Rooted in Place: A review of Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson

Recently I tried to find a citation for the expression “the same thinking that got you into a problem won’t get you out of it,” which is generally ascribed to Albert Einstein. But as I dug deeper I found the original is impossible to trace. Einstein’s putative expression is pertinent to Julia Watson’s important new book, Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, because she offers new, but old, thinking, but also because it’s about knowledge passed on by word of mouth, with mythological origins. With a multi-faceted environmental emergency pressing hard on human civilisation, the thinking of modernity that caused these crises is indeed being mobilised again to fix them, and geoengineering, in particular, has the potential to precipitate an even bigger crisis. A key problem in this type of thinking is its singularity. It’s an attempt to analyse and work with factors that have been segregated by science into silos but that actually interact in highly specific, complex ways that cross disciplinary boundaries, a common feature now of project and research teams.