Sowing seeds of sustainability
Written by Gina Rushton
Photography by Clement Pascal
Australian-born, New York City-based architect Julia Watson wants the world to know that ancient Indigenous wisdom might be just what we need to fight the climate crisis
What if instead of building a bridge, you could grow it?
For hundreds of years in the subtropical terrain of Meghalaya, in India’s north-east, the Khasi indigenous community has been training rubber fig trees to form bridges across flooding rivers. They plant Ficus elastica saplings, wait for the trees to develop strong sturdy roots and then another decade for them to sprout flexible secondary aerial roots which Khasi builders then weave onto wooden scaffolding over to the other side of the river. It is careful, patient work, on the wettest place on earth. The living bridges, called Jingkieng Jri, produce even more roots to be trained over the river and the threads naturally fuse together to create bonds so strong the structure can withstand the region’s monsoonal rain — which is so heavy that travel between villages can otherwise be cut off by floodwaters.
Meghalaya was one of the first places architect and professor Julia Watson visited while traveling across 18 countries from Iran to Indonesia to document thousands of years of ingenuity in her book Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism. “We tend to think of bridges as really static things,” Julia says. Hearing about the work of the Khasi community shifted Julia’s perspective. “I was like, ‘Wow this is a bridge that I can wrap my arms around, that’s made up of living trees that are responding to their environment.’ And that blew my mind."
Growing up, like many Australians, Julia’s education was sparse when it came to the rich history of First Nations peoples and the finely tuned practices that enabled them to live, build and sustain food sources in harmony with the harsh and varied environments of the country. It was only when Julia began to study architecture at the University of Queensland, and enrolled in a course called ‘Aboriginal Environments’, that her perspective widened and the trajectory of her career shifted.
Until then, in her architecture training, Julia had been encouraged towards unyielding materials like concrete and steel, which barricade humans from the natural world and its increasing instability. But here, she discovered ancient systems that work with, and not against natural phenomena. There are ideas people need to let go of in order to understand and value Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in creating sustainable solutions, she says. It might seem counterintuitive, at a point in history when we can comprehend the impact of anthropogenic activity on the climate crisis, but she refutes the notion that humans are an inherently destructive “plague upon the planet”. But, according to Julia, Lo- TEK isn’t offering ancient solutions for modern problems — it’s simply platforming ideas that have survived through generations and still exist.
“There are thousands of other belief systems that support being incredibly biodiverse and having a very symbiotic relationship with your surroundings,” she says.“What Lo-TEK is saying is we need to go back to creating technologies that work with those cycles and systems, especially working with seasonality and understanding renewal and regeneration.”
Take the Ifugao community in the Philippines, who have built rice terraces using intricate irrigation and farming systems using water from mountaintop forests using techniques that have endured for 2000 years. Or in Peru, where ancient Waru Waru agricultural terraces developed by the Inca successfully protect crops from environmental changes even thousands of feet above sea level. “If a technology that has stayed with civilization for 5000 years it probably works,” she says. “We have evolved with [these technologies] because they were good for us and worked with our environments.” A tenet of colonialism used to justify invasion, especially in Julia’s birth country of Australia where Europeans relied on a notion of terra nullius or land belonging to no one, is a perceived absence of agriculture. “ Colonisation was allowed to happen because of the idea that if land wasn’t used for agriculture by the community it wasn’t owned and therefore could be taken,” she says. But a growing body of evidence indicates that this was not the case at all. “First Nations communities were doing large scale agricultural, pastoral and land management activities for 40,000 or 50,000 years.”
“If a technology that has stayed with civilization for 5000 years it probably works,” she says. “We have evolved with [these technologies] because they were good for us and worked with our environments.”
Julia was back in Australia, from her now home in New York City, when the country was on fire in the 2019-2020 bushfire season, which experts agreed was made longer and deadlier by climate change. She watched on from Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach as hazardous smoke billowed down the east coast of the country. In the wake of the devastation, a national conversation was reignited about Indigenous land management practices in which preventative burning is used to stave off bigger, more deadly blazes.
"The idea that we just don't believe Indigenous and First Nations communities were technologists in any form is something that we need to unlearn.” Julia writes that, in an era of ever-advancing technology, “we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom especially in the face of a worsening climate crisis." Learning from communities that live in ways that use fewer resources and create smaller carbon footprints seems obvious. In the southern wetlands of Iraq the Ma-dan people wove islands and cathedral-like houses from a single species of plant using a technique more than 6,000 years old. In Benin the Tofinu tribe has developed the largest lake city in Africa using modern and traditional techniques where the stilted houses are surrounded by thousands of fish paddocks. She has studied the network of fish ponds, called bheris, in Kolkata’s eastern edge where fish are fed half the city’s output of raw sewage every day. The system produces fish, treats wastewater, fertilises nearby rice fields and keeps local fishermen employed.
“People are incredibly receptive to these low impact systems built with low embodied energy materials because people can see the extreme amount of waste around them,” Julia says. As the world warms and scientists warn there are more extreme weather events on the horizon it would be easy to dismiss ancient systems as unfit for the unprecedented times we find ourselves in. But Julia says their longevity is due to the fact that they were engineered to endure climate extremes.
“These communities have been dealing with massive changes — whether that’s water scarcity, tidal fluctuations, drought or floods,” she says. Indigenous peoples account for just over six per cent of the global population but are custodians of more than a third of the world’s most important regions for biodiversity, 42 per cent of which has been found to be in good ecological condition.
Although many of these ideas were developed hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, Julia does not see embracing Lo-TEK as “looking backwards” because these are not solutions from the past but in fact solutions from the present that have endured until the present day. “What Lo-TEK is saying is we need to go back to creating technologies that work with those cycles and systems and that work with seasonality and understanding renewal and regeneration,” he said. “It is countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.”
“We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom especially in the face of a worsening climate crisis."
Julia has created a Lo-TEK curriculum that helps school students learn about indigenous technologies and practices but she has been contacted by adults from around the globe from non-profits in South Africa to traditional communities in northern Siberia who want to learn more. When we speak, Julia has just attended the premier of Our Blue World, from the creators of the Netflix documentary Brave Blue World, which explores how humans can rebalance the planet’s water systems. She is currently working on her own docuseries with Peruvian-Australian Nathalie Kelley (The Vampire Diaries, Dynasty, The Fast & Furious franchise) who found LO-TEK a useful concept in understanding her heritage. Julia says that Nathalie told her that the book was the first thing she’d read that affirmed everything she had considered “special” about being indigenous as a kid, despite how other people tried to make her feel.
“These kinds of ideas are being catapulted and given platforms that they always should have had, on a larger scale,” she says. “Once it gets large enough it is going to create an impact.” Through the course of Julia’s research she was excited to discover that so many of the communities she was looking into had made similar discoveries at around the same historic time periods, despite never having shared these discoveries or progress with each other. “These technologies were simultaneously occurring around the globe in communities that had never spoken to each other, but had experienced the same climate catastrophes,” she says. “There’s an optimal way to respond sustainably in communication with nature.”
“What Lo-TEK is saying is we need to go back to creating technologies that work with those cycles and systems and that work with seasonality and understanding renewal and regeneration”
Julia is excited about the current connections solidifying across the globe between people from disparate disciplines, all of whom are interested in braiding ancient wisdom with modern knowledge to find solutions to the problems that plague us all. “Nature communicates all of the time,” she says. “Indigenous communities have found a means of translating all of those discussions and communications and yarns and talks and debates that are happening around us all the time that we are deafened to in the way that we live.” Hally War, a farmer who belongs to the Khasi tribe, learned how to grow the living root bridges from his grandfather. When interviewed for Atlas Obscura he said the construction was his life’s purpose and he dreamed about it day and night. “I will keep working on this bridge for as long as I can stand, and I will keep teaching my sons and grandsons so they can continue my work once I am gone,” he said. “And I will plant a seed of the diengjri [the species of tree] myself, so that one day someone from my offspring may grow a bridge when the time is ripe.”
The roots of the diengjri become thicker and stronger each year, forming bonds that will outlive us all.