TEKnology is the application of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to design and implement solutions to environmental, agricultural, architectural, and social challenges. It embodies practices, tools, and principles that enable respectful and reciprocal engagement with indigenous knowledge systems, honoring their underlying intentions, values, and ecological logic. TEKnology shifts society from extractive approaches toward regenerative relationships, connecting people to both place and planetary systems.

WATER REMEMBERS WHAT HUMANS FORGET

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is quite clearly Ocean.” – Arthur Clarke, science-fiction writer and futurist

In many traditions, water is kin. The Guna-Dule people of Panama and Colombia, whose ancestral lands are now threatened by rising seas, speak of the ocean as the mother’s amniotic fluid, carrying the essence of previous generations. When the sea is harmed, they say, it is as if the womb itself is wounded. This teaching is not merely metaphorical — it is a profound acknowledgment of interconnection, a worldview that understands water as an extension of life itself.

Western scientists and Indigenous knowledge keepers agree that water is where life began. Over eons of earthly rotations, the water submerging the earth’s surface was the medium for creation. In an emergent symphony of survival, it orchestrated the exchange of energies that connected the elements, species, and systems that sustain life to this day. Water has memory, having shaped the history of life on earth, sculpted landscapes, and sustained civilizations, and having bound human survival to the natural world. Indigenous cultures have long recognized water as a sentient entity — one that instructs, warns, and remembers.

Indigenous cultures have long recognized water as a sentient entity — one that instructs, warns, and remembers.

Western urbanism and industrialization have fractured this amniotic ancestry. Where once cities like Tenochtitlán were built to flow with water woven into the fabric of urban life, modern metropolises treat it as an obstacle. Can a city learn to live again by remembering how to work with water? The thriving Aztec capital, built in harmony with its lake system, was supported by a vast aquatic agricultural system of chinampas that produced food, filtered water, and supported biodiversity. The rivers that fed the ancient lake civilization — now buried beneath asphalt, diverted into concrete canals, or polluted beyond recognition — are dead. Today’s Mexico City, which was built by colonial conquistadors atopthe drained ruins of Tenochtitlán, is sinking. By ignoring the fundamental principles of water’s movement and memory, what was once a blueprint for coexistence has almost been erased. In the words of one Indigenous leader, the waterways that run through modern cities are characterized as “places of death that smell bad, full of primitive people who defecate in clean water.” The sacredness of water has been forgotten. Yet water endures — both a keeper of memory and an untamed force, holding the knowledge forgotten while remaining one of the greatest existential threats.

The sacredness of water has been forgotten. Yet water endures — both a keeper of memory and an untamed force, holding the knowledge forgotten while remaining one of the greatest existential threats.

For millennia, Indigenous cultures have understood water not as a passive element, but as a living intelligence, communicating through its cycles, currents, and rhythms. Water signals through patterns— rising daily with the tides, filling monthly with the moon’s orbit, flooding seasonally to nourish the land, retreating in drought, and, when ignored, reclaiming lost relationships. Reading these patterns requires deep observation, a practice cultivated over generations.

As Tyson Yunkaporta of the Apalech clan explains, Indigenous knowledge functions as a vast, interconnected web — a system of verification built on generations of observation and exchange. Unlike Western science, which often isolates phenomena into discrete categories, Indigenous ways of knowing recognize the interwoven relationships between water, land, and life. The rivers that feed forests, the wetlands that cleanse and replenish seas, the floodwaters that regenerate soils — each is part of a continuous dialogue informed by millions of conversations over thousands of generations between ecosystems and entities.

Unlike Western science, which often isolates phenomena into discrete categories, Indigenous ways of knowing recognize the interwoven relationships between water, land, and life.

Yet, as urbanism and industrialization accelerate, this dialogue is being silenced. Where Indigenous communities hear the warnings carried by water — rivers running dry, aquifers collapsing, ancestral fisheries disappearing — Western science counts the losses in data points and extinction rates. But when water dies, it does not die alone. It takes entire worlds with it.

The intelligence of water has always been there, embedded in landscapes, encoded in the knowledge systems of those who listen. The question is whether humanity will revive its relationship with water in time to adapt, or continue designing while denying a millennia of shared memory.

The intelligence of water has always been there, embedded in landscapes, encoded in the knowledge systems of those who listen.

THE CRISIS OF WATER WITHOUT WISDOM

Across time and territories, civilizations have risen and fallen based on their relationship with water, and today we find ourselves in an era where water crises shape the human condition. Rising sea levels endanger entire nations, and droughts devastate food systems, forcing mass migrations. Aging urban infrastructures designed for conditions that no longer exist are increasingly overwhelmed by floodwaters, while pollution transforms rivers into toxic runways, destroying ecosystems and contaminating vital sources of drinking water.

More than 50 years after Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald developed the first accurate climate model, their warnings remain ignored. We now witness their predictions materializing —atmospheric warming, ice sheets melting, weather patterns destabilizing, and entire communities displaced by water’s increasing force. Yet Western science is still grappling with what Indigenous cultures have long understood — the fate of humanity is inseparable from the fate of water.

But climate scientists were not the first to sound the alarm. Long before the modern climate crisis, ancestral knowledge keepers watched the waters and foretold the consequences of imbalance. In many Indigenous traditions, water is a messenger, revealing the health of the world through its rhythms and cycles. The Hopi prophecies speak of the Fifth World, a time when rivers and lakes would turn against humanity, signaling the end of abundance and the arrival of great upheaval. For the Anishinaabe, who honor water as the lifeblood of Mother Earth, the Seventh Fire Prophecy speaks of a time when humanity stands at a crossroads, faced with a choice — one path leading to renewal and the other to destruction. The Yup’ik people of Alaska, skilled in reading the subtlest shifts in seawater, ice, and currents, warned generations ago: “When the world changes, the weather will change along with the people.” Water, they understood, is the first to respond — a warning when the balance is lost.

As these prophecies remind us, water is reflective — it mirrors the choices humanity makes.

As these prophecies remind us, water is reflective — it mirrors the choices humanity makes. The floods, droughts, and poisoned rivers are not random events but consequences of a lost coexistence. We can regenerate that relationship, guided by the wisdom of those who have always listened, or remain ignorant to water’s warnings while surrounded by surmounting ruin.

As the broker of tensions between the atmosphere and the earth’s ecosystems, water still carries the memories of a time when it enveloped the earth. It shaped the histories of vanished civilizations and holds the plans for future survival. When it rises onto the land, it does not come to ruin but to remind us that we’re distracted from our role as its custodians. As the bearer of life, water too wants to live, but, just like us, water too can die.

While governments and industries debate how to control water, Indigenous and traditional communities have spent millennia understanding how to live with it. The technologies they have perfected — farming with floods, designing floating settlements, cleansing through nature-based systems — are not relics of the past. They are solutions for the future. The question is not whether humanity has the tools to adapt. The question is who will listen.

THE AGE OF TEKNOLOGY

We are living through an era that is being defined by its relationship to technology. Some call it the Fourth Industrial Revolution; others, the Age of AI or the Anthropocene Tech Epoch. Yet an alternative, parallel paradigm is emerging — one that does not separate technology from ecology, nor digital from ancestral knowledge. This is the rise of a TEKnological renaissance, where traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is interwoven with contemporary solutions, creating regenerative water systems that sustain both human and ecological communities.

Yet an alternative, parallel paradigm is emerging — one that does not separate technology from ecology, nor digital from ancestral knowledge.

This age is not just about reviving ancient practices but reimagining a future where water is recognized as a living intelligence — a force that shapes design, governance, and urban resilience. Instead of resisting water through rigid infrastructure, TEKnological urbanism embraces its natural rhythms, allowing cities and settlements to coevolve with tides, rivers, and rainfall. Lo—TEK, Water serves as a field guide for those pioneering this shift, offering blueprints for a world where water is no longer an obstacle to be controlled but a cocreator in design.

A TEKnologist is a practitioner who applies traditional ecological knowledge to water-based challenges in environmental management, architecture, and urban planning. Their role is to shift society from extractive water systems toward regenerative hydrological networks that sustain life for generations to come. This book serves as a field guide for TEKnologists by

· documenting Indigenous water technologies that have sustained civilizations for millennia — such as flood-responsive agriculture, aquifer recharge systems, and floating settlements;

· exploring contemporary architectural and ecological projects that integrate TEK into modern climate-adaptation strategies, ensuring cities work with, rather than against, water; and

· providing structured frameworks for integrating TEK into policy, planning, design and education —demonstrating how Indigenous hydrological knowledge can inform international climate-resilience efforts.

By embracing water as a central force in TEKnological urbanism, we open the door to a future where cities, landscapes, and communities flourish in symbiosis with the very element that sustains all life.

THE URGENCY OF REMEMBERING

Water holds memory — but in a time of crisis it is up to humans to remember. For centuries, colonialism, industrialization, and extractive economies have erased the original instructions — the teachings of how to live in balance with water. Yet the blueprints remain, carried forward by Indigenous knowledge keepers, embedded in landscapes, waiting to be recognized.

We stand at a crossroads. Do we continue to build in defiance of water, or do we learn to build with it? The solutions are not hypothetical. They already exist. We need only listen.

Lo-TEK is not authored by any single person; it is an ongoing conversation between landscapes, knowledge keepers, and the generations who have observed, adapted, and innovated with nature’s systems. It is orated by innumerable voices, translating millions of conversations that have taken place over thousands of years — between people and rivers, between forests and rain, between tides and the shorelines they shape. This volume emerges from a profound need to question the ways of thinking that no longer serve us and to challenge a system that dismisses Indigenous knowledge as unscientific. Decolonizing design means recognizing that the intelligence of water is already embedded in the world’s oldest infrastructures, that technology does not need to be invented anew, but rather remembered and reactivated.

This volume emerges from a profound need to question the ways of thinking that no longer serve us and to challenge a system that dismisses Indigenous knowledge as unscientific.

Decolonizing design also asks us to reframe the foundations of our discipline — not by rejecting form, but by reimagining its relationship to life. Instead of the modernist dictum form follows function, we return to a more ancestral logic: form follows flux. This principle acknowledges that design must move with the rhythms of living systems, not against them — centering reciprocity, adaptability, and cultural continuity as pathways to resilience.

The shift — toward a deeper, more reciprocal relationship with our planetary systems — will be fraught with failures and frictions. It will require an unlearning and a rewriting of colonial narratives. But, as documented in the pages of this volume, the process has already begun. The memory of water is calling. The question is whether we are ready to respond.