The First Seminar on Artificial Intelligence, Environment, and Socioenvironmental Justice was a vibrant space in which technique was celebrated as a collective practice, where diverse voices revealed that innovation emerges when maps do not precisely overlap, but become incommensurable and fertile, with gaps that allow fables and policies to enter.
“The axe is my toy/cutting off my hopes”
song of the babassu coconut breakers
To think about technique is to consider how worlds are arranged by the means of transmission of information, by how we handle the gestures, rhythms and materials that sustain the lives we share. Technique is not a mere instrument or accumulation of artifacts, but culture in motion, like the axe of the coconut-breakers, capable of opening up futures or limiting them. In the context of innovation, this perspective shifts us from fascination with isolated novelty to the recognition of practices and inventions that, over time, have produced modes of existence, coexistence, and care among humans and more-than-humans. In times of climate change, this responsibility broadens, for mechanisms of mitigation and adaptation cease to be containment measures and become practices of living together, capable of placing biomes, cultures, and technologies into arrangements that sustain life.
The First Seminar on Artificial Intelligence, Environment, and Socioenvironmental Justice was a gesture in that direction. A vibrant space in which technique was celebrated as a collective practice, where diverse voices revealed that innovation emerges when maps do not precisely overlap, but become incommensurable and fertile, with gaps that allow fables and policies to enter. In this gathering, imagining futures also meant inscribing them in the present, affirming that climate, territory, and technology can only be considered together. The seminar opened a rare space, welcoming differences and reminding us that common futures are not built through erasure but through recognition of diverse practices and knowledge systems. This gesture contrasts with intensifying pressure vectors: the expansion of data centers consuming energy and water on an industrial scale, the financialization of territories through large renewable energy projects, agribusiness combining border surveillance and genetic control under the rhetoric of "precision agriculture," and the dissociation from the land through promises of "efficiency" and "improvement" that rehash eugenic logics.
By bringing together the ecosystems of digital rights and socioenvironmental justice, we manage to name these tensions while affirming practices that resist erasure. The song of the babassu coconut breakers, recognized as intangible heritage, echoed as a reminder that biodiversity, seeds, and land are not inputs for decarbonization metrics, but sociocultural and political foundations of existence. It is in this intertwining that mitigation and adaptation gain meaning: as proportional responsibility of states, corporations, and finance toward peoples, biomes, and collective memories that sustain life, while affirming existing practices of territorial protection, autonomous protocols, and community funds as solutions to the climate crisis.
Thoughts of mitigation and adaptation branching from this intertwining must displace the very grammar of climate negotiations, which still rely on conversion schemes that reduce impacts to abstract equivalences in carbon units as a universal map of technological solutions. This technopolitical articulation between digital rights and socioenvironmental justice proposes another innovation program, capable of recognizing that territories, bodies, seeds, and biomes sustain dimensions of the future that do not fit into these standardized translations. In this horizon, mitigation and adaptation cease to be treated as mechanisms that merely reduce or compensate for damages and become understood as practices that produce knowledge from relations situated between territories, species, memories, and their technologies. These are synergies formed in the very functioning of ecology, offering paths to protocols capable of keeping the dimensions of climate, justice, and innovation inseparable, reminding us that life is sustained not only by carbon calculations, but by coexistence among practices of diverse worlds.
