some of my work. I went, you know, a pilgrimage that I'd taken to Tibet to to walk around a mountain called Mount Kailash and some research I did. And that this particular scientist he was designing or he. Is getting ratified the first UNESCO World Heritage site in Bali, which happened to be a sacred site and it's a sacred site of 40 acres or six and a half thousand hectares, 40000 acres or six and a half thousand hectares of sacred rice terraces and water temples. And they're making this a World Heritage site. And he you know, he wrote to me and said, look, I've been working here for 25 years. I'm deeply connected with the community. I've just gotten this, you know, airier World Heritage listed. I don't know what to do. Pass this. I need someone to help. So I started working with this soup. It's an area called the ZUBAC. That's the system. The people are also called the Zubac. It's his incredible rice terraces have completely changed the face of Bali over the last one thousand five hundred years to create rice, terraces and an agriculture in a landscape that's really mountainous. And, you know, I started working with him and working with the Kenya for a year and I worked on that project and from that, working in on sacred landscapes and and learning about, you know, the the cosmological and and and spatial understandings of the island and relating that and looking at the technologies that were being worked on, different types of technologies that were being worked on in the rice terraces, like different growing regimes, transference from, you know, using pesticides and fertilisers back to traditional methods of farming that were more successful. I started understanding that these types of systems, which I had thought of before, as you know, sacred landscapes and conservation areas were actually really active technologies and sophisticated, you know, natural nature based technologies. And then from that project, I actually got invited by someone from that team to work on another project was with which was with the Madon people in southern Iraq. And they're also featured in the book. They create an island technology with a house on top of it in these wetlands and these islands, they stay afloat for twenty five years. But this civilisation has been building this technology for six and a half thousand years, and they're called the modern people. I started working with one of their scientists who actually later in an NGO, they're called Nature Iraq. And we were working on a I was briefly involved in the project. It was a waste water treatment, parkland to help re water the wetlands that had been actually destroyed by Saddam Hussein. And so it was through doing project work that actually began to do the research. And then from that and from teaching. And when I teach, I teach. I teach students from all over the world and all over the world. Those students are coming to the schools that I teach had to learn a very specific type of way of designing and thinking. And at the time, you know, I was thinking back to when I was 20 years old and what I was learning in architecture school and I was learning about indigenous landscapes. And I was like, no one is teaching this. This is 20 years later and we're still not teaching this type of thinking. And so I kind of like took it upon myself to to explore all the different landscapes from and the technologies that all the students where the places that all my students have come from and start to build a compendium of different types of technologies that I thought designers would be really interested in understanding how to create and how to understand how different people are creating these soft nature based technologies all across the globe. 

David [00:26:08] Could you talk a little about how this innovation, for example, could be used or reimagined at scale? 

Julia [00:26:15] Yeah, I mean, it's it's already the scale of the island, so it's it's a very vast scale in itself already. But I think as a designer, when we talk about technologies, we often talk about something called ecosystem services. So those and ecosystem services is just a fancy way of saying all the things that nature gives humans for free, which is clean air, clean water, good soil, food, pollination, you know, all those things that come out of natural processes. So, you know, one example is water filtering through soil. That's actually a means by which we make clean water or by which nature makes clean water. So when I'm looking at these technologies and trying to, you know, understand the potential lessons that can be learnt by looking at a local technology, you're really looking for an understanding of what are those ecosystem services? How are how are these technologies put together to overcome the types of extreme conditions? Like what is what is? I always talk about seeding creativity in crisis. And so what is the crisis that these technologies were born of and how have they resolved that those conditions, those extreme types of conditions? And so these types of technologies, when you're looking at agriculture, are on a really steep slope that don't use pesticide, that don't use fertiliser, that have gravity oriented watering regimes. Those systems, when thinking about, you know, the most direct application is when we're thinking about cities and if we're looking at these types of conditions where we're building in cities at the scale of, you know, and these these types of terraces are at the scale of skyscrapers. And they these types of terraces, not only do they use water in an incredible way, not only do they become these biodiversity havens, they sort of become these these havens because what they're doing is they're really creating food at the bottom of the food chain that then attract all these different species and provide everything or these essential conditions for these species, habitat, food, shelter, and then, you know, their incredible carbon sequestering, their incredible water purification systems. So when looking at cities and the idea of an application of sustainable technology into what we would, you know, consider urban form and and skyscrapers, why aren't we building those types of ecosystem services into the way we're thinking of an application of green systems to those similar types of forms? And it could be that we start thinking, you know, we we do have these sort of very utopian and the sort of like almost if you look into like steampunk, you start to see these cities that, you know, have green all over them and and have trees falling down, off, you know, skyscrapers. But they really are just these sort of incredibly seductive and incredibly, you know, utopian type of visions for a type of urban form. But we haven't thought about, like, what's the nuts and bolts of that? How can that be achieved in reality? What are the codes that would have to be overcome? Well, the types of technologies that would have to support those types of systems at scale, like you talk about, you know, how how do we work with where does it come that we work with the natural systems in the landscape, then transfer into these built forms because these terraces are built forms. They're they're not natural landscapes, just as like skyscrapers are built forms and not natural landscapes. At some point, there's a symbiosis with natural systems, both physical in form, in material and at the very large scale of infrastructure. So it's sort of in all the work that I'm doing, you know, I'm really trying to understand like, well, what is what how how do these systems work? How are they how are we thinking about, um and the, you know, the built wood of architecture and urban design and landscape architecture. How are we thinking about building islands and then how are the islands being made that we've researched? Sixty four different communities around the world with local island technology building and like, how will we help? You know, how are they thinking about building islands and what are we not looking at and why are we not referencing any. These types of systems,. 

David [00:31:17] But generally in embracing resilience at scale, is at the heart of your book. And can you talk about this idea and how you see it supporting and solving the climate crisis? 

Julia [00:31:27] I mean, resilience is all about, you know, diversity. It's resilience. We almost talk about in the built environment as sort of taking over the the paradigm of of the understanding of what we have previously called sustainability towards. Now we sort of call things resilient. And what we're trying to achieve is a certain level of resilience. So a system will be impacted by an extreme event and be able to recover from that extreme event. And and we talk about that there, that that resilience is going you know, it's going to sort of like understand that it has to adapt to extreme events. And so it's not just sort of bouncing back to what it was before, but bouncing back to something that is better or to something that will be able to then keep on receiving extreme events and start to cope. The system will actually sort of learn from that and start to cope with those extreme events. And if we're talking about carbon emissions, if you know from from wildfires, if we're talking about viral transmissions everywhere, you start to understand that there's a relationship between humans and their environments. We can track those types of failures or those types of conditions of like negative impacts. We can back we can take that back to a lack of resilience and a lack of of diversity within the ecosystem. So when the pandemic happened, I had already been looking and talking to some people in the medical profession about how pandemics actually affect environmental resilience. And I'd been talking specifically to a researcher in Uganda who'd been working with the HIV pandemic, and she was saying, you know, in public health, people are actually trying to understand that pandemics have a really strong relationship to environment and environmental resilience. So what they find is that if there is a, you know, crops failing, if there's a lack of which leads to a lack of economy, which leads to social disruption, which leads to a family unit, disruption which leads to hunger and a whole slew of scenarios within a community migration, suddenly you'll see an uptake in pandemic. And that's because there's a whole new set of risk factors in play. And the reason crops are failing is because of monocultural cropping, is because of different types of environmental conditions that have led to that particular failure. And so they were, you know, before the pandemic global pandemic happened, there is already a slew of information and research out there saying environmental resilience and pandemic, a completely related for this particular case. We know or we assume that the zoonotic transfer happened between a wild species and a human being. And that's the way a lot of pandemics have happened. And also and that happens because of encroachment of habitat and one particular species then also becoming really prevalent. It's adapted to some sort of, you know, fringe urban condition. It's because its population has exploded. Therefore, you get more of an interaction with human beings and that type of explosion in a population that's that's not great because that happens because all the different other species that are related to that particular species, let's say a bat, those species have been removed from the environment so that species doesn't have any predators. And so you've reduced the diversity of all the different species in that environment and therefore you've reduced the environmental resilience of that particular habitat, which has led to this sort of systemic effect of then having these pandemics. And so, you know, that's two cases that are, you know, really relevant to where we are now. But, you know, the whole idea of retaining biodiversity in our environments is really key to how these systems work. These systems work because they they build biodiversity and that biodiversity just means like a diversity of species and a diversity of species interactions. And and that's what, you know, our modern technologies and our modern ways of progressing in our modern agricultural systems. That's what they do the opposite of. They create monocultures. They homogenise. They remove diversity. And that actually makes environments and then inadvertently human beings vulnerable and and it happens even in, you know, in business, in globalisation, you know, it's really interesting with the pandemic. One of the things that we saw is as soon as the pandemic hit, we saw sort of global trade and start to fail because we had, you know, an upsurge in people wanting masks and upsurge in people wanting PPE. And then all our systems crashed because it couldn't cope with these changes. We didn't have resilience built into, you know, the the systems. We couldn't respond to extreme events. And so we have you know, we now we understand we have incredibly vulnerable economic systems as well that are really volatile in response to these different types of extremes that play out. So, I mean, you start to see that there's the potential for the application of resilience thinking in so many different sectors of, you know, the way we conceive of our world beyond, you know, what we're talking about. You know, the book low tech or, you know, just the built environment. 

David [00:37:33] A lot of what you've you've just said echoes in many ways the work of Zach Bush, who was one of our guests on series one, Dr. Zach Bush, who is doing a lot of great work across health care and and actually the farming sector as well. In the US. He's become a good friend of the studio. And I remember him. One of the quotes I remember, which was fantastic was it's not an asteroid coming in. It's not a nuclear war. It's not a killer virus. We are the weapons of mass destruction, which is quite, quite a powerful statement. And in that talk, he really, really gave out a rallying cry to the creative community, specifically asking what we would do, you know, how we would use our opportunity or skills or platform to make a difference. But really, I can only imagine how vast and fascinating your research process must have been for the book. How did you approach editing the book and with the things that you wished you could have included that you didn't? 

Julia [00:38:24] Yeah, I mean, we had I think there were thirty five case studies at that time that we had looked at and we ended up for a whole different number of reasons and all different types of decisions that are made in the course of writing a book over a six year period. You end up through contacts, you're being allowed to talk about different types of knowledge, having time and and, you know, having having the ability. We end up with the case studies that we we did so. And since then, we've kept on researching. And I think, you know, we've kept on writing and so really keeping on building a compendium of research of different researchers and designers and collaborators from different communities around the world. And so that's that's sort of like, you know, I think that's going to be an ever an ongoing project. 

David [00:39:23] I have a question like a personal question, I suppose, around the fact the book speaks into the paradox around designers understanding the urgency of reducing humanity's negative environmental impact, but yet perpetuating the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Yeah, you know, I personally struggle and I'm quite frankly, bewildered sometimes by by where we're at with, you know, being bound up in systems that are so clearly self-destructive, but then relying on them in so many ways for our kind of daily existence and as a species with deeply indoctrinated into those solutions, manifesting is hard infrastructure and high tech design. Even though we recognise that many of these endeavours are inherently unsustainable. I think we're all kind of getting the picture now. If we continue to ignore this millennia old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature, what are the implications of that? 

Julia [00:40:17] I mean, I think we're already seeing the implications of all of that and we're seeing it play out, you know, in in different places and different regions, at different places around the world. I think, you know, it it's interesting when you start to look at, OK, nature based technology all around the world, because you see that nature based technology is still prevalent in some parts of the world and in some parts of the world. It's obviously disappeared and it's disappeared because of land transformations. It's just disappeared because of cities. It's disappeared because of colonialisation disappeared for a whole number of reasons. I think what is you know, the one thing that I I really find quite frightening is when, you know, working in different global south countries around the world, you start to see this adoption of ideas from the West, you know, or the global north, you know, working in India a lot of the time in different cities that I've worked in, there's just a real push by the government to wanting to be, you know, we want to be like Amsterdam. We we want to be like New York. We want to be like San Francisco. We want to be like and and it's really sort of this this this vision towards this extreme form of modernisation that is completely dislocated from culture and completely dislocated from environment. And so I think that, you know, in in in the global south, there is so much incredible potential for a different form of progress, a different, you know, leapfrogging all the mistakes that have been made in Amsterdam, in New York, in San Francisco, you know, all all those different and especially these technologies that have already been erased from these places but are still in existence in other countries that are sort of progressing and thinking about a means by which to move forward, but still thinking about it in the way of moving forward in terms of a modernisation of of which they've conceived, in which they see now. And I think the you know, by, you know, highlighting all these technologies, highlighting them where they exist, working and saying, you know, look, in India, you have the most advanced type of sewerage, wastewater treatment that produces food, that sequesters carbon, that cleans water, that is huge recreational public open space that provides 100000 jobs to the city. That's the that's innovation. That's beyond what we have in New York. That's beyond what we have in Amsterdam. Like look at what you have. Look at how incredibly unique and look how forward thinking it is. And and that will chart a direction for how you can evolve and how you can progress and how you can be more resilient than than the cities which you're you're thinking you want to sort of take after in terms of your forms of progress. Climate consciousness is something that is ever evolving and it's evolving at a pace that's rapid. And and what I don't see happening is sort of, you know, the narrative of, you know, we're climate driven, we want to save the earth. We're still want all the systems that we have. But we want to you know, we still want to live and protect the earth. We don't have any type of replacement of sort of this overarching mythology or like a narrative that will lead us to come up with new means by which we can conceive of a new form of development or a new form of technology or a new form of modelling culture, a large scale culture on an idea. So there's no new narrative. There's no new mythology of technology, which is exactly what low text talks about, like we need a new mythology of what technology is. And that technology is obviously it's putting us being put in it all the directions of what that can be of nature based technologies. But for, you know, the climate change movement, especially for the youth of climate change, what is the new cultural paradigm that associates itself with that? What is going to be that new global consciousness that will come from that climate change movement that will lead us towards that new form of of not being the saviour of the Earth, but living with Earth symbiotically? 

David [00:45:02] Yeah, beautifully put, Julia. I think that's fantastic and I feel exactly the same. What was your most significant and radical discovery in making the book? 

Julia [00:45:11] What was really interesting is I was looking at, you know, this idea that I kind of like, you know, sort of talking about this idea of survival of the most symbiotic instead of survival of the fittest in terms of like things have how things evolve. And then I was looking into the story of, you know, Darwin and and and, you know, coming up and and, you know, you know, his writings and also that, you know, he came up with the theory of the survival of the fittest at the same time as another researcher did. They came up with it independently and that was Sir Alfred Russel Wallace. And I always talk about, yes, Alfred Russel Wallace is being, you know, this forgotten, dismissed. And, you know, he really has to be treated well by history.And it was like and what's so interesting about Wallace is that he you know, he came up with, you know, same theory as Darwin. They presented a paper together. Darwin went away and like furiously wrote and then published The Origin of the Species. And Wallace wasn't attributed the ideas. And also in the scientific community, he was shunned because he was a religious or spiritual man. And he was talking about the idea of spirituality being very important to these understandings of science and evolution. And he was completely dismissed and and, you know, basically shunned from the scientific community. And it was like this brilliant man, this brilliant scientist. He was never attributed the research. Imagine if we, you know, prefer it at that time. And it's the same reason why indigenous technologies and traditional ecological knowledge hasn't been seriously considered by the scientific community is because it talks about spirituality and consciousness and these mythologies and different types of worldviews. Imagine if we had actually, you know, Alfred Russell Wallace's work had become the pre-eminent theory towards our understanding of the origin of the species or the evolution of ecology mixed with spirituality. Where would we be and how would the world be conceived of differently? 

David [00:47:38] Absolutely fascinating. I mean, history is littered with with forms of plagiarism, but the kind of change in different people's hands the original findings. I was fascinated the other day reading about the very early years of the powerhouse, which obviously was a short stint anyway. But in the very first couple of years, they were practising magic and they were doing these Egyptian yoga moves and like breathing practises, highly spiritual. Yeah, but it was stamped out, of course, because it was seen as Hocus-Pocus. And they can't be involved with modernism in the barrelhouse. And I think the I mean, yet again, what would have happened if the powerhouse had out of had the, you know, at least the flavour of of magical thinking within it? Yeah, the book is ravishing. Let me say, as a designer, you know, and it's from the moment I saw it, I just found it so deeply engaging. It's a dream to read and experience. You know, the textural quality feels like it's born from nature itself. Can you talk a little about the design process and how the book manifested? 

Julia [00:48:37] Yeah, that was actually, you know, incredible part of the process. Before I had a publisher, before I'd finished writing the book, we designed you know, we designed all the illustrations. Um, I, I have a very, very good friend who she now lives in Switzerland, but she was living in New York. We've been friends for a really long time and she was a graphic designer and super, super talented. And way back, you know, I talk to her about the book and she'd always been the source of such incredible encouragement. And she really believed in the work. And her name is Pure Will. She has a studio called Studio based in Zurich and and New York. And her partner is Claudine Eriksson. And, you know, they Pierret just always said, you know, this is going to be this is really great. You know, this is incredible. You need to push it as far as you can push it. And so when I'm looking for a publisher, I'm writing to all these people and and she's like, well, like, who would be your dream publisher? And I was like, Wow, Tushar. And she's like, go for it. And I was like, no. And in the end, I figured it out. And so she was always this form of like incredible encouragement and belief in the project. And I said to her, like, if I get. This if I get to publish this, will you design it and she was like, I would love to like this would be such an honour to be fantastic. So we got it. And it was just, you know, always this agreement that if the book was to be published, that she would and her firm would be the designer. And we worked collaboratively. But, you know, the brain and the and the beauty and the essence and all the the thought about, you know, the textural quality and the tactility of the experience and the type of paper stock, the type of aesthetic of like how you even portray the imagery. Everything was, you know, cladding and piara. And we also had an amazing artist, Burki Isaac, who he did all that. He retreated all the illustrations that we'd drawn and really brought this incredible essence of craftsmanship, almost like wood carvings, the way that he he designed the illustrations. And so, I mean, I have to attribute all of the the beauty and the aesthetic and the brilliance of the design of the book to Piara and Claudine. They took that idea of low tech. And now, like, it really was like, how do we embody this in book form? And so the Swiss the Swiss Pershore open binding, that was like so you can see the construction of the book and then, you know, intentionally making decisions about, you know, we want this to be uncovered. We want it. We don't want to we don't what the you know, the cover to be printed on brown cardboard or a grey card so that you can see that this is the natural material upon which all our books are hidden underneath the graphics of our books. So it was incredibly intentional. And it was you know, it was funny because in Tashan we worked really closely with the publisher. Basically, the publisher was like, give us a PDF, give us the final. You just go into it. So we had like creative licence to do anything. It was Drame. But in the end, you know, and we just asked for, like, everything. We're like, we wanna do this one to do this one. There were a couple of things, a couple of, you know, very small things that we had to compromise on for budget or publishing or whatever. But we really we really got to do whatever we wanted. And that was fantastic. But it wasn't, though, like there was apparently a joke that low tech is the most high tech book that they've ever had to produce. Good stuff that they gave us. But I mean, the quality and craftsmanship in the end, I think it was worth it. 

David [00:52:48] It's a beautiful thing. It certainly was. And so I'm curious, Julia, how you personally navigate your own desire to live in nature's cycles with the reality of urban living that many of us find ourselves in. 

Julia [00:53:02] Good question. Well, I must say, through our interactions since the first meeting, you've actually inspired me somewhat. One thing that my partner and I are endeavouring on at the moment is buying a small farm upstate, which I haven't told you about yet. But, uh, so, yeah, one of you know, with the pandemic and with being stuck in New York, um, I really you know, it's been a dream project for, you know, ever since I was pretty young to actually have a farm. And now our next big move is to split our time between New York and upstate and to actually create a, um, almost like a lab where we can test all the different types of design ideas actually out in the field and sort of to create a new a new, uh, uh, sort of project, um, where we can really think of this relationship. We think of this relationship with nature. Um, but a lot of the project work that I do as well is sort of the escape, uh, and the sort of like the way that I progressed, the thinking and and my understanding and my way of sort of, you know, thinking about, um, this relationship with nature. So, you know, all all the projects that I do. And I work in my design studio with a partner, a French horticulturalist, Murray Sylwia, who's incredible plant person and an incredible designer. And so all these you know, these are all different ways by which we're constantly trying to mediate and mitigate our understanding of our place in the world and our impact upon the environmental impact upon practise and how, you know, impact upon our profession and other professions as well. 

David [00:55:07] Of course not not everybody is able to do that. How do you envision these incredible learnings and technologies that you've kind of had the experience of being harnessed at an individual level, or is it more about systemic changes? 

Julia [00:55:23] I mean, I think it's both. I think there's a lot of different ways that individual people can. 

[00:55:31] Really think about adoption of these types of ideas and understandings personally, I mean, a lot of before the election, I was constantly talking about this idea that, you know, who you vote for, who, who, who you place, people in levels of power to to represent your voice is incredibly important because those will have impacts that they're your means by which you can have systemic change. You know, a lot of the time I'm, you know, as a consultant, I'm actually working with a lot of fashion labels and and helping them to imagine how their businesses can systemically change in response to vulnerabilities of pandemic or resilience or sustainability or. And I also, you know, dealing with that sector. I'm a real believer. And I think the fashion industry is actually really vocal and really leading the charge in some ways about putting this idea about sustainability and environmental responsibility out into the world. And I always say, you know, fashion is the most direct means by which we kind of brand ourselves and portray ourselves and probably a means by which, like food, where your dollar goes most directly. So, you know, always, you know, being very vocal and understanding, like, where do you spend your money? Like, what do you wear? Like, how do you how do you conceive of yourself and who you are as an identity out into the world that is like somewhat really dependent upon, like, fashion, but also, you know, about agriculture and the foods that you eat and the means by which you, you know, feed yourself and what you support in that way. There's multiple ways that we could be incredibly integral to these types of changes. And, you know, and so, you know, pick your pick your means by which you want to endeavour into the adventure. 

David [00:57:34] Thank you, Julia, of your words. Remind me a little of a quote that I found quite inspiring recently from Rudolf Steiner. And in fact, your work generally reminds me of this quote, which is that 'The thoughts of people today determine the physical being of the world in the future, just as the thoughts of people in the past determined our earth today.'

Julia [00:57:53] Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right, like you manifest the world, that which is that you want to live in. 

David [00:58:00] Thank you for listening to our conversation today. I hope you find Julia's journey, work and perspective as inspiring as I do. Endless vital activity is brought to you by Accept & Proceed, remember, creativity can reimagine our world.