Innovation has been hot topic at our dinner table recently, often coalescing with yarns about climate change, degrowth and post-capitalism. Opposing views can turn up the heat, but they also expand our perspectives and teach us (me mostly) how to listen and when to grab the talking stick. Our LinkedIn feeds are bursting with ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ initiatives promising to solve today’s pressing problems, but these innovations are too often techno-utopian ideals envisioned by mostly privileged folks who are better placed to soak up the lion’s share of investment, and they don’t always succeed in solving the problems at all. Furthermore, these innovations are rooted in ‘wrong story’ as Tyson Yunkaporta explains in his new book, which I’m reading now and will share thoughts on in an upcoming book club blog post.
(Reccomended reading: Protopia Futures Framework)
Enter Low-techs.
Quite often the solution already exists and is right under our noses, practiced in communities around the world at the grass roots level by people who are in right relationship with the land (‘right story’). So what if we scaled down unnecessary production, better assessed techno-utopian innovations (sifting out the privilege AND the greenwashing AND the wrong stories) and broadened our investment scope to support and scale low-techs (as far as they can grow within relational boundaries) and community-led technological innovations that are proven AND truly sustainable?
France’s Low-Tech Lab defines ‘low-tech’ as “techniques, technologies, services and know-hows that stick to three main principles: Useful. Accessible. Sustainable.”
Grounded in regenerative thinking (which at Voyage Virage we interpret as thinking that centers planetary health and societal wellbeing) low-techs are open source, making them non-discriminatory and accessible to everyone, everywhere. The good folks at the Low-Tech Lab are on a mission to find, test and share these solutions with a goal of inspiring gentler ways of living, producing, and consuming that are also more sustainable. And the results so far are impressive. The Low-Tech Lab database of global low-tech initiatives currently has 978 records from countries all over the world.
(Meet Corentin, co-founder of the Low-Tech Lab)
