There is reason to believe in the self-organising power of processes, and to use this knowledge. Even the best formulae and models might not surpass what we have learned from experience. The skilful usage of self-organisation, in fact, constitutes technological knowledge. This is a technology that the 'Leavers' are able to employ when the 'Takers' presume that the human mind can control and predict everything. The skills of an indigenous nation contain an ability to manage self-organising elements. If humankind as a whole wants to consider itself as an indigenous nation of the Earth, it must learn to find balance and maintain it between high and basic technologies.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANKIND HAS BECOME SUFFICIENTLY CONFLICTING: on the one hand it is well known that technologies, with the increasing usage of resources and the goods they produce, make our own living space narrower. Even more, cultural (including consumptive) behaviour is contagious in one way or another. Hence the knowledge that if the production and consumption attitudes spread in Western civilisation transfer to the Third World, with a population many times bigger, various resources will also diminish at remarkable speed (resource here is an ecological niche suitable for man). What should the next wave of technological development be like so that it will not bury us?
Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael divides people into 'Takers' and 'Leavers'. Both the Takers of the states with high-technology culture and intensive economy, and the Leavers of traditional cultures are technological creatures. Technologies of the Leavers, technological creatures who do not much disturb living nature, seem so natural that the Takers who take notice of them often tend to regard them as their own invention. A good example here is the poison called curare that the Takers have taken as a chance finding in the heritage of the peoples of nature, and that modern medicine, as its discoverer, has begun to use (in various surgical operations where the relaxing of muscles is inevitable).
Chance activities do not lead to an understanding of how to blend and treat various plants in dozens of processes, the resulting mixture of which would not kill but simply paralyse the prey so that its removal from the tree and its transportation to the consumer before rotting sets in, would be arranged in the best possible manner. This is technological know-how involving technological skills. Ancient knowledge and skills. Traditional technologies created by indigenous peoples contain much of what the technologies of the Takers have lost during the last three centuries, for example, the realisation that the living environment of other species is more important to man than all simple world perceptions are able to imagine.
In the 18th, 19th and even early 20th century, science and scientific knowledge were the main means to direct the development of technologies. Today we often say that technologies one hundred years ago were also wasteful and irreparably damaged ecological systems in some way or another. There could be many reasons for this, one being simply the lack of knowledge about the natural environment.
Knowledge of the peculiarity of how the natural environment functions has considerably increased even during the last fifty years, although this knowledge has not managed to halt the intensity of technologies. Even more - being thoroughly, and, hopefully also, constructively critical, we see that most widely used machinery and instruments largely rely on scientific discoveries made about half a century ago. Has scientific development stopped or turned to totally new areas because nothing fundamentally new has been found? Or perhaps only very little that causes the world's entirety and functioning has been put to use? Does the fault lie in people or institutions?
If it is in people, then probably this has occurred through institutions. By the start of the second millennium, structure, order, institution and system had become just as significant as in big centralised states throughout history. Knowledge and perception have always been connected with freedom - spiritual, intellectual and physical. Indigenous peoples are free and they lack the restrictions that would make them feel all-powerful or supreme beings of nature, an evolutionary finish - hence, perhaps leading to the availability, effect and continuance of these technologies. Without disturbing the surroundings.

Published in the magazine Director May 2003

Marek Strandberg (1965), has been active as journalist, editor, lecturer and businessman. Presently Chairman of the Board of Estonian Fund for Nature, participates in elaborating different ecological technologies.