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Inventors, Engineers, Innovators — Where are you?

saeeda bukhari
7 min readMar 13, 2016

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Fantasy utopia aviation — No. 2. Les utopies de la navigation aérienne au siècle

“… we never found any government, large organization, or investor willing to put real resources behind it. We finally stalled out and had to dissolve the corporation last month…there is no profit motive to what we are trying to do — reach destitute populations in conflict zones. So it was never going to entice ordinary investors…”

Could we learn from the Deviant?

Syria is not the first time that war and starvation have been companions. In 1943, a photographer, jots down a note. “Famine. A mother bests bark for her hungry children to forage and stuff into their mouths”. He is describing this picture, taken during civil war in China.

In 2016, a citizen journalist, describes citizens, eating grass, leaves, and dirt in the besieged town of Madaya, Syria.

This is an ancient problem, in need of a solution. And until we can change the desire for war, it is likely we see this again. So why have we not modernised our solutions, to meet our current level of knowledge of the world. Why do we not take the, “Positive Deviant Approach”. What if we identified the plants that are natural, and have survived in disaster, to provide sustenance and survival.

Seed Bombs

As a country disintegrates in civil war, fast growing hardy edible weeds, drought resistant grasses and plants, could be made abundant. Food we do not choose to rely on in times of peace but which can be valuable sources of robust sustenance in times of war.

Could deviants find, the natural world’s repeatable solutions?

Could technology distribute small, self contained, food production, that can be made mobile. So when the convoy cannot get through, there is something to fall back on?

Could NGO’s, family groups, citizen groups large and small, network with Off-grid farming, and sustainability in the natural environment and could they find willing and active engineers, to make this into a part of the disaster portfolio of solutions.

Wouldn’t it be great if “drone strike”, meant food delivery

However technology is still entwined in other goals, more pressing then human disaster relief. First it serves, military purposes and then other needs line up for resources. One would assume that a decade since the “drone strike”, entered popular news coverage, we must have the ability to fly in food parcels into besieged cities; simply because we have the ability to fly in bombs and missiles. The answer is “almost”. A start-up came inspiringly close to helping people in places like Syria, and it is crushing for me to repeat this conversation…

“…we never found any government, large organization, or investor willing to put real resources behind it. We finally stalled out and had to dissolve the corporation last month…there is no profit motive to what we are trying to do — reach destitute populations in conflict zones. So it was never going to entice ordinary investors…”

Currently it is unclear whether the same company or another will take this solution to delivery.

However Investment is not the only problem his team faced, the bigger obstacle is politics, to drop food through official channels, needs negotiators that are able to tackle, NGO’s, governments in conflict, armed groups and international organisations.

It is possible because we can see co-ordination to enable war and weapons. So why not food? However it will take time, and skilled people of a particular kind, of which there are not plenty.

Thinking Differently

So its obvious, investment and politics are big obstacles to progress. Two constraints that inventors, innovators, engineers need to overcome. However Large organisations sometimes fail when small NGO’s and individuals succeed, because smaller is frequently simpler and faster.

Therefore we must ask the question, can solutions be designed so food can be delivered to besieged conflict zones, by the little man? And there are examples that we can see, that show that this concept has already been proven. For instance, according to news reports, small time drug dealers, have been caught, dropping drugs into prison yards using children’s toy quad-copters.

Still, their solution is not in a war zone. And they are not poor. So could we think differently, what about balloons taking a small amount of food, could a balloon be navigated, and then burst above a GPS co-ordinate. Small, disposable, created so cheaply, it can be distributed across a country, so individuals could put together small amounts of food and let fly, without drawing much attention. So widespread that it would be difficult to control. Are there any innovators, inventors, engineers, willing and ready to take up this challenge, ready to think up any solution that could enable the people from the local area.

The Geneva Convention was a product of Social Innovation

“There must have been quantities of people, perhaps a majority of the inhabitants of Barcelona, who regarded the whole affair without a flicker of interest, or with no more interest than they would have felt in an air-raid…” — George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

The above words were written at the time of the Spanish Civil War, fought between socialists, anarchists and fascists, three political camps that were able to mobilise people into armed conflict on a mass level. And yet Orwell observes that most people, were indifferent, they wanted the world to return to stability. I am going to set aside the judgement of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and just point out that there are many conflicts that describe the same phenomenon. We cannot avoid that many people will just seek to get by and live, and we need to respect that in times of war and peace.

When we think of words like, “civilian” , we are in a way talking about the people who are not involved in the fighting, they may not be impartial, they may not be indifferent as Orwell describes, but they have not entered into a tacit agreement of kill or be killed. And it is these people that the fourth Geneva Convention, seeks to protect and is now binding to all nations.

From 1949 to 2016, we still have a long way to go before it is fully implemented. It is worth thinking deeply about this when we look at the recent pictures of the starving boy in Madaya, Syria.

When I think of the Geneva convention, I see something that is universal and in collective ownership, another way to describe it would be, the common ethics of humankind, which was codified in the Geneva convention but we can see evidence of in countless written and spoken works of human wisdom and history, religious and not. So in that spirit, I would like to ask, where are the innovators, the technologists, the creative people who are seeking to Protect Civilians in Time of War. Why is there a starving boy in 2016, when we can 3D print out of moon matter.

Bibliography

Illustrations

  • Les Utopies de la Navigation, Aerienne Au Secle Dernier, Utopian flying machines of the 19th century, France, 1890–1900
  • Starving boy in Madaya, Syria. Photograph: Local Revolutionary Council in Madaya, 2016
  • Henan Province (China), woman and children stripping bark from trees. 1943

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saeeda bukhari

Written by saeeda bukhari

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