Word: teche
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Even the most celebrated technologies of the past are now regarded as low tech. Take the Panama Canal, an unparalleled feat of human vision, perseverance and engineering 85 years ago. Standing at the mouth of the canal, in the northern port city of Colon, peering out at the cargo ships, you get an overwhelming sense that you're witnessing an archaic process. Heavy ships traversing the surface of the globe, loaded down with computer parts, petroleum products and Pokemon cards, pause in mid-voyage to pass slowly through the strategically placed Isthmus of Panama before continuing their journey to another...
...coming years, high tech will increasingly look low tech as we solve problems by turning to biology and microscopic particles where we once turned to engineering and information technologies. Today a rig churning and cranking to sop up an oil spill mars an ocean landscape; tomorrow genetically engineered micro-organisms will be sent into the ocean to clean up an oil spill invisibly...
...daily lives, high-tech experiences are increasingly replacing low-tech ones, and if we manage to design every square inch of the planet, then every experience will be a simulated one. Nature museums are cropping up in urban centers, a clear signal that the environment is in as much need of preservation as are arrowheads, shields and shuttle looms. Simulation has become the most popular experience in modern American culture. A North American child may play his snowboarding video four times a week, but he whizzes down a mountain only four days a year...
...clean water, unstoppable viruses, flooding, global warming (or cooling), a vanishing natural environment and mass extinction. Meanwhile, technology promises to solve these problems--feed the world, eliminate industrial waste, clean up the environment, predict climates and earthquakes, reduce human suffering and extend human life. In the short run, low tech will not replace high, if only because we need increasingly sophisticated technologies to solve the very problems technology created...
...long run, however, low tech may endure. Terry Erwin, a research entomologist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution, thinks in terms of millions of years. Humans may be the most successful species on the planet after the insects, Erwin says, but we have triggered a global species extinction that rivals those caused by ice ages, floods and killer asteroids--with a difference. "Those extinctions were more or less local, zonal or regional," says Erwin. "The present trend, the so-called sixth massive extinction process, is worldwide and atmospheric, totally pervasive...