B - we get to think about open ag tech in a low tech way
Courtney - from Asheville, coming with emotion grief and trauma. Interested to talk about tech and keep it sensitive to harsh realities.
Liz - what sorts of tech can we use to help mitigate and what is low tech enough to be okay. What are the really damaging techs and what are alternatives
Brian - fossil fuel free farming f4 - integrating solar into ag. Background in renewable energy.
Sirena - doesn’t think much about hardware but curious.
Marie - an academic - Field agnostic is the amount of data that is used by these technologies. A pull away from being conscious of resources that are required for software design. Interested in technologies that hit the edge cases where there is little or no wifi or power. Lower impact software!
Ariaet - creative technologist working in production. Here to listen. Has some things in mind. Role of farm in resilience? Can they help? Rare minerals. Interested in how hubs work in solidarity.
Kirsten - here in a personal capacity. “Vote for the party that makes things shittier slower.” Falling apart is inevitable. Looking for ways to build out the community that will help us survive. Tech, personal connections, how to we buy ourselves enough time to get there.
Evan - comp sci. It’s inherently digital — easy to forget being attached to the physical world. Where is software appropriate and where isn’t it. When is tech appropriate
Yury - how can we create resilient communities rather than tech. Who to call. How do you know who to call for resources — tools for support. Tangible community building.
Farmer Dave - invented the farmhand tractor. Goal to get affordable equipment that can help them grow with less impact. Make the farmer’s job easier.
Darryl - UC Santa Cruz center for agroecol. How to think about these things in terms of time. CA these things are very present — growers suffering. Larger timeframes or ecological collapse and rare earth minerals. Can’t have small holder ag in the U.S. without restructuring of everything. How do we support people in their livelihoods.
Leann - farm mg - open source farming platform. Students build a solution on top of their platform. How to shift from industrial to regenerative. Curious to hear what problems an open platform can help solve.
Nena - work with beginning farmers in the HV in NY. Farm is an accelerator for climate change - solutions - based farmers.
Santanu - UC ag and natural resources. Part of the economic dev department. Huge lack of info — huge gap between how resources are being used and … Working with all scales.
Dani -
Maria - CAFF provides tech assistance and policy advocacy. COVID and disruption. The dystopian future is now. Believes that tech can strengthen local food systems.
Rob - engineer and recovering academic. An hour outside Ottawa. Large segment of the community that has no internet or no power. The solutions that we’re coming up with can’t be supported by our current grid.
Brian - existential dread. Looking for solutions. Solar punk fits really well into this workshop. Has a bunch of solar stuff in his backpack.
Sam - engineer and looking to listen and learn.
Aaron - ag entrepreneur. Thinking about climate and fires and how livestock can help.
Shreegar - grad student, looking to study more. Working to create a device that tracks climate change.
Nalita - farmer - thinking about historical context. People had natural resources more in the historical context. Victory Gardens were a resiliency tool of the past. People don’t have those skills now. In a dystopian future, how will we survive when we don’t have basic skills.
MonKreet Singh - extension out of Fresno in the Central Valley - interested in implementing technology that is environmentally friendly and work for farmers.
Potential topics:
- Time scales - more of an observation than a topic
- Time horizons
- Ecological collapse - planetary boundaries — we’ve breached 6 of 9 and collapse is here and now
- Content — What are we wishing to sustain?
- Who to call?
- How to survive?
- Sustaining livelihood - going beyond the right here and now
- How do we share what we have since we have become more specialist than generalist
- Infrastructure
- Energy — we need this to run our technology systems
- Piece around underlying hardware - repairability
- In our technological infrastructure we have become specialists
Proposal:
breakout groups vs one big group
vote on whether to split or stay together.
benevolent dictatorship says we stay together
- Infrastructure - how can tech potentially be of use in the face of disaster
- Liz - feel a little split in the sense that there are innovations to improve our condition but in a collapse scenario, foundational skill building becomes more important. We have things that work already. How do we bring everything closer to ourselves. In disaster scenarios we will be limited to what is here. Tech that exists is better. Low tech has been here and works.
- Marie — Why do we keep building new cars, why do we keep building new cell phones, why are we so stuck in profit?
- Brian - maybe we need to shed some epistemologies. Cuba lost the ability to have fossil fuel in the early 90s. Farmers have seed libraries. Reframing of what technologies are in the first place. A lot of it is managing expectations so that when we are without, we are able to be okay. In Cuba there was a sense of capitalist free existence — the lack of advertisements. Life after capitalism is possible.
- Brian - lo tech magazine - article rethinking a resilient energy system. Alternative fail gracefully approaches to technology. One way of thinking about resilience is allowing for failure in the system.
- Arietta - seeds - seed ownership. In places where there is much more food growing, seeds come in bigger packages for much cheaper.
- Courtney - experienced in Asheville a month ago — all cell phones went dead the morning of the storm. No internet, no power, no water, no cell service. Teenagers and dogs were living a great life. People were riding bikes, laying in the sun. Couldn’t get in or out town. Met neighbors she’d never met before. Started talking about who had who. Who needs what. Needs, skills, Downtown Asheville had a bucket flush brigade. People were building dry toilets working with latino farming communities. Lives behind the anarchist bookstore and those are the people you want to be close to. Became one of the most vibrant areas in all of town. So much desire to support one another without the state. The disaster programs were also there from the gov.
- Liz - how do we keep the energy going when we’re not in the crisis?
- Courtney - it’s exhausting so we don’t want to keep it going.
- Conversation about how resilience works directly in a crisis vs when things go back to “normal”
- When disaster strikes and there isn’t the internet help, what do we fall back on. Thinking about blue prints. Thinking about sustainable manufacturing. What is the blueprint for local, distributed, regenerative farming. What are the practices? How do we continue to build resilience within us as humans. Psychology of human need for comfort.
- Rob - has anyone ever thought about using fence wiring for networking or moving power? Can you run ethernet over a fence at slow speed. Could do with radio — LORA
- Arietta - why don’t people support the CSAs? Convenience is going to win for many people. We are habituated to the tech so the capacity for the person to maintain attention has gone down. Technology itself has changed our brains. We have to look at human connection as infrastructure and technology.
- On CSAs, waste and guilt. The anonymous thing makes waste easier.
- Kirsten - Also time — during the pandemic we had so much more time. Cooking takes time. Feeding yourself is constant. How much of our individualism is just a U.S. thing and how much is that present in other places?
- B - Sweden is all about community. Don’t stick out too much. All of the drawbacks as well. How do we take them both into the future:
- Two take-aways — seeds are the most basic and important technology we have and human relationships are infrastructure.
- Conversation about how resilience works directly in a crisis vs when things go back to “normal”
