Is it possible to develop and use technology without falling into excess in its production methods?

What if excess itself is the essence of technology?

For the past thirty years, Indigenous communities like the Kogui and Macuna in Colombia, or the Yanomami in Brazil, have warned of the urgent need to translate and communicate their ancestral knowledge to "the outside world," to their younger brothers and sisters, the non-Indigenous people, whose destructive actions have brought about an imbalance with nature. But the alarm is now even more desperate when we read the studies on mercury and cyanide pollution levels caused by legal and illegal gold mining in the Caquetá, Putumayo, and Vaupés rivers in the Colombian Amazon. Data from the ONIC (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia) reports that currently only 4.6% of the Colombian population is Indigenous, comprising 102 distinct groups, 54 of which are located in the Colombian Amazon. Of these, 32 have only 500 inhabitants, and ten have far fewer: 50 people each. The high levels of pollution, a product of the legal and illegal mining that humans generate today to sustain an extractive and predatory economy, are a fundamental part of the weakening and extermination of these ancestral cultures. They have not only polluted the air and water, and thus the fish and food, but studies have also revealed that mercury and cyanide are transmitted through breast milk to newborns, damaging their central nervous system.

"Extracting gold causes Xawara. Xawara is a disease, an epidemic. Gold causes a disease to weaken people. That is why the spiritual owner of this land, Omama, believed that the gold should remain hidden in the ground, beneath this earth. That is how I and the village elders taught me. White people love gold. White people collect a lot of gold. So we think, we talk, so that men don't take more; gold is not for making food, gold is not for doing good, gold causes fights."

These words, part of an interview I conducted in August 2014 with the Yanomami leader, an Indigenous spokesperson in the state of Roraima, in the Brazilian Amazon, reveal the vast gulf between his understanding of reality and ours. Undoubtedly, he knows more about our reality than we do about his. They, the Indigenous people, have spent centuries trying to understand how the white man operates. We, in the 21st century, have yet to do so.

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