Ecotech Archipelago
In 2028, northern Portugal was swept by raging wildfires whipped up by savage winds. The resulting damage to crops and rural supply chains created a long-lasting and catastrophic food shortage in the capital, Lisbon. The government, unprepared for the disaster, was slow to respond, provoking wide- spread civil unrest. These events highlighted the fragility of Europe’s infrastructure, and its vulnerability to climate change. European entrepreneurs decided to look for a better solution. Increasingly, they opted to move out from the cities to rural areas, where they founded communities that lever- aged automation and decentralized technology to become self-sufficient. Over the decades that followed, this movement gradually went main- stream, replacing the centralized infrastructure of the past.
Context:
The extreme weather events of the 2020s caused several humanitarian disasters, including urban famines resulting from supply-chain disruptions.
Members of the “Green Wave” generation were radicalized into action – some constructively, others destructively.
A range of different decentralized systems emerged, including currency, farming, work, communities, etc.
The EU implemented a strict regime of taxes on CO2 emissions.
The most significant security threat from terrorism became the hacking of smart systems, which had the potential to disrupt entire cities, or even countries.
Today is Nathalie’s 15th birthday. She was born and raised in Novo Rumo, an EcoTech Village close to the River Douro in rural Portugal. Nathalie likes to hang out with her friends, out in the countryside and at the village’s tech-hub. At the hub, she enjoys learning about engineering, building interesting devices or writing new programs – activities that partially substitute formal schooling. Overall, her schooling is partly local, partly digital, and organized more by projects than by traditional academic subjects. Nathalie has recently applied to the High-Tech Apprenticeship, which involves travelling from village to village meeting various mentors and participating in different projects along the way. Through these collaborations, she hopes to learn about different technologies and how they can be applied to solve the challenges faced by her community.
When Nathalie was little, she remembers Novo Rumo being a lot smaller, with just a handful of families and basic dwellings scattered within sight of the river. At that time, there wasn’t much food to be found in the local area. For many members, that was the whole point of living in such a community, but she remembers all the parents being upset. In fact, her father was so un- happy that he left the village, alone, to find a better place to live. However, it wasn’t long before he came home to his family. As he told them: it was the same story every- where. Nowadays, the self-governing com- munity of Novo Rumo receives several applications for new memberships every week.
Anyway, after a few years, things started to get better. The waterwheel and solar panels meant there was always enough power for the village and the greenhouses produced more and more different fruits, vegetables and crops. Nathalie remembers her 10th birthday as a big party where friends from other villages came to meet her grandparents, who made the trip out from Lisbon for the first time.
Novo Rumo was one of the first Eco Tech villages set up by a pan-European group of pioneering entrepreneurs. After what is now known as the Lisbon Famine of 2028, they decided to live up to their environmental and decentralized ideals by founding new rural communities. Every village agreed to abide by the same set of values, or rules for living:
Take care of nature as it is the source of life. Do not waste it.
Knowledge and technology serve life. Life should not serve technology.
Live slowly, as life is finite.
Trust and respect yourself, and others who may be different from you.
Although there is a central governing body for all EcoTech villages, it is largely ignored by individual communities, while also being tolerated by national governments. The communities are self-regulated, with trans- actions affected through smart contracts that enable traceability and build trust. Village inhabitants freely choose and apply for their membership, actively choosing to live by the same values and tackle the same challenges. Inevitably, there is some conflict – but it is relatively rare, since communities are based on shared values and can sustain themselves. They grow to the limits of their collective interests, and quickly exclude those who violate their norms.
Over time, more EcoTech communities were established, and a network of villages along the Douro began to join together to form what became the “EcoTech Archipelago”. They are far enough from the river to be safe from floods, yet still close to water supplies for emergencies such as forest fires. Essentially, they are a decentralized yet connected group of small local settlements, governed and managed with digital technology and living according to their own emergent subset of laws, values, voting systems, etc. Each village produces its own food and energy, at the highest levels of efficiency but also with great awareness of the environment. Some essential one- off products are manufactured on a local, shared 3D printer using recycled plastic.
Villages engage and trade with other villages and cities, but always maintain a balance to ensure that every village is resilient to global infrastructure issues. To regain control of their privacy and protect the personal data of their inhabitants, the network has pioneered the decentralized web, which is evolving in parallel to the centralized internet. While the national government tolerates such autonomy, it was a recurring issue of dispute. The villages trade with a set of local digital currencies that are only used for physical goods and food production. These currencies are indexed to the national government currencies, which villages use when they need to exchange physical goods or digital services with smart cities. As the villages were founded by technologists and entrepreneurs, a large part of the local economy depends on remote work carried out for select companies and organizations that hold the same values. On the other hand, EcoTech villages have also become a fashionable destination for corporate training, and often host innovation retreats for teams coming from cities across the EU to work on temporary projects.
For Nathalie’s 15th birthday, her parents have booked the village’s shared e-camper through CommVan, a platform for hyper- local car rentals, and are taking her to visit her grandparents in Lisbon for the first time. The 390km journey takes about a day, because her parents choose the least energy-consuming route and have planned some impressive stops. But Nathalie doesn’t mind – she likes visiting other villages and admiring the landscape along the way. Her father tells her about when he was younger and nobody cared about the environment. Trips like this would only take a few hours. Nathalie thinks it would be exciting to travel so quickly, but she can’t imagine why anyone would want to harm the environment.
Nathalie’s parents have warned her that the city will be a world away from Novo Rumo. When the time comes, she feels an unfamiliar mix of excitement, curiosity and fear. On the approach to Porto, she notices that the road is nearly empty, with just a few little cars that zip past them at incredible speed. Now, as they make their way through the suburbs, more and more small cars appear, until eventually the traffic is grid- locked, crawling along even more slowly than their e-camper did on the dirt tracks near their village. Apart from the cars, every- thing is big – big buildings, big shops, big houses, big bridges. Everyone wears a serious expression and hurries wordlessly along the sidewalk. There’s no birdsong, no insect chirps – only a relentless whirring from the drones that hover and dart overhead. Nathalie’s dad says they’re for “security”. She wants to ask him what that means, but then she’s distracted by the huge, shimmering shop windows, full of so many things she’s never seen before – unless it was on a screen. She’s never seen so much in so little space and time. But there’s one thing she just can’t understand: why do her parents hate the city so much?
At the time of Nathalie’s trip to Lisbon, the average Portuguese child is still socialized in structures that predate both the natural disaster and the resilience movement. People still travel by plane and buy avocados grown on the other side of the world. Meanwhile, EcoTech village inhabitants live by strict values that have yet to take root among the general public. However, awareness is growing all the time, and the concerns of the movement – which some compare to those of 1960s hippies – are starting to spill over to the average Portuguese. On the other side of the coin, community dwellers are sometimes judged harshly by outsiders, who accuse them of isolating their children and denying them the opportunities that the world of 2040 could offer.
Nathalie’s grandparents both grew up in Lisbon, and are fiercely proud of their city and its heritage. It has been more than 15 years since their daughter decided to give up on her trendy lifestyle, her excellent job at Google and her beautiful apartment in the Alfama neighborhood. She and her family departed a year after the Lisbon Famine of 2028, which resulted from a rare combination of extreme heat, raging wildfires and strong winds. The effects were severe – even worse than those of the earthquake in 1755, which left a long-lasting scar on Lisbon’s history. The fires disrupted much of Lisbon’s food supply, and within just four days, there was almost no food to be found in the city.
Wildfires prevented help getting through by land, and even though emergency support was attempted from the Atlantic ocean and by air, the powerful winds made this impossible too. Rioting and looting went on for weeks, fights broke out over food, and a few unfortunate citizens died of starvation. In fact, feelings ran so high that the unrest continued even after food supplies resumed. Nathalie’s family has always been well off, so as soon as the situation calmed down, her grandparents drove over to their summer home and stayed there for a few months until they felt safe again. Nathalie’s grand- father still complains that he lost a fortune in the Famine. Nathalie’s parents, meanwhile, who both worked for Google, stayed put, as the company offered free meals to all of its employees and the option to live temporarily on campus. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Nathalie’s parents teamed up with some colleagues and tried to organize help. The company’s head of security objected, saying it would only cause more trouble. But her parents, as Nathalie very proudly recalls, disobeyed and snuck out of campus. to distribute supplies. The destruction, desperation and danger they saw had a lifelong impact on their politics, values and worldview. For their generation, nothing would be the same again.
Hot on the heels of the food crisis came a political one. All across Europe, voters abruptly turned against their governments and the policies – or lack of them – that had led to the famine in Portugal. This drove changes in policy, infrastructure and security quicker than any Europe had experienced since the end of World War II. While the changes took a heavy toll on most of Europe’s lower and middle class for a while, the majority accepted that they were necessary, and endured them with relatively little unrest. Over a period of five years, taxes were imposed on CO2 emissions, increasing the cost of flights, fuel-based cars and imported goods that carry a heavy ecological foot- print. Similar actions had been taken as early as 2021. However, since global warming was still continuing, and emissions targets were far from being met, these existing policies had to be dramatically strengthened. In Portugal, the government sank big subsidies into the transition to green energy, sharply accelerating the development and adoption of alternative energy sources, synthetic fuels and high-capacity batteries. Radical changes in transportation and public- services infrastructure achieved immense efficiency gains, although they also raised some new risks and inevitably meant sacrificing some freedom of choice. Terrorism, which had been almost entirely eradicated, resurfaced in the form of action against public and private institutions that were perceived as guilty of enabling, ignoring or responding too slowly to the climate crisis. EcoTech Villages like Novo Rumo were initially blamed for these attacks, which made life difficult for Nathalie’s parents for a few years.
At the same time, Europe’s cities started to rethink their resilience. Scientists were certain that local farming was less efficient, since economies of scale and scope did not apply. Therefore, creating only small local farms would merely serve to increase green- house gas emissions. At the same time, monocultures located far away didn’t just destroy biodiversity, but also led to long, “dirty” supply chains. Ultimately, governments heavily subsidized regional food production and also invested more into local and urban farming. The heart of this policy was enabling and empowering people to care for a small share of their own food supply.
Eventually, the e-camper pulls up outside Nathalie’s grandparents’ apartment in Baixa/Lisbon, which has been in the family for generations. Nathalie has rarely seen her grandparents, and has never set foot inside their home, or even one like it. She doesn’t quite understand what work her grandfather once did, but she knows her grandparents are retired and now dedicate their time to philanthropy. Nathalie likes her grandparents and the stories they tell about their work, but she can’t understand why they choose to live a “grey life”. Nathalie once asked her grandmother about this, and her reply was that there are different ways of being good and helping people or the planet; their way was just different from that of Nathalie’s parents. However, walking through her grandparents’ home for the first time is quite a surprise for Nathalie, as she compares it to the austerity of her own up- bringing. Having seen so much in such a short time, she no longer knows what to think. She feels repulsed, yet also intrigued. And she wonders, for the first time in her life, if her parents might not be right about everything.
Opinions:
“I see this as a tiny micro-niche for idealists, but irrelevant for society at large. It’s ‘ideologically’ green – driven by idealism rather than technological forces.”
– Claudio Feser, Senior Advisor at McKinsey & Company
“Small, selfsufficient economies will never be more efficient. It is just wrong; a silly utopia. Whether we like it or not, economies of scale – whether in agricultural production or any other type of production – are linked with efficiency.”
– Michael G. Jacobides, Professor at London Business School
“I like that they support ‘Live slowly as life is finite.’ I would definitely like to try this out for a couple of months.”
– Bojana Nenezic, Student