Nathalie Kelley has enchanted audiences with her range of roles, and now using her voice to promote ancient technologies that could better the environment.

The Peruvian-Australian actress had a breakout role as Neela in the 2006 film Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. In 2010, she starred as the love interest in the Bruno Mars’ video “Just the Way You Are”. She secured a recurring role in the crime drama Body of Proof, and played Sybil in the final season of The Vampire Diaries. Her role as Cristal in the Dynasty reboot in 2017 showcased her talent in a prime-time soap opera. In 2020, she played the lead role of Noa Hamilton in The Baker and the Beauty, hitting #1 on Netflix in America, the week of its release.

She has a social media following of 1.5 million, and recently spoke in Toronto, at the Collision conference, on planet stewardship.

What creative projects are you working on?

I’m working on a science fiction story about a world in which modern technology is hurting us, and the world has to rely on ancestral knowledge and Indigenous skillsets to survive. 

That story is not a dystopian future. This post-apocalyptic world is a much better world than we’re living in today. Climate change has been averted. Relationships have been restored between humans and other living beings. What matters? Clean water, food. There are corporations ordering people to cut down trees, or put mercury in the water to get out gold to make iPhones. No! People are concerned again with what matters. And these technologies bring us closer to nature, instead of taking them away from nature. 

What did you speak about at Collision?

I spoke on behalf of technologies that have been overlooked by Western history, culture and science. Technologies have existed on this continent and around the world, for over 30,000 years, that involve ways of growing food, and clean water, constructing communities, that are primarily borne out of intimacy with all living beings. We should desperately consider alternatives to high tech, calling this local traditional ecological knowledge “Lo-TEK,” and serve as an antidote to the destruction that high technology has on our planet.

What’s an example of Lo-TEK?

Terra Preta, Portuguese for Black Earth, is the fertile soil on which the Amazon rainforest was growing. We think the Amazon rainforest is a pristine bit, untouched by man, that humans just happen to stumble upon? But there were parts built by engineers, created by people using technology, over thousands of years, to create the world’s most sophisticated carbon capture. It also is home to the most biodiversity on the planet. It is a supermarket of pharmacy, with 96 per cent of all medicines today coming from tropical forests.

If you look at things like Machu Picchu, the cities that my ancestors the Incas built, were incredibly sophisticated engineering, to move water long distances to irrigate lands, to build topsoil with the agricultural techniques and feed tens of millions of people, without a drop of chemical fertilizer or glyphosate, or any of the things that industrial agriculture tells us we need now. We have technology to clean water, through bio-remediation, using plants, and mycoremediation, through the use of fungi. Ancestral knowledge is trying to be erased, being ignored. Indigenous technologies were born out of a different value system, and cannot be co-opted by corporations and monetized. They see technology as tools for collaboration between humans and the natural world, in order to increase biodiversity, in order to make life prosperous and abundant for all living beings. The world desperately needs to return back to these values, rather than looking at these things as resources to be plundered.

Can you offer another example?

The use of fire to regenerate a forest, or a piece of land, or grasslands, and prevent future wildfires. A huge problem with the wildfires we’re seeing all over the world… those places had Indigenous people that yearly were going through that land and meticulously and methodically practicing small burns, to ensure that they burn off all the brush, all the kindling, anything that could provoke a huge wildfire. 

The ash left behind will actually feed and fertilize the soil, causing the landscape to grow even more lush and biodiverse, inviting more wildlife, thereby helping Indigenous people by making hunting more bountiful. So it was a full, complete system.

Dave Gordon | Contributing Writer