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Deconstructing Science
By: Anil
Agarwal
Nature
uses lean sources to get work done. The environmental crises we face today are
a result of ignoring this simple paradigm for two centuries. For the sake of
our survival in the 21 st century, science will have to move on from just
unraveling nature to imitating its ways. More so in developing countries that
face a whole gamut of environmental and developmental problems. This is the
challenge of Science for Ecological Security.
Few people
realize that the 21st century is going to be the century of the environment.
Technological change in this century is going to be heavily driven by the
environmental imperative. Any nation that forgets to invest in environmental
science and technology will only do so at its own peril - its economy and the
lives and health of its people. Human technologies will be forced to mimic
nature's cycles and gentleness. Else they will threaten the very survival of
the human race.
How can we
say that such development is destined to take place? Firstly, let us look at
the evolution of science itself in the 20th century. Scientists during the last
century essentially asked four important questions. At the start of the
century, the biggest question that was in the minds of scientists like Albert
Einstein or Neils Bohr was 'What is Matter'. By the middle of the 20th century,
scientists had begun to ask two other important questions, namely, 'What is
Life' and 'What is the Universe'. It was around the 1950s that Francis Crick
and James Watson unraveled the structure of the DNA. This discovery led to
enormous developments in life sciences and, more recently, we have begun to see
the emergence of biotechnologies based on the knowledge gathered by life
scientists in a very big way. But by the last quarter of the 20th
century, scientists had begun to ask yet another critical question and that is
'What is the Web of Life'.
This last
question was not asked out of scientific curiosity but because of human
necessity. The vast range of technologies that had emerged because of increased
human understanding of nature was beginning to have major impacts on nature
itself. Soon after the World War II ended in 1945, within just 15 years, the
world witnessed what economists call the Post-War Economic Boom. During this
period, the Western world not only saw enormous economic growth but also
enormous environmental problems. By 1960, it was impossible to breathe in most
Western cities, all the way from Tokyo to Los Angeles, and rivers Iike the
Rhine and the Thames had become stinking sewers. Therefore, an enormous amount
of scientific and technological investment had to be made from the 1970s
onwards to deal with the environmental crisis.
The Western
environmental crisis of the 1950s and 1960s was not a historical accident. It
is inherent to the Western technological paradigm which is dependent on a very
heavy use of materials and energy and which, therefore, leads to rapid
degradation of the environment. By the last two decades of the 20th century,
this technological paradigm had begun to spread in a big way into the
developing world and, not surprisingly, Southeast and East Asia which began to
show high rates of economic growth, quickly became the most polluted part of
the world.
As this
technological paradigm spreads across the developing world in the 21st century,
we can expect an enormous amount of environmental mayhem to take place, which
is going to go well above the carrying capacity of the earth's environment and
could easily destroy numerous critical geo-chemical cycles like the carbon
cycle and the nitrogen cycle.
ENVIRONMENTAL SURPRISES
The second
reason why humanity will continue to struggle with the environmental imperative
for a long time to come is because the last three to four decades have clearly
shown that massive technological interventions into natural ecosystems lead to
major environmental surprises. In fact, the only way the Western world has been
able to maintain some amount of environmental sanity in its economic growth has
been by constantly monitoring the environment and quickly taking corrective
measures each time a new surprise gets thrown up. As a result, the last two
decades have seen innumerable environmental treaties being negotiated to bring
about global cooperative action amongst the nations of the world to deal with
the new and emerging environmental threats.
Nature and
its various subcomponents are all very complex systems. When major
interventions are made into these very complex systems, no one ever knows what
will be the result. Because of the complexity of nature's ecosystems, it is
almost impossible to predict the outcome. It is like millions of rats being let
out across the Himalayan range. But even if we know that these rats have a
tendency to congregate, the Himalayan range is so large that nobody can predict
where and on which mountain these rats will begin to emerge and start eating it
away. This is exactly what happens with technological interventions. A few
examples are as follows.
DDT
(dichloro diphenyl trichloethane): First of the chlorinated organic
insecticides, DDT was originally prepared in 1873. In 1939, Paul Muffler of
Geigy Pharmaceutical in Switzerland discovered its effectiveness as an
insecticide - he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 1948
for this discovery. DDT's use increased enormously worldwide after World War
II. In the late 1940s, Charles Broley, a Canadian banker retired to Florida,
said the pesticide, sprayed along the gulf coast to control salt marsh
mosquitoes, was the cause of the drop in the numbers of the bald eagle -unique
to North America and the US national emblem. Subsequent research showed that
the chemical interfered with its ability to develop strong shells for its eggs.
The shells were so thin that the eggs often broke during incubation or failed
to hatch. Their reproduction disrupted, bald eagle populations plummeted. As
the dangers of DDT became known, in large part due to Rachel Carson's famous
book Silent Spring, it was banned for most uses in the US in 1972. Several
countries have banned it since, while some like India continue to use it to
counter the menace of malaria. They desperately need a new way to control
mosquitoes as vectors develop resistance to DDT.
CFCs
(chlorofluorocarbons): When chlorofluorocarbons were first discovered in the
1930s, they were seen as wonder substances because of their extreme stability.
In fact, after the Second World War ended, they not only came to be used in
air-conditioning and refrigeration systems but also in medical uses like
inhalers used by asthmatics. These gases could go deep into the lungs of
asthmatics and yet have no effect on them. But nobody could have dreamt that in
'the 1970s scientists would find that these chlorofluorocarbons were destroying
a global ecological system like the stratospheric ozone layer and literally
threaten the very survival of life on earth. The stratospheric ozone layer acts
as a very important protective shield against the lethal ultraviolet radiation
coming in from space. By the mid-1980s, scientists had discovered a hole in the
ozone layer above Antarctica and by the end of 1980s, the nations of the world
had to get together to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Today, the
world is busy redesigning all its air-conditioning and refrigeration
technology.
POPs
(persistent organic pollutants): In the mid-1980s, a Canadian scientist, Eric
Dewailly of Laval University in Quebec, was trying to look for pure, unpolluted
human milk to compare with the concentration of polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCBs) in the milk of Southern Quebec women. He collected the blood of Canadian
Eskimos, also known as the Inuit people, who were living way up in the Arctic
region, far away from the industrialized world. The scientist was stunned to
find five times more PCBs in the milk of Inuit mothers. He could not believe
what he had found, and thought he had made a mistake. Repeated tests showed
that this was indeed a common problem among the Inuit people. Now scientists
know that the use of POPs in countries situated far away in the lower latitudes
leads to these pollutants, which do not degrade easily, riding the waves and
the winds and finally reaching the Arctic circle. Frank Wania of the University
of Toronto explains that planetary circulation systems produce a "systematic
transfer of these chemicals from warmer to colder areas." The Arctic region
acts as a 'cold trap' where the chemicals fall from the sky and dissolve in
water, disappear into sediments or accumulate in the fat of animals or fish,
which the Inuit eat. Today, there is an international treaty to phase out these
POPs.
Diesel:
Up to the early 1990s, diesel was regarded as a green fuel because of its
higher fuel efficiency as compared to petrol. It was, therefore, seen as a
solution for even arresting global warming. But in just the last five years,
environmental health scientists have discovered extremely negative health
effects of diesel-related pollutants. As a result, diesel today is literally
being phased out across the world and every week new evidence emerges about the
health effects of diesel.
Carbon
dioxide:
When the newly industrializing Western world embarked upon the use of fossil
fuels to energise its economic engines, it had no idea that one day the use of
these fossil fuels will threaten to destabilise the world's climate systems in
such a way that it would threaten the very survival of a large number of
coastal cities, agriculture across a wide swath of tropical lands, and numerous
.species of living organisms which today live in niche environments and which
will not be able to colonize other environments in time. As a result, the world
is now faced with a major challenge of reinventing its energy system, moving
away from fossil fuel energy to zero-carbon energy, which will lead to a major
technological change.
Vehicular
pollution control:
within India itself those of us who have been involved with vehicular air
pollution control have been consistently surprised. In Delhi, for instance,
when the Supreme Court gave an order that Delhi should phase out leaded petrol
because lead causes mental retardation, especially in children, everybody
thought that this was a very good thing to do.
But few
people realized that in order to deal with the knocking problem for which lead
is normally added to petrol, refineries would increase the quantity of benzene
and other aromatics in petrol. This has led to high levels of benzene in
Delhi's environment and as benzene is a well known carcinogen which causes
blood cancers, and as blood cancers are already very high in Delhi as compared
to other Indian cities, the Supreme court has now ordered petroleum companies
to limit the benzene content in petrol.
Having done
this we are now finding that the companies are trying to improve the combustion
of petrol by adding oxygenates like MTBE (for methyl tertiary butyl ether)
which help the combustion of the fuel. Just about 10 years ago, the US had
promoted the use of MTBE in petrol in a very big way. And then it suddenly
found that the substance has an extraordinary ability to travel through
groundwater. It smells like turpentine and even a teaspoon of the substance can
make an entire Olympic-size swimming pool stink to heaven. It is also a
carcinogen. First California and now the US are taking steps to ban the use of
this substance. But Indian petroleum companies like Bharat Petroleum and Indian
Oil Corporation have set up plants and are now adding MTBE to their petrol. So
another Supreme Court order is now in order to ban the use of MTBE.
But the
story doesn't end here. University of Venice scientists have reported that the
growing use of catalytic converters, which use heavy metals to reduce pollution
from cars, is leading to accumulation of heavy metals in Greenland. So, what
next? A ban on catalytic converters?
ON TOP OF A
TREADMILL
All these
surprises show that the only way is to constantly monitor our environment, to
keep making efforts to understand how human interventions in the form of new
technological changes are leading to new environmental impacts, and then take
quick remedial, regulatory and technological measures to stop the problem. But
every new technological change, we have found, is quite likely to pose a new
environmental problem. Therefore, investments in 'Science and Technology for
our Ecological Security' are vital, and a constant reality - almost like a
treadmill.
It is not
surprising that already a number of new technologies are beginning to emerge
which are being driven by environmental imperatives. For example, in the last
20 years, technological changes in the internal combustion engine (and the
automobile industry) have been heavily driven by the environmental imperative
and yet this challenge continues to dog the automobile industry. Despite all
the environmental efficiency introduced into automobiles, as the number of
automobiles continues to grow and new understanding of the health effects of
automobile-related pollutants continues to emerge, the automobile industry is
being pushed into newer and newer directions. In fact, many people now even are
thinking in terms of concepts like car-free cities, which would mean an
altogether new approach to transportation systems within cities.
At the same
time, over the last five years, there has been considerable hype about fuel
cells or the use of hydrogen as a major source of energy for driving vehicles
as well as small-scale power generation systems. Once the use of fuel cells
becomes common, there will be no need left for large power stations that
require an enormous infrastructure for delivery of power. Every single
household can have access to pollution-free small-scale power generating
systems of its own. In other words, we will move from centralized power
generation systems to extremely disaggregated systems in the years ahead.
Similarly, solar cells, wind energy and a number of other renewable energy
options are going to be driven by the threat of climate change.
Few people
realize that the emergence of fuel cells is not because of technological
curiosity. The entire interest in fuel cells has been driven by the
environmental regulation set by the world's largest car market, namely, that of
California, which has mandated companies to introduce zero emission vehicles in
the Californian market. Auto companies first tried to think in terms of
electric vehicles but found that they were not able to crack several problems
related to batteries and have now taken up fuel cells in a big way. A small
Canadian company, Ballard, has suddenly become a centre of interest for energy
and automobile multinational giants. As Al Gore former vice-president of USA,
pointed out, we are looking at the end of the internal combustion engine, which
has so dominated modern lives over the last century.
In the
decades to come, one can see numerous other technologies coming up which will
replace the dinosaur technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Apart from
the efforts to clean up local air, climate change will force a total revamping
of the energy technologies in the decades ahead. Similarly, the use of sewer
systems will disappear. These waste disposal systems totally destroy nature's
nitrogen cycle in which nitrogen collected from the land ought to be returned
back to the land but, on the other hand, with the use of sewers, gets dumped
into rivers. The only way to deal with the environmental impact of sewer
systems is to make enormous investment in sewage treatment plants. Even in the
Western world there are a large number of cities, which still do not have
adequate sewage treatment facilities. With urbanization growing rapidly in the
developing world, the amount of investment that will be needed in sewage
treatment plants apart from the investments in the sewer systems themselves, is
going to be extremely high and unaffordable and long before these investments
can be made, the use of sewer systems will have totally destroyed the aquatic
ecosystems in the developing world, posing enormous threats both to public
health and aquatic biodiversity.
In India, we
don't have to look a few years ahead. We already see the signs of this
hydrocide. Literally, no small or medium river today is clean. Every big river
like the Ganga, whenever they pass through big cities, become a filthy drain.
Already there are technological developments taking place which give rise to
the concept of sewer-less cities using new technological systems which use
either extremely low amounts of water or no water at all, and in which all the
wastewaters and the solid wastes are recycled.
In very
simple terms, 21st century technology will move closer to the ways that nature
itself works. This can be explained in two ways. Nature uses weak forces rather
than concentrated forces to do its work. For example, nature uses very tiny
temperature differences to carry as much as 4,000 million hector-meters or
40,000 billion tonnes of water from the oceans and across thousands of
kilometers to dump it as rainfall over India. Yet when humans want to do
anything they use concentrated energy sources like coal or oil that have
created enormous problems like local air pollution and global climate change.
Nature does it so well and so gently without any environmental damage. In the
years ahead, people will move towards much more weaker sources of energy along
the lines of nature like solar energy, for example. In the area of water, too,
humans have come to rely much more on concentrated water sources like rivers
and aquifers in the last 100 years. But the heavy use of these sources is
leading to their overexploitation. In the 21st century, human beings will once
again move to weaker water resource like rainfall.
There are
various natural geophysical cycles in nature like the carbon cycle and the
nitrogen cycle. As in the case of technologies that use the internal combustion
engine, all systems that depend on the use of oil and coal or sewer systems,
and which destroy the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle, will have to be
phased out. In other words, technologies will move much closer to nature's own
geophysical cycles and to more gentle use of nature's sources like energy and
water, and will replace the dinosaur technologies of the 19th and 20th
centuries. In this alone lies the possibility of human survival and growth.
It is very
clear that the 21st century is going to be a century of the
environment in which literally every new technology will have to be subjected
to environmental scrutiny and consistently modified to meet environmental
needs. We have already seen that one of the first major developments in
biotechnology, namely, genetically modified organisms, has run into strong
environmental opposition and even the most powerful companies are being forced
to take the environmental concern into account. There is no reason to believe
that this is an isolated problem. The writing is on the wall. These problems
will keep coming back to us again and again and we will have to deal with them
on an ongoing basis. Any effort to deny this reality will only be at our own
peril and lead to heavy costs for humans and for the health of our ecosystems.
In other
words, investments in Science for Ecological Security will have to become a
very critical element of our investments in Science for food security, our
health security, our industrial development, our livelihood security and,
indeed, even our national security in the larger sense. No longer can we say
that science for food security can forget the Science of Ecological Security
because if there is ecological devastation, it will be impossible to produce
any food.
In this
context, it is really sad to note that both the quantity of our investments in
Science for Ecological Security and the quality of the research that is being
carried out in this area is abysmal compared to the challenges that India faces
today. Neither are we able to address the problems of our biomass-based rural
economies in terms of their scientific requirements for boosting ecological
security nor are we able to deal with the enormous environmental problems that
have been created by urbanization industrialization and motorization in urban
areas. This shortcoming has to be addressed. And fast.
The author
Mr. Anil Agarwal is a noted environmentalist and Director of Centre for Science
and Environment, New Delhi. |
