Imagining a techno-sustainable Palestine
Call me unrealistic, call me naïve: I dream that Palestinians can rebuild their community with sustainable technologies on land that they securely call their own.
First, may every Palestinian have nutrient dense food and clean water, immediately and every day.
May your clinics have sufficient supplies, physicians and nurses. May your children become healers.
May you generate your own energy, access your own water and grow your own nutrient-dense food. Your communications, transportation and banking systems will not depend on Israel’s leaders, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or international supply chains. Palestinians will control these systems, and they’ll be biodegradable. They will not be toxic or emit electromagnetic radiation.
May the late Jerry Mander’s eight attitudes toward technology support your designs.
May forums with Palestinian homemakers, engineers, architects, construction workers and physicians who welcome questions and observations guide what you create. May the world watch in awe as you build a sustainable society.
ENERGY
Avoid large-scale generation (and distribution) powered by fossil fuels, solar PVs or industrial wind turbines. Avoid large-scale battery storage. Go for small systems that keep power and distribution local.
If you electrify homes by solar energy, keep to low-voltage direct current (LVDC) with a 48-volt battery. With direct current, you don’t need inverters to alternating current (AC)—and that saves energy. Use DC appliances commonly used by boats and motor homes.
Solar photo voltaics (PVs) are not perfect. Beware of their drawbacks.
May every household have a biodigester. A biodigester turns kitchen scraps and human or animal manure into liquid fertilizer and methane gas. 20 million Chinese families (and some American schools) use this waste-generated methane for cooking fuel and/or to power generators. One day of one household’s waste can generate enough methane to cook for two hours.
See How to make biogas at home with a biogas digester, Mother Earth News; Building a Biodigester with T.H. Culhane, and Food waste audit at the University of Florida BioEnergy Summer School 2007.
Biodigesters work for households and school cafeterias.
For industrial applications, I don’t know of an ecologically-sound energy system.
FOOD
May every household have at least two insulated raised garden beds with soil that’s 40% compost and 60% amendments (coconut coir, perlite, pumice, rice hulls, expanded shale, humus, worm castings, biochar, feather meal, fishbone meal, blood meal, alfalfa meal, oyster shell, metamorphosed evaporite, flax seed meal, cotton seed meal, dried molasses, kelp meal, azomite, potassium sulfate, limestone, yucca extract, and mycorrhizae). In winter, water condenses within the tents. The garden needs water only once every two weeks.
Consider geothermal-powered greenhouses.
May the midwives and herbalists among you grow herbs for your community—and make them into tinctures and salves.
May teenagers build solar ovens. May they learn to cook grains, beans, chicken and bread in them. Check out solar cookers & greenhouses in Gaza. Check out Solar Cookers International.
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Go for wired telecom infrastructure to every household. Go for infrastructure that you control—not Pelephone, not Cellcom, not Israel’s prime minister, not Elon Musk (who controls lots of satellites). You cannot localize mobile, wireless systems. I know, I know—people love their smartphones. But if you want control of your communications, use copper wires or fiber optics. Wired systems are much simpler than mobile systems: you can keep them local.
Manufacturing mobile devices and operating access networks and data storage centers demand multiple extractions, guzzle energy, guzzle water and generate toxic waste.
Mobile devices and cellular antennas generate electromagnetic radiation that harms public health and wildlife.
Mobile devices are vulnerable to hacking.
Mobile devices are addictive. Children are especially vulnerable to behavioral problems from too much screen-time. (Instead of social media, may they build insulated raised beds and solar ovens. May they plant gardens.)
TRANSPORTATION
Focus on bicycles powered by human muscle. Nothing electric—because manufacturing e-vehicles requires extractions and smelting and water. Charging EVs demands outrageous amounts of power and overheats nearby transformers. Plus, EVs generate hazardous waste. They don’t biodegrade, and they’re fire hazards.
STORIES
May you have book and tool-lending libraries.
May the world learn Palestinian history. I’ve learned from documentaries includeng: 1948: Creation and Catastrophe: A Documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Tantura: about one alleged massacre (of 300-400) committed in 1948 in one Palestinian village—and the Jewish researcher who wrote about it. “If you love Israel,” filmmaker Alon Schwartz said in 2022, “hold it accountable.”
Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story shows that a century ago, Palestine was a thriving economic and cultural center.
Have a good laugh with Palestinian-American comedian Sammy Obeid.
The Long Way Home tells the story of Holocaust survivors’ efforts, from 1945-1948, to make a home for themselves—and most countries did not welcome them. When the UK and the UN turned Palestine into a Jewish state (and 750,000 Palestinians suddenly became refugees), layers of generational trauma added to the European Holocaust.
May everyone who wants to tell their stories have paper and pens, canvas and paint, theaters and drums and musical instruments of all kinds.
RE-CONSTRUCTION
Palestinian architect Yara Sharif imagines using Gaza’s rubble to rebuild.
May the mechanically-inclined among you restore discarded devices and appliances.
May your engineers build biodegradable tools. May they turn discarded and unused batteries into generators.
TRANSFORMED SOCIETIES
Abandoned as a child, Kenyan Charles Mully adopted 2000 African children, found water and turned a dusty plot into an oasis.
When the USSR suddenly stopped exporting oil to Cuba in 1989, the country spent three years learning how to grow food and use much less energy. They stopped using cars, turned parking lots into farms and bought bicycles. Watch “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.”
Good farming generates water! Read Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function: A Teacher’s Manual by Didi Pershouse, 2017.
May the world’s gardeners send you heirloom flower and vegetable seeds.
Thanks for mentioning Jerry Mander... his "4 Arguments" was a wake-up call...
Thank you, dear Sister, for laying out how it should be everywhere. You are not naive, you are articulating our sacred responsibility to care for peace, for the perpetual well-being of children, and elders, and Mother Earth before all else. To the best of your ability, you are walking the path that your dear friend and guide Jerry Mander laid out for us in his brilliant, 'In The Absence Of The Sacred' (1991). I recognize many of the people he thanked for guiding him during his 10 years in writing that book, mostly Indigenous knowledge-holders, many of whom are still with us today. Jerry articulated the contrast between Peoples who hold sacred their Life-affirming kinship with one another and All That Is versus people with the mindset loyal to the system of domination and its patterns of dehumanization, slaughter, slavery, starvation, removal, erasure, control, hierarchy, plunder, and extraction, that, for hundreds of years, has been carried out across continents against populations they deem inferior or subhuman. The horror we are witnessing today is an old story of unspeakable atrocities, but also the story of the survival, resilience, and perseverance of people. Inspiring stories are emerging alongside a very familiar self-destructive story - the fall of empires - nations and peoples paying the price for thinking they could dominate other people and the planet, fools disconnected from reality and the Life-affirming values and ethics and timeless ways of knowing required to thrive in perpetuity.