An Eco Village With No Visible Technology

Most images in the Slaacr gallery have a piece of technology somewhere in them — a solar panel, a wind turbine, a glowing dome, a pipe carrying something. This image has none. What it has is a small village of dark-roofed wooden cottages, tucked into a steep green valley with a creek running through it and a small waterfall on the right. The roofs are pitched in the manner of Korean hanok or Japanese minka — heavy timber, deep eaves, gables low to the ground. A solitary figure stands near the creek. Light comes in soft from the upper left, the way it does in early morning in mountain country.

The absence of visible technology is the editorial argument. There's a strain of environmental thought that holds that the most sustainable village is the one that doesn't need to be visibly engineered to be sustainable — the one whose materials, orientation, and water relationships were already correct. Vernacular architecture in mountainous tropical regions is full of examples. The traditional Hanok of Korea uses ondol underfloor heating fueled by kitchen smoke, which means the heating system is the cooking system is the smoke-egress system. The Minka of rural Japan uses thick thatch and deep eaves to balance summer cooling and winter retention without active climate control. Neither needs a panel.

What the image quietly proposes is that not every solarpunk image has to show solar panels. Sometimes the picture is just a village that already worked, before electricity, and would still work if electricity disappeared. The mountains, the trees, the cottages, the creek — none of them are imaginary. They're a village that exists somewhere in this world right now, very probably without an internet connection.