Ep. 228: Lo-TEK’s Julia Watson on Applying Indigenous Knowledge to Climate-Adaptive Design
Julia Watson, a landscape architect, author, and educator, developed a passion for global cultures and knowledge as a child in Australia, inspired by her parents' National Geographic collection. She has since dedicated her career to exploring traditional knowledge systems and their application to contemporary design challenges like extreme weather, waste management, and population growth.
At the heart of Watson's work is a profound respect for indigenous knowledge systems and a commitment to applying Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to climate-adaptive design. Through her work with Lo-TEK, including the recently launched Lo-TEK Office for Intercultural Urbanism, and her books, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism and the upcoming Lo-TEK Water (November 30 release), she strives to facilitate the equitable exchange and implementation of indigenous knowledge and technology to the crucial and complex challenges of our evolving world.
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Learn more about Julia and at her website or instagram, and check out Lo-TEK: Water (available to pre-order).
Julia Watson: We’re not losing biodiversity, what we’re actually losing is technology that support all of the biodiversity across the globe.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Julia Watson - a designer, consultant, award-winning educator, and bestselling author redefining the future of climate-resilient design through Indigenous knowledge systems. A leading expert in nature-based technologies, she coined Lo—TEK —a design philosophy grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), reciprocity, and intercultural co-design. Her work bridges ancient practices and future innovation to advance a more inclusive and sustainable planetary design ethic. She is the author of Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism and the forthcoming Lo—TEK Water, A Field Guide for TEKnology. Her books have become seminal works in the field, challenging dominant narratives around sustainability and offering Indigenous and local knowledge as essential solutions to today’s ecological crises.Her thought leadership has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, BBC, CNN, Wallpaper, and many more. She is a TED speaker, a Long Now presenter, and has consulted for global brands such as NIKE, Cartier, and IKEA on sustainability and future visioning. Here’s Julia…
Julia Watson: My name is Julia Watson, I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I’m a landscape architect, author, educator and somewhat of an activist. I work with a lot of indigenous communities to research their traditional knowledge systems and their application of what is really ancestral knowledge to incredibly contemporary and even futuristic scenarios and situations. And I do that, I think it really actually comes from a really deep fascination with the incredible diversity and beauty of global culture and it’s something that I think I’ve been fascinated with since I was a really young child. I think it might have been inspired by my parents National Geographic collection, which always sat growing and growing with these incredibly vibrant yellow spines that I used to sit hours poring over, looking up and down, up and down spines and travelling across the world. I think I’ve really been on a search to understand the breadth and depth of human experience through understanding and learning and diving deeply into community and culture from all over the globe. And I think it’s really important now, given this homogenizing force that we can call ‘modernism’ or we can call a push towards a dominant culture or universality that is being lost and it’s a real gift what culture offers us and I think we should really embrace it.
Amy: Agreed! And I love that shout-out to National Geographic. They’re the best photography ever, but they really took you inside a place and it’s such an iconic magazine, and a portal, a portal to supercharging your curiosity about the world.
Julia: Yeah, and it was definitely an inspiration, even through the design of my books, National Geographic and the Explorers Club have a beautiful publication as well that, a little bit of a tip of the hat to them.
Amy: (Laughs) I want to start by breaking down the name Lo-TEK and what it means, that’s sort of the name of the body of work that you’re generating. And for our listeners, that’s Lo, L-O, as in ‘local,’ and TEK, as in Traditional Ecological Knowledge. In your words, what is Lo-TEK and why is it important?
Julia: Yeah, I think the first thing to explain is ‘TEK.’ TEK is an acronym for Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and that means, by definition, the cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices and belief systems, of any community. And in my line of work as a designer, architect, landscape architect and an educator, I had been seeing within my profession a real homogenization of what we call ‘technology.’ And really a very US Eurocentric understanding of what technology means in the built environment. However, I’d been always really fascinated with the culture as I was talking about, and I’d done a lot of travel, being an Australian. And really specifically had travelled to spaces where there was often multiple narratives or stories happening in that landscape. And you might call them ‘sacred landscapes,’ but landscapes where there was just a rea attraction by many cultures and there was just many narratives playing out in a landscape. And I was really interested in how stories and narratives and cultures play out in space.
With that investigation, I’d done a lot of travel to really mountains and rivers and places around the world that were sacred and in those places I saw what I thought was technology, as a landscape architect, I’d see a wetland system or a living bridge or an aquaculture system or a floating island community and I was like, whoa, these people are living on water, that’s a technology and why don’t we speak about this because we’re making floating islands for remediation in my profession. Or we’re making landscapes that clean water organically in my profession, biologically. And so when I was experiencing and doing what you might call] these walkabouts or global travels, I really saw that there was this whole ancestral, technological world that I really found that I wanted to expand as a person who was working in the built environment, working in climate and conservation, our breadth of understanding of how we can create climate solutions, built on thousands of years of knowledge, of people who live in a place. So that’s what TEK is, as examples.
Lo, which was the first of the word, is for ‘local,’ and so it’s local traditional ecological knowledge, but Lo-TEK itself is a word I completely made up. It is not a word that is common language, and I made it up because in my profession we were calling these technologies L-O-W dash T-E-C-H, and the actual definition of what that means is primitive and unsophisticated technology. And there’s a whole branch of technology that is L-O-W-T-E-C-H, and it’s often used in humanitarian projects. But what I saw in these…incredibly sophisticated, ecologically sensitive, culturally responsive technologies was not L-O-W-T-E-C-H, but something else, but it hadn’t actually been given a name. And so kind of as a bit of tongue in cheek, it sounds the same, but it’s spelled very differently. It has a very different meaning and it’s built on T-E-K, which is incredibly sophisticated knowledge systems. I came up with this word and said okay, well, let’s call it this, let’s call the book this. And that has kind of moved on, become a bit of a mainstream term at this point.
Amy: You mentioned the book, the first book, which was out in 2019, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism. That book made a big splash and your next book, Lo-TEK Water is due out soon. Both books champion this traditional ecological knowledge that you’re speaking of, and the incredibly sophisticated systems of land stewardship that, as you mentioned, are ecologically sensitive and culturally responsive. And they’re this knowledge that’s owned, stewarded, held, but these indigenous communities based on thousands of years of wisdom that they’ve amassed. And also very notably these systems, as you point out in all of your work, have a kind of essential, reciprocal relationship built into them, that is part and parcel of the system. And so I’d love to just illustrate what some of those systems are. You’ve talked about floating islands and wetland systems; maybe can you get a little more granular and take one specific system that we should be paying attention to right now that might help with floods or fires or a lot of the pressing concerns of the climate emergency?
Julia: Yeah, one of the systems, and you find this type of system across the globe in all different types of wetland contexts, it’s an aquaculture system and it’s not just aquaculture is fish farming. These aquaculture systems, which are usually informal types of systems, one of them I’ll talk about is the East Kolkata Wetlands, as you might be able to tell by the name, it sits on the fringes of the city of Kolkata in India. And Kolkata is a city of about 15 million people. And so on the edges of the city of Kolkata there is a wetland system that has been adapted by fish farmers, about 350 really large fish ponds. And what this system does is the waste water that comes from the center of the city of Kolkata doesn’t have any form of formal waste water treatment, so it’s really going in to the river systems. It’s getting diluted, but it’s going in dirty and it stays in that river system dirty. And then it enters the Bay of Bengal, which is their natural estuary that goes up out to the sea. And really high nutrient loaded, sewerage ridden, polluted water going into that environment can have really disastrous impacts on lots of different marine life. And along the way it’s pretty disastrous as well.
So what’s happening is these very informal, this is not a really old system, it’s 150 years, this system is actually cleaning the city’s water, about 60-70% of the city’s water every single day so that when it moves through this system and it provides food for the fish that are within this system, the fish are actually cleaning the water, as well as algae and sunshine and bacteria. So it’s a really biological, diverse biological system that takes about 30 days to clean the water before it enters the Bay of Bengal. So it’s going into the bay actually quite clean. So at the same time that fish is being used to then provide fish to the residents of the city of Kolkata. So the city of Kolkata is then eating that fish that’s producing in that system. There’s also rice fields and agricultural fields all around this system. So this particular informal waste water aquaculture treatment system is providing a significant amount of food, both protein and vegetables and grains to the actual city of Kolkata. It sits right on the fringe of the city, it’s ribboned by highways, it’s like next to one of the big smoking escarpment of the cities trash and it’s doing all these really informal services for the city. It’s estimated that it saves the city about $21 million in operating costs if it was to run a formal waste water treatment system, which is crazy.
Amy: Right!
Julia: And so it’s doing this incredible municipal service for the city. It provides 80,000 informal jobs for the residents of the city and not only that, if you think in these really much larger terms of climate resilience, it’s sequestering carbon, it’s cleaning water, it’s providing habitat for lots of different species, migratory bird species, lots of amphibians and insects. And it’s also, bringing water back into your underground waterways and aquifers. So it has all these much larger environmental services that it’s providing, apart from municipal and food and water security services. So that in itself, and that type of a system you can see replicated all over the world. It creates somewhat of a circular system, whereas the city’s residents and their poop is providing food for the fish and the fish are providing clean water and the byproducts of the fish, which is clean water irrigating crops and rice and giving food back to the city. So a really big circular cycle.
But then at the macro level it creates these big impacts. It also lowers ambient air temperature in that area and changes localized weather patterns. So it has this really incredible impact and those are the types of informal systems that are biological. And actually this is the kicker about this system. So Kolkata city has exploded in its growth in the last 40 years, by 400%. So the city’s population has changed expanded really, really quickly. The system has been able to expand at the same capacity as the city to provide the same service for these same amount of people over that 40 years, because as more sewerage comes in, the fishermen just keep on expanding. So it’s a completely adaptable system, as well as providing flood protection for the city as well. We can go on and on. (Laughs)
Amy: Yeah, I would love for you to go on and on! I want to hear about another example, that’s just so powerful to think of, how it’s working with all of the natural forces in the area, in concert, in symphony.
Julia: Yeah. Yeah. One of the examples that I’m going to give you, which is… I think one of the more fascinating examples, just because of its form it’s on the front cover of the first book and it’s called The Living Root Bridges. And it’s these bridges that are grown by a community called the Khasi. And the Khasi people live in the Jaintia Hills in north east India and they live in a really remote area that is very… the terrain is off the charts. I think I walked down 3,000-4,000 steps to get down into one of ravines to walk between the villages when I visited there. And in the season of the monsoon, obviously there’s these torrentially, fast-flowing rivers that run through this landscape and what that does is cuts off all the different villages of the Khasi, so they can’t travel between villages.
Amy: Okay?
Julia: So to overcome this they have been growing living root bridges out of a very specific tree called the ficus elastica which features in their origin story. In their origin story the Khasi actually came down a ladder of this similar type of tree from the heavens and then came to earth on this tree. So this tree is very sacred to the Khasi. And they create these living bridges by planting two trees, saplings, on either side of a river that takes years and years. So a grandfather might plant these seeds. His son might continue to tend these plants until they’re growing into trees, and then the community will create a bamboo bridge structure. And once the roots, the secondary root system, they hang from the big boughs of this particular fig tree. They weave those root systems through this bamboo bridge, this scaffolding that they’ve created, and they keep on looking after these trees and tending these trees. And so maybe then the grandson of the man who first planted those trees, he’ll be the one to eventually plant the opposing roots from a tree into the other side of the bank so that those trees actually are living across the river and planted in the opposing bank.
And then over time, because these trees and their roots are growing together and becoming tangled, there’s this phenomenon called inosculation where those trees actually become eventually one living organism. And so they’re the only bridges that can actually withstand the forces of these monsoonal rains. Every other bridge gets knocked out, concrete bridges, wire bridges, everything. So these are the only species because they’re alive and the tree roots are really so deep embedded into the banks of those rivers. And there you want to go through all the great services that those bridges are doing, those trees are sucking up the water table to keep the water table high. They’re providing anti-erosion for the banks of that corridor. They’re allowing the community to cross in between these bridges and they don’t just have a single bridge, they have a double decker bridge, they have a triple decker bridge, they create living root ladders because they have their fields at an elevation that’s much higher to where they live and so they grow ladders and they climb up ladders to go to their groves and collect their food.
And so there’s all these different kinds of permutations of the way they use these ficus elastica trees for transportation and travel between all the different sites within their landscape. The other thing is, these trees are just alive and so I remember being there and wrapping my arms around these incredibly large boughs that formed the buttress of this bridge. And then knocking on it… when you knock on steel it’s just like a dull clang, but then you knock on the side of this truss and it just echoes and it’s alive. And so they get stronger with age and they’ll last for about 500 years. And so these bridges are just like nothing that we have in any other place that are created with concrete and steel and the traditional modernist material or that we use in everyday urbanism.
Amy: So much of our modern experience with materials is mine it from the earth, cut it down, then use it…
Julia: Super extractive.
Amy: Super extractive, but to imagine a building material that stays alive and gets stronger because it’s connected to the earth, and actually only really works because of the deep root system, it’s so powerful. So then those trees continue doing all the service that trees do anyway cleaning the air and…
Julia: Providing habitat for birds and animals and…
Amy: Yeah, that’s so incredible! One more example, what have you seen in terms of managing or stewarding land with regard to fires?
Julia: So with fires, pyro technology or cultural burning, I’m from Australia originally, so it’s something that is deeply a part of the country where I call home. I haven’t written about the Australian cultural burning practices in my books, but I do talk about the Americas and their practices. And you’ll find that fire farming, we can call it, is a practice that you find actually across the globe. But in the Americas… there’s one particular example that you could find by a community who live in the Amazon called the Kayapo. And they create these gardens called ‘apetes forest gardens.’ The Kayapo are an incredibly, I think, well-known community of people because they have actually protected the largest contiguous area of Amazon that is still in existence today. It’s the size of Kentucky,. I believe it’s 24,000 acres of contiguous land. And they have this relationship where they will find a piece of land and they’ll want to create a village and they create concentric rings to create this village. And they have all these different ways of burning the forest which is cool burning. And they do this knowing exactly what to burn, when to burn and how to burn and within that burn area what to plant at different times to regenerate. And they’re regenerating soil through the ash, because in the Amazon most of the nutrients are really stored up in the actual canopy of the forest.
But they’ve been doing this over thousands and thousands of years, so burning the forest and creating these incredibly rich black soils for quite a while. And so the Kayapo actually make their villages by using this burning process and then planting different types of species of plants and agricultural plants within that space. And then every so often have a cycle of time. They’ll move that village to another site and so that site will be allowed to regenerate. And they’ll also have different sites. They have war gardens and medicine gardens and the war gardens, they call them ‘war garden’s but they’re really for when travelling through the landscape, if you want to stop and you’re a long distance from your village, they’ll track where these supply gardens are, so they can go and collect food and firewood and medicinal plants in different places.
You might think of the Amazon is like a wild landscape. It’s not wild. All of this area, all of this dense forest is cultivated and managed and stewarded and protected and really done in a relationship, like you said, of reciprocity. And it’s done with the intention of supporting life for multiple generations. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful key intentions of all of these types of systems and I think you pointed out really well, they’re not extractive, they’re really regenerative. They’re based upon this reciprocity that happens over time. And the intention is not just to create food gardens for people, it’s to build the soil so that the soil is healthy. It’s to give food for other animals, it’s to create spaces and have for other animals… the Kayapo actually have a really incredible relationship with bees. They live with bees, in ceremony they paint themselves with the markings of insects and it’s to honor all of those relationships that they value the most, which are these relationships that they have with bees and insects. They actually use different types of ants to help them when they’re making all these gardens.
And so there’s this really incredible relationship with lots of different species. And so they see themselves as custodians of not just human life, but this relationship is… and the belief systems of these communities is really… these systems and these technologies are in support of all life. And they’re regenerative. And I think we’re not losing biodiversity, and that’s like the one-liner. What we’re actually losing is technology that support all of the biodiversity across the globe. And we know that indigenous communities are the greatest supporters of biodiversity on this earth and it’s their technologies that do that.
Amy: That’s incredibly powerful to think about. It also just highlights how western, Eurocentric, US centric thinking there’s such a big disconnect between humans and nature and the rest of nature, it’s like we’ve separated ourselves and we conduct all of this urbanism and manufacturing in order to serve humans without regard really…With the rest of the ecosystem that we’re a part of.
Julia: Yeah.
Amy: How that disconnect maybe has actually made me feel like a bit of soul lost or an emptiness that is not good for humanity and how we might be able to, through the work that you’re doing and through other ways, how we might be able to bit-by-bit restore that connection. And I think a big key to that is acknowledging these technologies and all of their many benefits and how all living systems benefit within them and therefore all of the ripple experiences from them serve everyone.
Julia: Yeah, and as like a person who has a love for design and trying to understand cities and city making, I think it really goes back to the idea of… at the end of the 18th century this idea of modernism was to build cities like machines…and it was because it was being… the sort of machine idea of modernism was to create the greatest efficiency and that was like, wow, that’s the most innovative thing that could happen, because we have all these extractive materials and we can build sky-scrapers and we can concretize and we can have cars and we can be… it was all about efficiency and speed and that’s what innovation meant. And now, fast-forward, we’re at a point where we see the complete chaos, that mindset has created environmentally. And so that extractive machine, modernist thinking that was really part of colonization and empire, that’s why we can see that climate and colonization is so, so intertwined.
Amy: Yeah.
Julia: And so think what we’re seeing is like in response to that, what’s the alternative to that? We have examples within every single country, every single region across the globe, that are still working. That are regenerative. That are the opposite to that extractive machine-like mindset. That are really deeply connected with people and planet and place. And all we have to do is open our eyes and really think of innovation in a different way and imagine how we can create something different. And even just put those examples into the general imagination of all the incredible urbanists and policymakers and mayors and architects and then we’re working with something that will lead us somewhere really positive.
Amy: Yes, the way to encourage that perspective shift is to plant the seeds, the water of the imagination with the examples of what’s already here, what’s already working. That’s essentially the premise of the work you’re doing at Lo-TEK Office for Intercultural Urbanism.
Julia: Yes.
Amy: Can you tell me about what it is, what it does, what that looks like in practicality?
Julia: Yeah. I mean over the years since Lo-TEK was first published along with having two children and writing another book, what came about is the creation of Lo-TEK Institute which is education and advocacy arm of what I call the Lo-TEK ecosystem. So you have the books, you have the institute, this is a curriculum that I’ve created with one of my co-founders that is used to educate people about climate literacy that’s based on ancestral, nature-based solutions. So thatthree year curriculum, it is being implemented in schools, high schools around the world, and universities. It’s also being implemented in global corporations and organizations, conservation organizations. So part of the work that I’m doing is education and advocacy. I’ve been an educator for many years. But happening in a very grassroots way. So really teaching climate literacy through the lens of all the dismissed voices and histories, of all these communities around the globe. And then Lo-TEK Office of Intercultural Urbanism is a new organization that I’ve been forming recently around the work that’s coming out of the next book, which is an organization that’s led by indigenous and non-indigenous designers and scientists. We are guided by a majority indigenous advisory circle of practitioners. And really trying to model everything that is encompassed in all the work that I do.
So we have this education advocacy. We have all these precedents and research, how are we really, in the best, most respectful and most reciprocal way, creating an office of design and science and research that together you can co-create the model for future cities and for future policy and for future technology. And so my two partners in London and one advisory and collaborator here in the States as well, all women, and we’re really just working in that space as sort of an expert providing services of advisory, studies, research, design advisory. One of my co-founders, she’s actually a Green chemist and so really on that material scale all the way up to the infrastructural city-making scale. And the office has really solidified a number of ideas that I’ve put on paper in this forthcoming book, in this really final section called Future Directions. Where I sat down and really started to think about, what have I learned about urbanism? And by that word ‘urbanism’ I mean urbanism can happen on an island, in a village, in a rural landscape or in a city. It’s not just focused on city; it’s really sort of like this idea of progress or land transformation.
And we’re trying to guide that in a way that that transformation is not just facilitating a couple of wealthy few, it’s facilitating the next several generations and the whole idea is that we can transform our landscapes. We can envision progress. We’re humans, are a critical part of creating really vibrant, really healthy and regenerative landscapes. And so we’re trying to model how indigenous and non-indigenous communities can create that type of applied research and design on the ground.
Amy: Wonderful, that sounds like exactly what we need, it’s sort of like the living bridge between this modernist mindset that we know is not functioning anymore and this indigenous wisdom, but we do need a way to interface and we do need a way to interpret it and imply it. And to not do it from a position of extraction, which also requires its own systems, which I know you’re working on and I want to talk to you about. What types of clients are you serving at the Office?
Julia: I’ve been working with international governments, usually within agriculture, tourism, culture, I work with private corporations usually, larger corporations that are really looking at systemic change, product… organizations that deliver product. That are looking for changes in their systems and their value chain. For example, if you have a company that has built a multigenerational legacy around a particular type of product that might be petrochemical based, how are they going to transition to a biomaterial product? What would that look like? And how do you leverage in a similar way to how these particular examples that you see in Lo-TEK, how do you leverage that in contemporary value chains? For one example I always talk about the Ma’dan people, they live on floating islands in the southern wetlands of Iraq. They use one particular species of reed to create their floating islands, their houses, their boats, they feed that reed to their buffalo, they eat it in their bread. Everything in this particular community is made out of this species of reed. And what they do is they take that species of reed and they layer it to make these floating islands that stay afloat for 25 years. They make it into columns, they make it into rafters, they weave it into roofing and walls and then they twist it into twine to create the fixing system that actually holds all their buildings up.
So they’re so versatile in the way that they think about a material and use it in every single way. And that’s creating an incredible system from like the material all the way up to the infrastructure. In the same way of that thinking, how do you create a biomaterial, one example from a study that we were doing was using kelp. Kelp which you can grow in underwater forests in your coastal regions, which usually have a relationship to a community that support underwater biodiversity, that’s really fast growing, that sequesters carbon, it’s a bio up taker, so it cleans water as it grows. You can use that. And now we see kelp, we see it being used in burgers, we see it being used in food sources, it’s definitely used as a fertilizer. It has potential to be used in the construction industry. We also see it used in agriculture as fodder. But it also has an incredible potential for biofuel, for bioplastics, for glues, for fire retardants, for packaging, for color. And so working with a particular client, what do we do when we think about changing an extractive petrochemical based product that you’re making and replace that with kelp? What type of incredible impact can you have, like these systems have, like all the services that these systems have, on that singular material scale in a production cycle for a client that has a really big industry, that would then lead to much larger adoption throughout that industry.
It’s kind of like this concept called Industrial Symbiosis, that’s what I base a lot of this work with a particular corporate client on. But it’s really fascinating when you get into the weeds of like literally creating a new ecosystem for a company based on an amazing product like kelp, which I really, before I was working on this, I had no idea. I was like yeah, kelp make burgers… I mean it does so much more.
Amy: That is fascinating to think about, if a major manufacturing industry adopted a system like this and was able to put it into motion, which then created further adoption in that industry, which then was another domino that tipped and we got further adoption in other industry…
Julia: That’s the big one. The multistakeholder relationships that you can form. If you could get a clothing company to then create a relationship with a biofuel company, then you’ve got these multistakeholder relationships between industries that can really push a new frontier for R&D on a product like kelp.
Amy: That gives me hope! (Laughter)
Julia: What I’ve been dying to say all the way through we’ve been talking, this is already happening. So I know folk in allied industries and colleagues and friends who are already doing this. It’s sometimes on the down low because we have things like legal and marketing that are really scared about talking about some of these things out in the open. (Laughs) But I know that this is happening. And then on the urbanism front, in my next book, the front half of the next book is very similar to the first book where it’s ancestral case studies from around the globe. The second half of the next book is contemporary projects. They can be architecture, they can be urbanism, they can be materials, and conservation projects where traditional ecological knowledge is really the foundation of that design. So I went and interviewed architects and landscape architects and universities who I found that were really interested in traditional ecological knowledge, or in locations where I thought they might be observing and using some of the traditional ecological knowledge, practices as inspiration. So sponge city, which might be a model for urban development and water infrastructure that you know of, sponge city is really prolific in China. So sponge city is a concept that was developed by an incredible landscape architect, his name is Kongjian Yu and he has an office called Turenscape, he’s in China. And he developed this system that is really about creating a space for water in a city to sit. Not just water in a city to sort of run out of that landscape as quickly as possible through channels and corridors and underground tunnels and everything else that we do in cities, but really giving rivers and wetlands and spaces where water is traditionally supposed to be, space to sit, space to absorb, space to be filtered. And he does this in really intense urban environments. And so Kongjian has two projects that I feature. One of them is a Sanya Mangrove Park and another one is his fish tail parks; I think it’s Nanchang Fish Tail Parks and both of them are in China. And his projects are inspired by traditional Han and Hani types of [poldodike 0:42:29] systems. And so [poldodike?] is like pond and berm. And in these different types of projects that he does, he will plant mangroves in one if it’s kind of like a brackish, brine’y environment, or in another he’s like fresh water ponds, and they’re food producing, they are creating space for biodiversity, they’re recreational spaces, they’re cleaning water. They’re doing these multiple services and it’s the most successful urban water resilience projects that we have on earth. So with that point, you can see that we’re already doing this.
Amy: Yes, okay, and those are recent construction, right?
Julia: In the last 10 years.
Amy: Yes, that’s so exciting! And what I’ve learned from looking into that is that when water hits suddenly, in terms of flash flooding or levees, we’re not trying to hold it back with levees or dams, we’re not trying to have it drain off when water levels are rising, so it’s not really… it doesn’t really have anywhere to go. We’re trying to take the force of it and disperse it, and spread it out…
Julia: Yeah, giving it space to spread and do its thing.
Amy: Yeah! So instead of it knocking over things, it has a path to go be absorbed and then while it’s there it’s fostering biodiversity and filtering and it’s doing all the things that water should do for us. And what’s so powerful about it, and what you talk about so eloquently is, it’s about working with water instead of against it. And so much of our existing structures come from that mindset of dominating over nature.
Julia: Yeah.
Amy: And it’s like a battle of man versus nature, which is…
Julia: We’re not going to win it, because nature is getting stronger and more forceful, the more we dominate, she’s responding.
Amy: But also how arrogant, right? (Laughter)
Julia: The superiority complex, I talk about in my first book, is well and alive. (Laughter)
Amy: But this concept of working with a natural force, something that you know is going to happen, something that we’ve witnessed over and over again, how can we work with it instead of against it? How can we work together, when this happens, how can it possibly be good for us?
Julia: Yeah..
Amy: Is such a powerful… and ultimately more efficient way of working with nature and when it comes down to it, manufacturing.
Julia: Yeah. And I always talk about the water has memory. Water is in conversation with us. It’s showing us its pathways, it’s warning us about where we should build and where we shouldn’t build. It’s always telling us, water is a holder of life, always has been. And in so many indigenous communities water, this relationship of kinship with water, a family of really, really close connection… we’ve lost this connection with nature, but we’ve lost this connection with water. And I talk about really what you’re describing is remembering, like allowing cities and rivers and landscapes to remember the pathways of water. And allowing, as a designer, for that remembrance, to be acknowledged and to build that into the way that we design. Because ultimately that’s what’s going to protect us against disastrous flooding or incredible, blistering heat or dry or… you know, really that memory of what the landscape wants to do, rather than forcing it and contorting it into these ridiculous types of infrastructures that it eventually will just break. That’s where we want to be.
Amy: Hallelujah! Yes, amen!
Julia: Yeah!
Amy: There is a sort of dirty history of extraction and colonial, imperial ways of just exploiting people and communities that isn’t going to work anymore.
Julia: Yeah.
Amy: Shouldn’t be anymore. In your work what kinds of systems and designs and relationships are you working on to help engage with this indigenous wisdom from a place of non-appropriation or non-extractive… or even just like great, that’s a really good idea, I’m going to use it, I’m going to profit from it and then we’re not in reciprocation with you. We’re also going to take this body of knowledge and do our thing with it and we’re not going to… it’s not going to grow as part of your body of knowledge. I mean it’s so rife with potentially problematic relations, but I know that’s a verybig area of focus for you. So what does that look like?
Julia: Yeah, I mean yes, traditionally there’s been extreme exploitation or erasure of knowledge. And in my work my understanding of how to protect the work from going down those pathways and avenues and really being respectful and reciprocal in the relationships that I engage within, in writing I always work with community as co-author. And so that’s a really long and involved and engaged process. And there are lots of different guides and ways that you can read about the guidelines published by different communities on how to actually interact with communities in a reciprocal and respectful way, that communities will, in their own terms, guide. But in the first instance it’s really about consent and it’s really about engaging in a way where you’re understanding that the community has knowledge. Often a community really understands that knowledge, not in a western way of ownership…
Amy: Like a patent… (Laughs)
Julia: No! No! Well, the knowledge is owned by everybody, it’s community and it’s been passed on from multiple, multiple generations. And the intention of that knowledge, as I said, it’s really to protect multiple generations of life. And that’s why these systems work for 13,000 years, for 6,000 years, because the intention, and those relationships are built into that knowledge. I have a friend, she’s a colleague, she wrote the forward to my next book, and we talk about this quite often. And her name is Dr Lyla June Johnston, she’s an amazing scientist and activist, she’s Diné. And she says if a technology really isn’t used with the same intentions that it was designed for by community and it’s used for extractive, profit-driven purposes, just see how long that technology is going to work.
Amy: It won’t.
Julia: It just won’t continue. And she also says, as an indigenous woman, she speaks about very similar technologies as I talk about, so we’re very much colleagues. And she’s part of the Lo-TEK Office. She says, the intention is to give these incredible systems to the world to help the world. To move from a pathway that is dark and destructive to a pathway that’s potentially abundant and verdant. If someone is going to take that, and I’m speaking her words, if someone is going to take that knowledge and use it for profit driven, that’s on them.
Amy: Yeah.
Julia: The intention here is to give it in the best way possible, but yes, there are lots of safeguards, paying your consultants and your co-authors and the experts that you work with an actual consultant fee when you’re working with those particular experts. One project I was working on with an engineering company was a project that I was developing for the Barbican Museum in London. We were in the midst of working with three different communities and it was community consulting and engineer consulting because this was an engineering company. And we were going through these processes of designing technologies for the year 2040 based on these traditional systems. And in the midst of this project I woke up one night and I was like, (gasps) I think I’ve opened Pandora’s box because all of the engineers started to say in our workshops, (gasps) “We have a project in Oxford that we could use this,” or, “We’re doing a town that we could use this,” or… and I said, okay, so we are paying our consultants, we’re doing that, but I think that we have to take this a step further.” And exactly like you said, if this is going to be used for profit, and not to create a patent, because a patent is a very western aligned legal system and technology. So to overcome that I worked with a friend of mine who is an intellectual property lawyer and a group of indigenous intellectual property experts. We developed something called an SOU. It’s a legal, technical innovation that is to replace an MOU, which is a Memorandum of Understanding. And SOU is short for Smart Oath of Understanding. So it’s actually an oath that was taken by the CEO of this global engineering office and responded to by the three communities. And it’s quite short, it’s very written very aspirational language. And this oath that is taken and it’s kind of like a promissory oath that outlining how this technology would be used to the benefit of all life. How it would be protected. The ways… sort of offering all of these sorts of frameworks for this reciprocal, respectful engagement.
And the other part of it is we actually transparently encoded on the public blockchain. And a smart oath is using a smart contract and a smart contract is a digital contract, so you actually don’t need teams of lawyers, you encode it onto blockchain and then it can be triggered when these technologies are used and then reparations that are compensation, whatever type of value that that community has placed upon the transference of that knowledge, those compensations can be paid to the community through cryptocurrency. And so it’s really taking a very asymmetrically aligned, western legal system and creating a middleground that’s based on oath making. Which is oral form of knowledge sharing, which is the way indigenous communities actually traditionally share knowledge. And for this particular project, that oath was played in the space where we were showcasing these technologies that we’d developed with community. And so the knowledge that was shared by the community in these workshops with the engineering company is protected in perpetuity for those communities.
Amy: And so the oath applies to anything that comes from that knowledge transfer, right? And it’s attached company-wide, so if that CEO and those engineers move on to other companies, the oath stays with…
Julia: The oath is with the community.
Amy: Right.
Julia: And with the entity, yeah.
Amy: But one hopes that… I mean there’s a whole value to making it a promise, to an actual… from an actual person to another person or a group of people. And one hopes that even if those engineers, that CEO move on to work other places, technically they’re not bound by that oath anymore. But from a human place they are.
Julia: And from an ancestral place, like Lyla June said, it just won’t work. So there’s kind of like this (laughter) other… checks and balances. It is, you hope, promissorily that someone won’t do that, but also the intention is not there. These systems just won’t work for the same amount of time and perpetuity.
Amy: Yeah. That is the ultimate checks and balance, I love your intention. I want to zero in on you personally, if you’re okay with that?
Julia: Yeah.
Amy: This work, you’ve seen so much, you’ve witnessed so many cultures and systems that are doing beautiful things, like symphonies of nature. And you talk a lot about how these systems work with nature as opposed to against it and then that makes me think on a personal level, how has this transferred to your own work with yourself? Like how have you started to recognize your own patterns of resistance? How have you modified your own practices just in terms of processing life, to work with your nature rather than against it?
Julia: Hmm, that’s a good question. My mind goes to, I guess, how I interact with my children and the way I speak to them and what I talk about with them and really how we operate as a family and… I guess in our house we are very low waste. We are incredibly sustainable. We don’t have tissues, we don’t have paper towels, we have washable toilet paper and bidets. We really are trying to minimize toxicity and reduce that in the home as much as possible. My little girl is called Ocean and we’ll be outside and she’ll talk about, “Oh, the wind…” and we talk about the fact that wind has a spirit and she’s like, “Oh, the wind is really blowing,” I’m like, “Well, the spirit of the wind is really forceful today,” and she’s like, “The spirits in the wind.” So we have these stories that really talk about an animation of nature, an animation of the world that you’re experiencing that I try to teach them and try to make them understand that they’re not an object living in isolation and disconnection from their environments. That they’re as much as you can with a two year old and a four year old, they’re really deeply connected to where they are and who they are and the experience that they are having.
I myself, I found after my first pregnancy, postpartum, I’m inherently at heart a researcher and I was trying to figure out, you always think about what happens when you give birth and everything is the focus on the child and after that and what are you doing and how you’re figuring it all out. I think first time moms actually forget that keeping yourself healthy and building up your vitality in yourself is probably the most important thing you can do, because if you get in a bad mindframe or headspace, it can be pretty hard. So for my second child I became my own ayurvedic doula and I found the diet in Ayurveda, the practices of Abhyanga, which is the massage that you give your baby and the massage you give yourself and different breathing exercise, which I think Ayurveda, which is sort of traditional medicinal practices of India, it’s kind of like an ancestral technology or ancestral medicinal technology. And I’m now a practitioner, so I just practice Ayurveda in my everyday life now for the last three years.
And so I think in my world, personally, that’s how I really protect myself and try and understand. And I’m always looking for understandings and different types of ways to see the world and to see your everyday experience of the world through different belief systems and different cultures. And I guess that goes back to my fascination with culture, is that there’s so many understandings about how to do something like postpartum, or childbirth.
Amy: Oh, I bet, yeah.
Julia: That are just specific to a culture or specific to a culture that’s not like a dominant global understanding of culture. That are actually incredible wells of wisdom, that are just like not your standard medicine. And so I sort of am somebody who is always exploring. It’s like the flipside to the mainstream.
Amy: I love that. I can absolutely see you doing that. Having witnessed so many different cultures and your fascination, I’m wondering if it’s had an impact on you in terms of your definition, your understanding of what true wealth is, what true success or what true health is?
Julia: Personally, how I see maybe myself or through this work I have changed, is really that I’m sort of… I’m not an indigenous person, so I’m not a person who can speak for a community or speak for a particular people. But what I can do is try and uplift. And create a space that allows for this ancestral knowledge to be brought into a contemporary context and in the space that I provide or the platform that I provide, bring as many other people and as many other voices into that space, to fill that space with so much more conversation that has been dulled or erased or pushed aside or literally just taken from the surface of the earth into a space where it’s really acknowledged and try as a practitioner to show how it can be done respectfully and reciprocally. So kind of a bit of a guide, I would say.
Amy: Well, that sounds to me like true wealth there, when you can align with a purpose that feels meaningful to you, that is not just serving you, but is ultimately serving all. And to feel like you’re a meaningful contributor to that process.
Julia: Yeah.
Amy: That feels good. (Laughter)
Julia: Yeah, it does. It’s also like I, along the way, I just learn so much all the time. I was having a conversation with one of my friends the other day and we were talking about ecosystem services and I was saying, well, doing an ecosystem service assessment of a particular piece of land, which is what she was doing, and I said, “Oh, are you marking and you’re giving measurements on a scale of how well those ecosystem services are working for those particular farmers?” And she’s like, “No. I was doing it from the indigenous perspective. I was talking about how well those farmers are contributing to the ecosystem service for the rest of the life on that land.” And I was like, of course you were, yeah. (Laughter) Okay, thank you for schooling me in that. Every single time I interact with my advisory council or my friends and my peers and my collaborators, it’s just incredibly ‘aha,’ eye-opening moments, continually, of this is the way you respectfully engage with life. Because frankly, dominant global culture, we’re not taught that.
Amy: No, yeah.
Julia: And so I think, it’s an incredibly privileged position to be able to have these types of conversations and to have friends and colleagues open up to me. And be interested in teaching me these thing.
Amy: That does sound incredibly nutritious, a great way to spend most of your days, just learning and having epiphanies over and over again.
Julia: Yes, yeah. (Laughter)
Amy: Well, thank you so much for the good work that you’re doing.
Julia: Thank you.
Amy: And thank you for sharing it with me and thank you for sharing your story, I really enjoyed talking with you.
Julia: Yeah, me too, thank you.
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: Complete our listener survey at the link in the description. Share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. For a transcript of this episode and more about Julia, including links and images of her work, head to our website. Cleverpodcast. com. While you're there, check out our resources page for books, info, and special offers from our guests, partners, and sponsors, and sign up for our free sub stack newsletter, which includes news announcements and a bonus Q and a from our guests. If you like Clever, we could really use your support. You can share Clever with your friends, leave us a five star rating or a kind review, support our sponsors, and definitely hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X. You can find us at Clever Podcast, and you can find me at Amy Devers. Clever is hosted and produced by me, Amy Devers, with editing by Mark Zurowinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anoushka Stefan, and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround Podcast Network. Visit surroundpodcasts. com to discover more of the architecture and design industry's premier shows.
Julia in the field
Floating farms, Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo
Living Bridge (double decker!), Photo by Pete Oxford
Photo credit: picture alliance/REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
Inle Lake in Myanmar, Floating Garden Fishing Villiage. Photo by Toby Harriman
Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.
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