The International Center for Appropriate Technology or ICAT is founded on the site of a well-known national laboratory whose primary focus has been the invention and development of weapons of mass destruction. Our deteriorating ecosystems now demand that a Manhattan Project-like crash program be initiated to address global environmental problems. At the source of the present crisis is the high consumption lifestyles of developed countries and decades of shortsighted national foreign policies that emphasized arms sales and military actions instead of programs of environmental restoration and social equity. The ICAT now serves as a world-class research center whose scientific expertise and supercomputers are directed toward fashioning the next generation of environmental technologies.

       Ideally, our newly elected, environmentally conscious President would emphasize the readiness of the United States to serve not as a militaristic bully, but as a responsible world leader for environmental restoration and renewal. He would encourage the best and the brightest minds of his country to take up the challenge to build a better world, and he would promise to direct the full force of the American scientific community toward this end. “‘Swords into plowshares’ — this time it's for real," he would say proudly. "Let us begin the ‘Campaign to Restore The Earth.’ It is a noble, necessary pursuit; we must wait no longer — as all of life is now at risk."

A VISIT TO ICAT

At the entrance to the facility, the visitor would notice a bronze plaque announcing the founding date of the International Center for Appropriate Technology. The word "Peace" is rendered in several languages. Visitors often comment on the palpable presence of a sense of deeply-desired human expression for a new, more harmonious world order. It manifests itself in the artifacts of prayerful expression — artfully-bound feathers, offerings of animal fetishes and miscellaneous unique tokens — and also, simply, as just a feeling in the air.

      Yet, conceivably, with the redirection of this former national laboratory away from weapons design and toward global environmental restoration, an opportunity for national psychological and political transformation might exist. Certainly the past cannot be changed. The contaminated land here will never fully heal in human lifetimes; but human intentions can change, and with that shift can come healing and revelations to ensure a future beneficial to all. These thoughts filtered through my mind, translating into silent prayers. Somehow, perhaps humanity will finally understand what it needs to do to serve the interests of all life on the planet.

      And indeed, progress is being made here. ICAT put the huge supercomputers designed to model atomic explosions to a much better, more humane use — monitoring the health of the planet. The supercomputers at ICAT continue to process huge amounts of data, but the data is now environmental, constantly imputed from sensors under oceans, in rainforests and deserts, on mountaintops and glaciers, and relayed from scientific laboratories and on-the-ground survey teams.  The incoming information stream is stored and processed at the Real Time Diagnostic Center. Inside the Center is a kind of Earth Situation Room, which houses a 20 foot x 30 foot electronic map of the world.  The huge  EarthWatch Map is impressive. It renders a sophisticated and highly detailed, almost 3-D graphic depiction of the planet’s surface that enables the viewer to easily sense the topographical makeup of any particular region of the globe.

      The EarthWatch Map is capable of modeling future scenarios such as global warming, ozone depletion, nuclear fallout, and ecosystem and population collapse. Running these scenarios is usually not for the faint of heart as they vividly describe impacts to the planet if the current course of civilization remains unchanged. However, the sobering experience often has the effect of prodding visitors to become more politically and environmentally active.

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     Elsewhere at ICAT, international teams of young researchers guided by experienced scientists and planners are hard at work with powerful tools seeking to fundamentally revision village and city infrastructures. Highly skilled engineering teams work long hours in state-of-the-art laboratories designing wonderful, earth-friendly technologies that people need to live a sustainable, healthy life. 

      The ICAT is home to biologists exploring simpler and better birth control methods, and botanists probing the inner secrets of soon-to-be-extinct plants. Urban planners will sit for hours at a clip skillfully modeling city designs on computers — rethinking Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles — trying to find better ways to manage people and their environments. 

      Economists, anthropologists, sociologists and architects, an entire building full of them, can be seen pouring over tabletops piled high with studies, data and drawings.  The are re-envisioning everything — the whole assemblage of human civilization.  Nothing is considered sacrosanct here — not the marketplace, not politics as usual, or contemporary patterns of financing and development. They care little for embedded governments and institutions and their precious ideologies or status-quo relationships of gender, ethnicity and class. Everything is up for reconsideration here. All is judged potentially remake-able.

Your next stop now should be the Southwest Intercultural Collaborative. See you there.