PATTERNS THAT PERSIST imagines agroecological futures where biodiversity is the measure of healthy human food systems. The video explores different ways that emerging technologies could be mobilized to increase the biodiversity of kitchens, farms, and rural landscapes.
What if… Biodiversity was the measure of healthy human food systems?
In the future a successful food system is one that maximizes biodiversity. From activist communities in remote areas, to the largest ag-tech corporations, everyone is looking for ways to make kitchens, farms, and rural landscapes more biodiverse.
The story follows a journalist named Max, who travels through Europe in 2033. He meets various stakeholders affected by this transition, which is not always easy. Max is particularly interested in talking to the farmers and citizens that feel left behind by the new focus, and the network of regenerative farmers and food producers who are leading the way in healing depleted agricultural landscapes.
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Digital and social technologies are tested and implemented at various scales. In Portugal he meets a technician who designs monitoring tech for food forests. She composes and cares for the landscape and measures the ecosystem services it provides. Her toolkit includes environmental sensors, drone and satellite imagery, planting & harvest algorithms. She listens to the ecological flows of her food forest through AI-enabled audio monitoring. She opts into digital platform that connect producers with eaters.
Social technologies such as public plant breeding and revival of heirloom varieties increase the cultural value placed on distinct taste of places and changing seasons. New culinary innovations and practices evolve based on changing notions of environmental and human health, and what constitutes the good life. There are debates about when and how to utilize living technologies such as biopesticides, CRISPR, e-DNA, etc., but most people agree that more more is different, and different is good. Climate change requires constant adaptation, but maintaining and caring for agroecological systems at the bioregional scale becomes the focus of teachers, philosophers, chefs and politicians.
However, disagreements persist and Max attends the filming of a talk show in Serbia about the future of food, where he observes that Food is a playground for new possibilities and hybridities, but also a battleground of polarised identity politics.
What digital, bio and social technologies can we implement today that will increase biodiversity and create agroecological patterns that persist?
Patterns That Persist was support by S+T+ARTS MUSAE.