Jon Katz

Katz is coordinator of the Ecopartners Project at the Center for Religion, Ethics and Society Policy at Cornell University. He designed the hydroelectrical system for the village of El Limon in the Dominican Republic (1997). He served as a consultant for sustainable development for the village of Yoff in Senegal (1992-95). He was the co-founder of the Peacenet-Econet computer network (1987). He wrote a chapter for "Minigrid Electrical Systems" to be published by the World Bank later this year.

On helping rural areas develop access to information technology:

It's a new style of development where you have a much more personal connection between the people who are trying to create a better life for themselves and people who are working with them to try to make that change. That includes me, it includes the students who come down here from Cornell, it includes Rotary volunteers and the other Rotary members who haven't come down here as volunteers but have been very supportive of the project.

It's a personal style of development that's very different from the traditional institutional style. The whole question of access to media, access to be able to tell a story, access to communications, is increasingly important to the developed world. What we're trying to do here is work with the community so that the community can have that kind of access to the rest of the world.

We're trying to do it in ways that are replicable, ways that communities can talk to each other, as well as talking [to the] outside. In the developing world, technology tends to be very concentrated in a few big cities. Certainly in this country it is. ...

What we're trying to do is get that technology into the hands and into the lives of people ... in small rural communities. In this country about 25 percent of the population is rural still. It's shifted a lot in the last few years. A lot of people have really given up on the country and moved to the city. They may not like it there, but they don't see options.

So what we're trying to do is create a rural option so the community that wants to stay where it is ... and the people who ... want to stick it out [can] make this place better.

On the project he's involved in with the students in El Limon, Dominican Republic:

The kids have been ... learning how to do video. This is really an important thing, because video is a way of getting a story out. It's a way of communicating with people over long distances, and with people who are fairly close. ...

So the kids have been ... learning the basic techniques and making video. ... In this world, that's very important. In a sense it's doubly important here, because [before] we put in a hydro [electric] system ... there were two TV sets in this community. Now nine months later ... there about 20, 25 TV sets. So we probably multiplied the access to television by about 10 times.

The other side of the coin is that we're developing a group of young people here who know what it's all about and who can produce video. ... A lot of what this is about is trying to help people ... create a situation where they're not just passive consumers. ... ... The kids have been ... been learning how to shoot video, and how to get it out of the camera and into the computer, and how to edit it on the computer, so that they can produce something that can communicate. ...

We've been working on [a] project here to help other people have a sense of what it's like to build your own hydroelectric system. ... We're trying to [use] this place [as] a model. ... [In] this country relatively few of the rural people have electricity. There's not a real good prospect of them getting electricity anytime in the immediate future. So building their own ecological small-scale hydroelectric system is a very attractive option. ...

What we're doing is producing a video that will help other communities understand what's involved in doing it themselves, as a way of encouraging other communities to go ahead with their own ... hydroelectric system. That's the point of this.

The other point is ... that the kids will understand what television is about. ... Not only will they know how to do it, but they'll know how to use it, and it won't be something that's outside their control. It won't be something that they see as just something that's pushing them to buy things. It'll be a technique that they know how to use, a very different relationship with the media.

On the history of the project in El Limon:

I came here to do a workshop, and we were here with two pickup trucks and a bunch of people and just generally doing our educational project. ...

[I] just came up here more to demonstrate the technology and the options for a village than to really do much here. And [a village leader] decided that this was something that would really be a value to the community and that there was a potential here. ...

He basically latched onto me and kind of pulled me into the community and started this off, and we did our little project here actually. We put in a little turbine at the school, and it was nice. There was enough light for some basic night literacy classes ..., and they could hold meetings in the evenings after it got dark. ... But the question constantly was, What about our houses? ...

Part of our class was teaching the people how to measure the water flow for a small hydroelectric system. We measured the after-flow in the irrigation system. There wasn't a river here. ... There was a little stream; it wasn't much. But they said, We've got all this water in the irrigation system. Why can't we put a turbine in that? And I said, Well, I don't think so.

So we went out and measured it. We figured out that there was enough water to make about 35 watts a house on the average. And I said 35 watts [is] not going to do much good for anybody. That's basically one little tiny light bulb a house.

But then I started thinking about solar panels, and I realized that the solar panel here gives you that 35 watts. They use little 35-watt solar panels and you get an average of about five or six hours a day of 35 watts, and there was only one family in the village that could afford that. And it was considered highly desirable.

So here we were in a position of actually being able to give people four times as much electricity [as] a solar panel [could]. ... [W]e thought [it would run] a couple [of] little fluorescent lamps and a radio. And we went around and said to people, Do you really want to work for a year, really work hard for a year, for a couple of little fluorescent lamps and a radio in your house? And they all said, Yeah, we want to do that. [LAUGHS] So OK, we did it.

It was one year of backbreaking work. People made their [own power] poles. These poles weigh about 500 pounds. They're made out of steel-reinforced cement. They were made right here in the village. It was a lot of work to make them and it was a lot of work to move them.

This isn't the place where you call a cement mixer to come deliver your cement. It's not even a place where you have a machine that mixes your cement for you. Three or four people stand around a pile of cement and gravel and water on the ground and shovel at it until it gets mixed. That's the way they do it here. Making 140 poles that way with wooden molds was an enormous amount of work.

And it was an enormous amount of work moving those poles as much as a half-mile up into the hills, up where the turbine is, and down the road. And they did it. They did it [because] they wanted the electricity. [It] took a year and a half, and it works, it works.

On how the IT programs have changed the students of El Limon:

There are quite a few young people who've really had their horizons broadened. There is no question about that. The question is, Where do we go from here? One place where we're going is [trying] to get some better basic education for the young people. That'll probably take the form of trying to get a third teacher in the village. That'll take the form of trying to get the kids down by truck to intermediate school, to high school in town.

It's also taking the form of the distance learning project that will hopefully bring high school level education into thousands of these rural villages. The other thing is to create in some way for people ... who want to stay to make a living here using new skills. That's what this rural center is about ... to create an educational institution, a community institution.

It's not a not-a-for-profit business. [It's] a community institution that provides a decent living for people using high tech skills. We're going to be able to do a lot more than just have people entering data or doing low skill work.

We want to have people to be able to do educational work, to do creative work here. The really exciting thing about these technologies is they open up the possibility of doing that.

For the first time you can go into any village like this and create broadcast quality video. And that's new. That's exciting. That's important. And that's a real change. It's the same thing for making Web pages, for making CD-ROMs. All these things are within the reach of what we can do here and what people can do in hundreds of thousands of villages around the world.

On how technology has advanced globalization:

There are a couple of things going on. One is there have been talks for three decades, at least, about the so called global village. The idea of rural communities being able to jump over the 20th century. Essentially going from 19th century into the 21st century -- from basically a peasant economy, very limited access to education, very limited access to health care, isolation, poverty -- directly into ... the information economy. To basically jump over the smokestack stage of development. That idea has been around for quite a while.

I think we're starting to do that here. I think this is one of the real experiments in creating a global village, in the sense that [Buckminster] Fuller and those in that circle of people talked about. The other thing is that ... I see globalization as an interplay of technology and culture.

It seems to me a lot of what we call globalization is very profit driven. It's oriented toward maximizing efficiency. It's really not based on humanistic values. It's not based on ecological values. ...

A great deal of the problem that's being perceived now is ... that human values and ecological values are not being honored in the process of globalization. What we're trying to do here is to use the tools, use the techniques, to work together across the distances, to have a lot of different kinds of people working together, for a common goal. But to base this on human values and on ecological values.

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