Indian Economy, 5th edition (90 page)

INTRODUCTION

We are passing through an era of ‘technology vs environment’ dilemma. Never before has so much attention been given to the issue of the
‘relationship between environment & technology’
. While humanity continued realising higher growth and development on the ‘vibes’ of newer technologies; scholars remained busy debating the issues like – whether technologies are neutral, promote happiness or cause environmental degradation. We are at crossroads where shortcuts are available at every step, but there lacks an alternative technology which can promote its growth and developmental requirements and eventually doesn’t threaten its habitat, surrounding, ecology and the environment. Global as well as individual attempts are in place but it is probably not possible to put a timeframe in which mankind will be able to solve the dilemma. This chapter is devoted to understanding this dilemma. All contemporary views of experts, together with the official stand of the major nations of the world, including India, have been included in the discussion.

TECHNOLOGY – THE TRADITIONAL
VIEW

The old view about technological development was that they came into being through chance discoveries from the works of independent scientists and engineers. It was assumed that such discoveries are then applied if they increase industrial productivity, meet market demands and increase profits. In this way, inventions lead to innovations, innovations lead to the diffusion of technological products. In the history of technology, key points of interest have been,
who the inventors were
, when they made their invention and on what scientific or technological advance the invention was based. Occasionally, attention is turned to why some inventions fail to make it as commercial technologies and what the barriers to that progression may be. Technology is therefore seen as merely the fruits of applied science.

By one view, technology is
neutral
and that is why techniques pursue no end in itself.
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However, this view has been discredited by modern scholars who opine that the progress toward the wide adoption of a technology is neither smooth, nor inevitable. Many technologies were invented before the scientific principles on which they are based are known (steam engine is one example). Emerging technologies often compete. The choice of technologies as well as the way they are designed and developed are influenced by social as well as technical factors.

For
Economic determinists,
technologies are developed and selected to suit the prevailing economic conditions, for example, relative scarcity of land, labour, capital, and the products and services that are developed depend on market demand. The technologies which are a commercial success in the market are those that are widely adopted. However, economic determinism does not explain the development of technologies where there is no profit motive or market demand such as space research, military technology and even medical technology. Nor does it explain why the cheapest means of production is not always the one that is adopted.

More recently, the scholars of technological change tend to argue that the invention and engineering design process is guided and shaped by the goals of the designers and their
employers
or
clients
. This is why, they argue that it is misleading to consider technologies as neutral or the inevitable result of progress . Basically, long before any technology is offered for use in the market, a process of selection occurs that is guided by social and political, as well as economic, considerations. This is why we have been seeing many report across the world in which the developers of a new technique or medicine have been blamed of concealing harmful effects. Recently, ‘swine-flu’ was almost declared to the proportion of a pandemic in which a ‘WHO-drug manufacturer’ connivance was highlighted.

TECHNOLOGY – AS MEANS OF
RESOURCE USE

The reality of
environmental degradation
can be described as a product of population, resource use per person (affluence) and environmental damage per unit of resource used (technology). In the negotiation at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the USA wanted to remove all references to consumption (resource use per person) from the Agenda 21 document (the proposed plan of action for the 21st century). The US administration did not take suggestions that lifestyles would need to change in affluent nations, and the then US President, George Bush said, ‘The American lifestyle is not negotiable’.
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Two main reactions came to this –

i.
Developing
and
low-income nations
retaliated by removing references to the urgent need to slow population growth. These nations ultimately wanted to shift responsibility for environmental problems onto industrialised nations.

ii.
The
Women’s groups
from the USA and low-income nations supported these moves, arguing that population control ‘jeopardises women’s health, is disguised genocide, or places blame on women’ rather than on the economic systems that exploit and misuse nature and people.
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The absence of a consensus on either of the two issues;
population
and
consumption;
and the political need for the concept of sustainable development to accommodate economic growth, means that the achievement towards sustainable development will depend on our ability to reduce the environmental impact of resource use through technological change. Many interest groups accept this political reality. They see continual growth in a
finite world
as possible, through the powers of technology, which will always be there to help us find new sources or provide alternatives if a particular resource appears to be running out. Otherwise, technology will help us to use and reuse what is left in the most efficient manner.

The legislative measures, economic instruments and consumer pressures are aimed at achieving technological changes such as recycling, waste minimisation, substitution of materials, changed production processes, pollution control and more efficient usage of resources.
The Commission for the Future
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says ‘the challenge of sustainable development is to find new products, processes, and technologies which are environmentally friendly while they deliver the things we want’. This view is generally held across the spectrum of political views as per which: an ecologically sustainable society ‘will require large amounts of new technology, technological innovation, modern management practices’ as well as changes to lifestyle.
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Same group of experts believe that environmental damage can be reversed with modern technology, and that new technologies can rectify the problems caused by older technologies.
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The
Pearce Report
also suggests that resource usage can be dealt with through recycling and minimising wastage, and that the use of the environment for disposing of wastes can be minimised in a similar way : ‘Recycling, product redesign, conservation and low-waste technology can interrupt the flow of wastes to these resources, and that is perhaps the major feature of a sustainable development path of economic progress.’
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Still some questions remain to be addressed. What sort of changes are necessary to precipitate dramatic technological changes? Will technology alone be enough to solve the environmental problems facing us? Should there be no change in our consumption style?

TECHNOLOGY – AS THE CULPRIT OF
ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS

We can take some clues from the first lot of insightful writings by the scholars of the past. One among them was the Harvard educated US biologist Barry Commoner. His writings (supported by empirical data) are considered to belong to the first lot of such views which left deep impact on the scholars and the policymakers of the time, across the world. Barry Commoner,
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in early seventies, argued that the escalating growth of environmental problems in the USA was due to flawed technology, rather than population growth or affluence. He pointed out that pollution was increasing at a much faster rate than population or economic growth. The difference, he argued, could be accounted for by the emergence of new technologies after World War II. He noted that in the twenty-five years following the war, the production of non-reusable soft-drink bottles had increased by 53000 per cent, synthetic fibres by 5980 per cent, and mercury used for chlorine production by 3930 per cent. During that same period, the production of food, textiles, clothes and metals had only increased at similar rates to population growth (42 per cent); and cotton fibre, wool and soap manufacture had decreased.
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These were the reasons why he argued that it was not economic growth itself that created environmental problems but how it was achieved. The new production technologies had a far greater environmental impact than the ones they replaced. As
an example
, Commoner looked at farm technologies. He pointed out that the traditional
fertilising system
of farms, where animals provided the manure for fertilising the land, had been interfered with by the use of feedlots, where animals were confined in small areas whilst being fattened up for market rather than leaving them grazing on pastures. The resulting heavy concentration of manure placed undue strain on a small area of land which could not naturally deal with so much waste. The waste, therefore, tended to pollute underground and nearby waterways. Animals in feedlots were fed on grain, and the land used to grow the grain was depleted of nutrients; so that farmers had to resort to artificial fertilisers, especially nitrogen, that created their own pollution problems because some of the chemicals used ended up in the waterways.

Similarly, the use of
pesticides
also enabled farmers to get higher yields from smaller land areas, but at an environmental cost. Pesticides such as DDT also polluted waterways, and killed or harmed other insects and animals (and sometimes humans) that were not originally targeted. While artificial fertilisers depleted the soil of naturally occurring nitrogen-fixing bacteria, pesticides killed off the pests’ natural predators, and the pests themselves built up resistance to the pesticides. This ensured continuing dependence on the new chemicals and the need for ever-increasing amounts to be used.

In a
nother example
Commoner talked about the replacement of soaps by detergents. He estimated that the production of the active agent of detergents required three times as much energy as soap. The burning of fuel and high- temperature reactions needed during manufacture of detergents added to air pollution. Not only did the manufacture of detergent subject the environment to greater stress than soap, but its disposal created a whole new set of problems. The original detergents did not biodegrade in the environment, and they created mountains of foam in waterways. The new generation of detergents developed to solve this problem did not produce foam but were more toxic to the fish in the waterways. Also, the phosphate in the detergents stimulated algal growth which could choke rivers or stress them with an overload of organic material. Detergents replaced soaps on the markets, argued Commoner, not because they were better at cleaning but because of the advertising efforts of detergent manufacturers.

He provides a
third example
which deals with
textile production
. Synthetic fibres, which are often derived from non-renewable resources such as oil or natural gas, have replaced natural fibres such as cotton and wool in many applications. They require extremely high temperatures to manufacture, which adds to air pollution and energy usage. Furthermore, unlike the natural fibres, they do not break down in the environment. The manufacture of synthetic fibres, plastics and detergents has required big increases in the production of organic chemicals. Since mercury was used to manufacture organic chemicals, this meant the load of mercury in the environment increased.

He concluded that the new technologies also used more electric power and other forms of energy than those they replaced. During the time he was writing the book, aluminium and chemical production alone accounted for 28 per cent of US industrial electricity use. This, in itself, meant more use of energy resources and more pollution.

Precisely, the experts today conclude that though technologies seemed to be solving the immediate problems of humanity’s urge for higher growth and development, they were basically, adding problems for the future in a hidden way. It means, every technology had a hidden cost to it. Mankind went on excluding those costs intentionally or unintetionally – a clear case of ‘flawed accounting and thinking about the risk’.
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Those hidden costs were just waiting there to become visible. They are now taking toll in the forms of ‘disturbed weather conditions’, ‘melting ice-shields’, ‘submerging islands’ and finally, culminating into the greater danger of ‘climate change’.

THE POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE

The idea of an ‘appropriate technology’, which could provide sustainability to our planet and at the same time does not hinder the growth of humanity either, has always been a hot topic of debate, epecially, in the western world. The first idea of ‘Appropriate Technology’ was formulated by the British economist, E.F. Schumacher, which today exists in many different forms and flavors.
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The experts defined it precisely this way –
appropriate technologies are those systems of technology which promote and maintain a sustainable culture
. The modern industrial culture of North America, Europe and other industrialised nations is hardly sustainable, and the technologies employed here exhibit dubious appropriateness.
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It has been recognised that developing appropriate technology requires changes in the socio-political and cultural mind set.
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We do not see these conditions available in the western developed world till recent times, as they have been the harbingers of technology diffusion to rest of the world. But in recent times, the attitude is changing. Since early 1970s experts have been debating everything from ‘neutrality’ of technology to the ‘sustainable culture’ and ‘sustainable technologies’ much of which is today known as the primers in ‘environmentalism’. But at least the experts were able to sensitise the issue of sustainabilty and made the world think about in the coming decades in a more concerned way, and finally, we see the idea of ‘sustainable development’ being mooted out by the world in 1987.
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