Earth Balance: Futures of Human-Nature Symbiosis
Research and Speculative Design
2021 - ongoing
Overview
With all of the data and technology available to address climate change, why haven’t we taken the necessary actions? As part of Parsons’ Immersive Scenario Planning class, I wanted to explore climate futures from a sociocultural lens and how our values and relationships to nature might shape climate action.
Process
I collected and mapped signals across different disciplines, mapped them into themes, wrote scenarios, then expanded them into speculative journalistic pieces in styles that ranged form straightforward reporting to longer-form human interest pieces.
Signal mapping in Mural
Scenarios
Rogue Spores
Years of environmental decimation eliminated hundreds of thousands of species: children born today might never see a flower in their lifetime. With public mandates to focus on technological progress and climate mitigation, the defeated general public tries to forget what they've lost and develop new notions of beauty and life. But rogue bands of individuals and communities leverage technology to make the most of wastelands, protect what's still alive, and rebuild our botanical past through advanced techniques in synthetic biology, gene editing, and more.
Microflourishing Collectives
With vast climate catastrophes causing panic, chaos, destruction, and system-wide shutdowns over the past few decades, communities learned through painful personal experiences that they'd need to save themselves. Experiments in ecological living and techniques gained popularity as people open-sourced their plans, reverse-engineered successes, and learned from indigenous knowledge over the years to develop communities centered around living in greater harmony with all forms of life to protect the collective future of our planet at scale.
Banned Botany
Caving to expanding capitalist demands for natural resources like land for data centers and factories, governments across the world compete to secure the favor of tech-driven companies by declaring nature "flora and fauna non-grata." The technocratic elite developed robotic and holographic replicas of natural elements which they deem far superior to the originals. Keeping "organic" plants and animals alive is seen as old-fashioned or even outlawed in some places in the name of forward progress, where governments consider it to waste time and energy on inferior objects to what humans & AI create.
Biocivic Imperative
Cascading climate catastrophes over the years means the impact finally hit home for governments and many people, as governments shell out trillions to repair infrastructure and redirect armed forces more frequently to climate disasters at home. Realizing the need to take strong stances in response to budget defaults and increased public distress, governments around the world compete on climate goals to set strict mandates, laws, and tax codes deigned to preserve what's left and protect the overall natural world from falling further out of balance.
“Governments across the world compete to secure the favor of tech-driven companies by declaring nature ‘flora and fauna non-grata.’”
Scenarios & Artifacts
Banned Botany
New law bans organic materials as “flora & fauna non grata”
September 15, 2050 — Washington Post
The Department of Techology official declared the possession and growth of organic material illegal today. The law prohibits all recreational purposes and personal growing, with exemptions for “consumption-grade” organics produced within contained, centralized, cloud-based home-grow systems like Amazon’s GrowLexa, where citizens' grow stats can be monitored by the Department and shared with partners at edible science companies such as Nestle-X for research and development.
“We welcome this new step into our progressive future,” says Zenee Molin, the DoTech’s head. “Thanks to the incredible research work of partners like Meta, we’ve learned that children born today don’t even know the difference between an organic and synthetic flower, and in fact prefer the robotic and holographic versions created by other partners like Boston Dynamics.”
The spaces and resources previously dedicated to dying relics of the past can now be used to build the public infrastructure that really matters to people, like more data centers for even faster information processing and connection. “We’ll also eliminate the organic allergens that reduce the public’s productivity by 7 to 13 percent each quarter,” Molin adds.
People found in violation by harboring recreational fauna will be charged with a misdemeanor and fined a minimum of $1,000 for their first offense. “Our collective time and energy need to be dedicated to supporting the new natural, not maintaining obsolescent objects which failed to adapt,” Molin says.
Rogue Spores
A flower grows in Fresno – for the first time in 10 years
Citizen ecolabs restore the past and promise of our local ecological systems
May 1, 2050 - NY Times
Until yesterday, 63-year-old Miri Florez hadn’t seen a living flower in over a decade. “I used to pick up flowers from the farmer’s market every Sunday in my younger years,” she says with a smile. “My friends and I would share photos of our plants on social media. Plants really took over Instagram for a minute. You might be too young to remember what that was,” she laughs, referencing the early-2000s photo-sharing social media platform.
The proud plant parenthood of Miri’s youth disappeared many years ago. In the 30s, devastating wildfires and droughts in her home state of California and the practice of harvesting wild plants to sell to people like Miri destroyed much of the recreational fauna that used to decorate homes and star in social media posts. The global “warm wave” of 2044 – a benign name for a weather event that killed 1.7 million people – pushed more people to turn their attention from the dying world outside towards a more promising synthetic world, aided by the rise in affordable mass-market AR optics and shift towards ‘virtual’ aesthetics and culture.
From global catastrophes to local roots
While the masses moved headfirst into the virtual world, others sought to stay grounded in the natural world. With global governments reluctant to take what they regarded as meaningful action, nascent experiments in ecologically harmonious living began to sprout up in the late 20s. Far from their radical roots as free-for-all communes in the 1960s and 70s, these early models brought together scientists and eco-enthusiasts to prototype scalable solutions that tested how communities and individuals could leverage emerging technologies in solar power, waste repurposing, and more.
Traditional utility and climate tech lobbyists successfully silenced these experiments for years to protect centralized energy systems and the climatech boom of 2031/where governments shelled out billions to private companies and consultants for promised improvements to blackouts and power grid failures. But these changes have yet to trickle down to the general public outside of paid service upgrade packages. So the public opted to create their own climatech interventions, like citizen science labs, to regenerate interest and skills in analog fauna.
Citizen science labs across the globe pair up with local eco-enthusiasts – or the eco-interested – to rekindle the joy of plants through nostalgia-tinged programming that recalls the flora of people like Miri’s old days. People of all ages learn about sustainable living ecological concepts through hands-on classes in synthetic biology, local & live-streamed events featuring conversations between indigenous technologists and community leaders from around the world, and adaptation consulting and build services to bring eco-living concepts into their own homes and communities. Global grow competitions prove popular among the younger set, employing sensors and real-time data into game-like scenarios that may rival the popular VR-X Games in the next few years.
Engineering hope and community roots
The Citizen EcoLab in Fresno is part of a global consortium of over 1,000 formal labs that collaborate, develop, and share open-source programming, samples, and expertise to empower more people to take our ecological futures into their own hands. Marte Sing, director of Fresno's Citizen EcoLab, hopes to inspire a new generation to turn more of their attention from the virtual to the natural world. "Formal efforts through governmental guidelines and laws have fallen short of what we needed. Those failures made a lot of people lose hope," she says. "We want to show people that we don't need to wait for anyone to save us. Each one of us can preserve, restore, and rebuild the natural world in ways both big and small. It all starts with a seed – in some cases, literally," she says.
Fresno's Citizen EcoLab is a textbook example of "big." Housed in a decommissioned elementary school, it showcases the types of projects and technologies people can bring into their homes: retrofitted solar power-generating windows, waste recycling systems, wall gardens, and more. Local climatech companies and contractors gain exposure and business through the labs, keeping resources within communities instead of with the greenwashing corporate climatech companies dubbed "Big Clima" by some. Immersive ecosystem window boxes and rooms introduce patrons to plants they would have seen in the outside world just 30 years ago, giving them glimpses into both the past and the future.
Sing says they've recently seen an increase in visitors in the past six months as new reports, research, and leaked documents revealed the actual costs of losing our naturally-occurring greenery over the years. The recent rise in congenital disabilities in babies and a sharp spike in children born with JBLD (Juvenile Black Lung Disease) – the condition correlated with pollution levels – resulted in a warning for pregnant women from the CDC that pregnant women stay indoors past the first trimester. Medical professionals and researchers have also reported staggering growth in pharmacologically-resistant infections and diseases due to ground and water pollution, which render new treatments for conditions like tarriatic eczema (the painful skin condition named after tar which is caused by chemical concentrations in the air) useless in as little as three weeks.
Guerilla researchers and medically compromised people have partnered up through the help of community microgrants to make the case with data that the natural world offers real, tangible benefits for our health overall. People facing medical issues modern medicine can no longer solve – and those just eager to contribute to research – uproot their lives to move across the world to a handful of eco-enclaves which have become the last holdouts for scientists hoping to prove our natural world is worth saving. "More people than ever are starting to feel the impacts of our destruction of the natural world personally in the ways they never imagined," Sing explained. "They're eager to find answers for themselves."
With research dollars and government spending tied up in tech-forward health nanotechnologies and reactive climate mitigation measures, people will need to get their hands dirty at labs or through eco-communities to learn more. But citizen labs aren't without controversy. A recent auto-generated campaign attributed to the Centralized Climate PAC (CCPAC) and leveraging newly protected eye-tracking technology seeded hundreds of artificial news stories and conspiracy theories that ranged from the moderate ("Opinion: On Citizen Labs, The Quantum Court Must Balance Safety and Freedom") to the extreme ("Radical Local Labs, Backed by China, Develop Deadly Bioweapons to Kill American Babies"). Recent regulatory measures driven by the corporate climatech industry resulted in local shutdowns in some states. Still, the Civil Ecological Liberties Union (CELU) is working quickly to challenge these and develop national guidelines to protect labs so they can continue their work.
Despite the threats, Miri isn’t daunted by the threats to her local lab. Looking at the vibrant pink Hibiscus syriacus flower growing from rock wool at her lab station, she says, "Big Clima is kidding themselves if they think they can shut this down. Once you grow it yourself, there's no going back. We're just getting started!"
Microflourishing Communities
International EcoPeace Prize Awarded to TEKNos
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — World Ecological Consortium
October 1, 2050
The IEP Prize has been awarded to TEKNos, a South American traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) collective. The Community Prize is awarded to groups for outstanding work in community building and knowledge sharing in ecological peacekeeping.
For the past six years, groups rooted in South & Central America and Southeast Asia have won a significant share of eco prizes globally. TEKNos’s approach blends knowledge creation and sharing, art, and partnerships to restore our connections with the natural world as individuals and communities. The leaders of TEKNos eschew public recognition, emphasizing their role as facilitators and historians sharing eons of wisdom and bridging spiritual connections to nature.
Their most notable work is PermaNos, a permaculture database launched four years ago that enables individuals, eco-communities, commercial developers, and urban planners to reference global TEK techniques while ideating, developing, and building projects of any scale. This year’s addition of AR overlays and local material adaptation, which guide people through these techniques and help them adapt concepts to their own local resource constraints and availabilities, expanded the accessibility of TEK to an even broader audience.
TEKNos also gained acclaim for EntheoNos, an art and information project that aimed to balance the commercial psychedelic industry’s influence with the entheogenic roots of psychedelics. After psychedelic medicine became widely legalized in 2032, the commercial industry boomed and individuals who experienced their first spiritual connections with higher ecological consciousness in their lives felt driven to protect the planet. A rise in goods and services deemed techno-solutionist and extractive led TEKNos to develop EntheoNos, allowing people to immerse themselves in the history and stories of the lived experience of indigenous peoples who have used plant medicines in ceremonies and fought to preserve their culture against erasure for centuries. This led to the passing of new laws and a shift in global consciousness around psychedelics centered around greater balance.
In decades past, commercial developers and planners in many countries wouldn’t have been able to use resources and building methods from indigenous communities, which hadn’t been subject to rigorous testing and safety processes. The high-profile failures of dated infrastructure across many cities in the face of climate change led to Western countries declaring a united “War on Climate”, which proposed militarized approaches like weather manipulation, urban flood diversion tactics, and strict border control. In the face of massive protests, political leaders across the globe realized the need to welcome different mindsets and approaches to work with nature, not against it. Centuries of knowledge at risk of being lost were preserved by global groups of people with the foresight to see that the only way out of the impending climate catastrophe would be a harmonious approach.
A ruling in Mexico in 2041 that mandated that all planning and building processes must include indigenous representatives who served as the original stewards of the land throughout each step spurred similar legislation across the world. These transformed the perspectives of many people on what living and community could look like, resurfacing notions of the commons for people and the inalienable rights of flora and fauna. Research studies demonstrated that eco-centered communities see tremendous health and social support gains, reducing the reported prevalence of mental conditions and poverty by 68% in almost a decade.
The EcoPeace Prize was introduced in 2042 as a counterweight to tech- and innovation-focused challenges, focused on fostering balance with our ecosystems and recognizing those designing with – not just for – the natural world.
BioCivic Imperative
Congress passes strict regulations on climate data companies
February 26, 2050 — WSJ
Congress passed stricter regulations for all companies that record and report climate data today. Companies found to be falsifying or misrepresenting data or allowing more than a 2-5% margin of error – depending on industry and company size – will be subject to heavy fines, revoking of contracts and licenses, and jail for all parties involved.
Last year’s BioCred scandal spurred these changes. The top-tier carbon credit company, which handled data for companies like Amazon and Meta, was found to have misrepresented over $64 million in carbon credits. BioCred has since folded, with a federal trial scheduled to start at the end of the year.
The crackdown is part of a multi-year expansion of the government’s role in setting climate direction. The climate catastrophes that dominated 2038, from a cascade of mega-storms to melting roads, resulted in billions in infrastructure damage. Only 68% of the promised repairs have been completed to date, leaving some communities still stranded and isolated.
It took until 2046 for partisan politics to give way to progress. The US military was unable to aid in the prevention of World War 3 due to ongoing climate catastrophes at home, as conflicts rising over water rights across countries in Africa and the Middle East were supported and diffused by China and Russia. This key moment drove decisive action from Washington, quelling partisan politics toward the goal of restoring American pride and international capabilities.
Accurate data reporting is seen as a critical part of monitoring the US’s climate progress compared to other countries and holding companies and governmental organizations accountable in response to public calls for transparency. As more areas of the US become uninhabitable and climate migration increases out of necessity and personal value, states and countries are competing with each other to maintain steady tax bases to support their ecological goals.