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How floating labs will regenerate the Amazon from within
Monday, 16 December, 2024 — From Plymouth to Peru, a network of over 2,700 innovative fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) are using new creative materials research to combat exploitation of the environment.
<p>Gathered inside the first city in the United Kingdom to join the <a href="https://fab.city/">Fab City initiative</a>, an MIT Director and a rainforest tech innovator introduce themselves at Arts University Plymouth’s international research conference, <a href="https://makingfutures.org.uk/">Making Futures</a>. Today’s topic? How on-site crafts can offer a cure for fixing extractive supply chains in the rainforest, plastic waste catastrophes and habits of consumption that are urgently alienating the natural world and our place within it.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The Amazon rainforest is often touted as the ‘Lungs of the Planet’. In fact, the Peruvian Amazon helps absorb <a href="https://rainforestfoundation.org/our-work/where-we-work/peru/">57 million tonnes of CO2 annually</a> alone. A vital endeavour in a world which is frantically scrambling to reduce carbon emissions, as climate change continues to grow far beyond being a pop culture priority. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Despite this, however, in under fifty years, the Amazon has lost one fifth of its rainforests due to deforestation and is experiencing its <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68032361#:~:text=Amazon's%20record%20drought%20driven%20by%20climate%20change%20-%20BBC%20News">worst ever droughts</a>, due to a combination of extractive agricultural practices and climate change. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Enter Benito Juarez. The Founder of the first Fab Lab in Latin America has arrived at Making Futures to announce his bold solution - a series of self-regenerating boat laboratories, floating deep into the most remote and underserved parts of the Amazon rainforest. These <a href="https://floatingfab.org/">floating fab labs</a> will create microeconomies and allow the crafting of sustainable materials for local communities on-site, based on exactly what’s available and what they need to thrive and prosper.<br /></p>
<p dir="ltr">As an Amazonian native, Benito grew up in the jungle and witnessed first-hand how extractive supply chains are destroying environments around the world, leaving little for future generations in favour of much needed short-term returns. </p>
<p dir="ltr">In the near-past, circular economies were the way that communities operated globally. Native populations knew where each product came from, how long it would be used for and how it would be repurposed after its initial lifespan, to recycle and reduce waste. Now as cities around the world demand increasingly large quantities of resources with little connection to, or education about, how to sustain these environments, this knowledge is disappearing.<br /></p>
Children in the Amazon
<p dir="ltr">Benito explains: “We are losing more than 20% of the jungle right now, we are losing our biodiversity. It means we are losing our bio information that is important for global sustainability and also for the future of our different industries, in nutrition, in medicine, in product development, in energy and in the water. </p>
<p dir="ltr">“My grandfather planted lots of trees 40 years ago, but today, my family told me that they want to cut them down and sell them for more or less, £100 pounds for each one. So it's a huge problem for us. How can we replace this extractive economy that cuts trees and sells them for almost nothing?</p>
<p dir="ltr">“People do all of these practices, not because people hate nature. It's come because people, local communities, want to bring education and health to their relatives and to their kids. Maybe it worked in the past because it represented a small percentage of the forest, but today is not yesterday. We are now changing the local ecosystem and we have predation, contamination and in parallel we don’t have opportunities for young people in terms of education and capabilities development. If we take these two realities, we have a predative system.” <br /></p>
<p dir="ltr">According to Benito, despite living in one of the most biodiverse places in the world surrounded by superfoods, up to 90% of young people within the region are suffering from malnutrition. Opportunities after school education are not readily available and as a result, the people here are suffering from illegal mining, deforestation and narcoterrorism. </p>
<p dir="ltr">This is a hard life, but the team behind the Floating Fab Lab believe that they can make a difference through a long-term mission of education, empowerment, and bioreactors. </p>
<p dir="ltr">This is not science fiction. Products already produced by students and researchers under this initiative are as optimistic as the makers creating them; biosensors to measure water and soil quality, personalised nutrition on-demand using microorganisms and much loftier plans to create an entirely new economy. A series of localised economies that will replace a supply chain which has proven decade-after-decade to be devastating to long-term commercial prosperity, community health and education levels within the Amazon.</p>
<p dir="ltr">“To reverse these changes, I think it's about education in terms of empowering local people to reinvent the local economy, to protect the forest and to generate value with the forest, and this is part of what we are doing with Fab Lab. <br /></p>
Floating Fab Lab Peru
<p dir="ltr">“We developed a bioreactor where you can grow microorganisms to produce customised nutrients. And according to the environment, we can control the environment, pH, level, temperature and you can stimulate it to produce, for example, more vitamin E or more vitamin C, A or others according to the proportion that you need. </p>
<p dir="ltr">“For example, with local communities, we are developing biosensors in order to measure the quality of the soil and also biomaterials to grow plants that are especially at risk of extinction, and to disseminate it. They are learning, and we are learning together, about how we can create a new economy, regenerative for the ecosystem and regenerative for our health. Because this is also an important part of the problems of low levels of education. It's local people that are losing the sustainable practices, especially in nutrition.”<br /></p>
<p dir="ltr">In 2014 Arts University Plymouth founded <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/research/supported-projects/fab-lab-south-west">Fab Lab South West</a> (formerly Fab Lab Plymouth), joining a network of over 2,700 fabrication laboratories across the world. Each with a growing team of educators and innovators of all ages, demographics and creative practices just like those in Peru, working on their own unique contributions to the challenges around them. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Today, the University’s Making Futures event is hosting leading researchers, scientists and artists as it investigates craft's engagement with material science innovations, ecological challenges, and the quest for a sustainable future. </p>
<p dir="ltr">As a keynote speaker at the conference, Sherry Lassiter, President and CEO of The Fab Foundation and architect of the MIT global initiative for Fab Labs, shares the impact of her work to inspire, empower and foster creativity of individuals using grassroots technology:</p>
<p dir="ltr">“The Fab Lab network is empowering and educating makers all over the world. We've seen communities far and wide use innovative crafts and materials in order to tackle global issues such as climate change, malnutrition and extractive supply chains.”<br /></p>
Fab Lab South West (formerly Fab Lab Plymouth) at Arts University Plymouth
<p dir="ltr">From <a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/posts/a-new-wave-of-green-energy-created-with-the-help-of-fab-lab-plymouth">unique solar panels</a> from South West’s Fab Lab to bioreactors in Peru, a simple search of Fab Labs showcases a growing list of creatives who are crafting practical ways to use new materials in ways that place innovation at the intersection of creativity, craft, science and the will to make a change.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Stephanie Owens, Associate Professor at Arts University Plymouth and Convenor of the Making Futures Research Group, said: “The increasing alienation of human society to the natural world and the ecological changes that impact how we live as global citizens is an urgent concern for all of us, and artists and designers have a unique role to play in this regard. By bringing together these innovators from all parts of the world, particularly those that work to heal the gap between the systems of nature and human systems, we develop the courage and vision to see the world in alternative ways, and bring a kind of tangible, material experience to the frequently intangible scale of the forces that confront us.”</p>
<p dir="ltr">Benito’s closing remark is all that needs to be said about creative solutions being the answer to the complex problems that confront the modern lives we’ve grown accustomed to: “It is not about fighting with this system. It’s about generating a new model that makes the previous one obsolete.”</p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Find more coverage of Making Futures by reading our news page </strong><a href="https://www.aup.ac.uk/posts"><strong>here.</strong></a></p>
