#wafflegardens — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

#JuliaWatson Champions #Indigenous #CoastalDesign Strategies as Models for #ClimateResilience

by Kate Guadagnino
Mon, March 31, 2025 at 8:00 AM EDT

Excerpt: "Julia Watson was 11 when, in 1989, the #ExxonValdez ship spilled more than 10 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound, killing scores of animals and gravely impacting the region's Indigenous communities. She can still remember sitting in her Brisbane, Australia, home watching television footage of scientists washing birds with household detergent. That disaster confirmed her sense that, she says, 'there was something humanity wasn't doing for the oceans that we should have been doing,' prompting her to announce her plans to become a marine biologist. Ultimately, Watson, now based in Brooklyn, took a different path, studying landscape architecture. But her practice and new book, #LoTEKWater (Taschen, June 2025), show that same understanding of place and instinct for problem-solving.

"The volume is a sequel to Lo—TEK, a first-of-its-kind compendium that documents indigenous design technologies all over the world, from the water-retaining sunken plots (a.k.a. #WaffleGardens ) of New Mexico's #Zuni people to the bridges that Northern #India's #Khasi people make out of the roots of rubber plants. Watson argues—in support, she says, of a sentiment long expressed by Indigenous leaders—that these local, sustainable, and often ancient systems ( #TEK stands for traditional ecological knowledge) should serve as blueprints for contemporary responses to climate challenges."

#SolarPunkSunday #WaterIsLife #IndigenousSolutions #ClimateSolutions #ClimateResiliency #WorkWithNature #ClimateChange #TraditionalPractices #TraditionalTechnology #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge #IndigenousKnowledge #ClimateChallenges #ClimateChange