E L A I N E R E G I N A
URBANISATION IS ONE OF THE MANY CAUSES TO DEFORESTATION.
Cities are often expanding to forested areas and urbanisation puts pressure on forests to produce more animal and processed food products leading to more clearing of forests to provide land for feed and building infrastructure to cater to the growing population (Jones, 2010).
Source: Global Forest Watch
FOR developing NATIONS, climate change IS A day to day REALITY
Especially as someone who lives in Jakarta, Indonesia where flooding is a common occurence, Jakarta is expected to sink in 2050. The government has decided to move and is currently constructing a new capital city in Borneo Island, expected to be completed by 2024. However, the unsustainable effect of “building” cities include negative environmental practices like massive wildfires for land clearing and native species losing their habitat due to deforestation.
Source: BBC
Source: Symbiome
Source: Bloomberg
Source: ati
Source: CNBC Indonesia
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Jakarta is sinking due to various factors. Seawalls in Jakarta designed to protect the city are falling at an estimated 25cm a year, due to subsidence (Lyons, 2019). Excessive extraction of groundwater for daily consumption due to lack of supply of piped water has caused Jakarta’s ground level to plummet.
Coupled with Jakarta’s dense population, and constant property development, of new apartment blocks, shopping malls and even government offices 40% of Jakarta especially in the northern area has dipped under the sea level (Voiland, 2019). With the additional effect of sea level rising from climate change, every time heavy rain occurs, the area is increases in the risk of a catastrophic flooding.
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Jakarta is moving its capital city to Kalimantan in Borneo Island. The relocation is to relieve the economical burden in Jakarta as it houses 60% of the country’s population and more than half of its economic activity.
Moreover the city is struggling under heavy environmental burdens like poor air quality and heavy flooding (Lyons, 2019).
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Borneo is the largest island in Asia filled with dense rainforests and is home to 221 species of land-living mammals like the native Orangutan, 420 species of birds, 15,000 species of flowering plants and 3,000 species of trees
Deforestation in Borneo has taken place on an industrial scale since the 1960s for Palm Oil Production and currently to empty land for the new capital; thus endagering the local biodiversity as well as the indigenous caretakers (Fleming, 2020).
Modern technology makes our lives easier, but its reliance on excessive consumption comes at a great cost to our planet. Where modern technology equates progress with the dissociation of nature, Indigenous methods, rich with traditional and cultural ecological knowledge, instead works alongside nature.
Developed countries forefronting capitalism are the lead contributors to climate change (Center for Global Development, 2015), however we can’t deny the positive technological advances that have shaped our lives. Meanwhile, developing countries who experienced the worst effects of climate change & after effects of colonisation produce less emissions overall, and are the lowest contributors to the environmental damage the world is facing at the moment (Sommer, 2021). These developing countries are still strongly practicing traditions & past knowledge of their ancestors that are rooted in tending and working together with the environment (Watson, 2019).
As such, a good balance is required. Where modern inventions respect the sacred knowledge of the past that honors the earth. Where there is no disconnection of system between the old and new.
This is “ancient future technology” for me.
CONCEPT:
Inspired by living structures built in Indonesia like Jembatan Akar of the Baduy Tribe and Bunut Bolong in Bali, I am proposing a future speculative scenario where humans live inside a forest of 3D printed houses that are digitally fabricated to host and grow the local living trees; as well how diverse local organisms can symbiotically and systematically co-exist in an arboreal landscape.
