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- Bridgstock, Ch. 11 -

The Message

The message of this lecture is very straightforward. Any discussion of science and technology today is really a debate about the quality of life in the future. This understanding leads to several conclusions.

1. Because the future belongs to all of us, it cannot be left to the republic of science to determine the direction of science and technology. This determination needs to be undertaken by society as a whole. It is too important to leave to a single group, who may not even see the big picture.
2. Because we only have one planet with one future, we cannot allow economic values to displace other values. Moreover, we cannot take the risk that market forces will ensure the best future. We need to plan and make deliberate choices.
3. At present, our random and/or self-interested approach to our future gets in the way of making good choices about science and technology, particularly in terms of judicious spending and the use of alternate sources of energy.
4. The choices that we make about science and technology need to take into account a complex range of interrelated variables, including: economics, politics, ethics, bio-diversity, ecology, eco-systems. At present, our knowledge of the relationships between these variables borders on the naïve and the primitive.
5. Despite the complexities involved, some of our present choices for scientific and technological investment are criminal or obscene. For example, if we cut a mere 15% from the global arms budget annually we could provide the world’s population with “basic shelter, clean drinking water, adequate nutrition and sustainable health care.”
6. Not only do we need to make more prudent and rational choices about our investments in science and technology, but we also need to devote more resources to evaluating the consequences of those choices. In other words, we need to better assess the impact of science and technology.
7. While science and technology may be part of the solution as well as part of the problem, it is dangerous and irresponsible to assume that there will be a technological fix for all the problems that we face now and in the future.
8. The reason that a technological fix is not plausible without a new emphasis on sustainability is because we live in a closed system where resources are being used up at an astonishing rate.
9. This requirement for broad-based planning and evaluation of impacts is valid whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about the role of science and technology in our society.
10. The planning that takes place in the future must be global planning because the problems we face - like global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, species depletion — are far too complex and international for separate nations to deal with.
11. One of the best ways to develop a new global ethic for the deployment of science and technology is to identify with future generations. By identifying with the generations of the future we will be more conservative about the use of scarce resources. Unfortunately, market philosophy does not encourage this kind of forward thinking because it focuses on individual happiness in the present.

Population Growth and the Technology Fix

The importance of planning with respect to science and technology is complicated by the fact that it is difficult to forecast with any accuracy how science and technology will impact society and the environment. Most past forecasts - especially those of a doomsday character - have been mistaken in the past. The reason that they have been mistaken is because they always underestimated the power of technology to solve many problems.

The classic case is population growth. In the eighteenth-century, the first demographer - the Reverend Thomas Malthus - predicted that population growth would lead to a depletion of resources resulting in famine, disease and death. His argument was that, while agricultural resources could only be increased arithmetically, population growth increased geometrically. This inevitably led to a situation where the population grew to large for the ecosystem with disastrous results.

That didn’t happen because Malthus’ country, Great Britain used technology to vastly improve agricultural production to the extent that it could support many times the original population base. Moreover, agriculture became so productive that it allowed many people to move from the rural countryside into the urban cities to produce the value added goods that allowed the Industrial Revolution to occur and, eventually, a consumer society to be born.

Thus, it is easy to say that nay-sayers like Malthus seriously underestimate the ability of the marketplace and technology to respond to environmental challenges. Human beings are not like Darwin’s struggling species; they are ingenious and able to discover solutions to problems in the human city.

We should beware of reading too much into the technological successes of the past, however. Not only could we still eventually face the scenario that Malthus described, but we are now confronted not merely a precipitous drop in the population but with the destruction of our planet. We live in a closed environmental system characterized by declining resources. The population growth that agricultural improvements have allowed us to sustain has added new problems to older ones by increasing the greenhouse (global warming) gases in the atmosphere.

Population growth means that more energy needs to be used. Energy use releases carbon dioxide and poisonous gases into the atmosphere resulting in global warming, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer that protects us from the dangerous ultra-violet rays from the sun. Population growth globally leads to the destruction of forests, the one thing that has absorbed carbon dioxide in the past and provided health-giving oxygen in return. As the forest cover is cleared, particularly the rain forests of the Amazon, we are restricting our planet’s capacity to breath, not to mention eliminating entire species that rely on the rain forest eco-system.

The stats for population growth should scare us:

Year 1 = 250 million people on the planet

Year 1650 = 500 million

Year 1850 = 1 billion

Year 1930 = 2 billion

Year 1975 = 4 billion

Notice the clear geometrical pattern that Malthus warned against. During the twenty-first century, the population will nearly triple again at the present rate of growth.

But let’s say everyone tomorrow decided to practice some form of birth control, and agreed to limit himself or herself to one child per adult. That would be a great political and social achievement to be sure. But it still would not stop the population from at least doubling to 8 million+. And let’s assume the most optimistic figure that the world could support between 10-15 million people. That’s certainly possible, but it would imply a serious decline in our standard of living and would mean that most of the new people that came into the world would be denied a civilized lifestyle.

The neo-Malthusian scenario is much more scary than the one Malthus originally developed. The original scenario might mean famine and disease in the short term, but the population would recover over the long term. The species as a whole was not threatened. Modern conditions including pollution and the destruction of the ozone layer, threaten the existence of our entire species. Humanity could go the way of the dinosaur. There is now the potential for complete collapse “with extinction as the result”.

Yet another perilous development relates to the use of science and technology to solve the problem of feeding a growing population. In the past, scientists engaged in developing new strains of plants that would produce more food or grow in otherwise marginal soil. They also bread animals to produce livestock and herds that were bigger, leaner and more productive. The new science is based much more on biotechnology or taking genetic material from one species and introducing it into another to create more useful products. The danger here is that we do not really understand the potential hazards of biologically modified foods on human beings. For example, spider genes have been introduced into goat embryos, with the intent to develop tough and elastic materials as a by-product from goat’s cheese. These materials could be used for bandages and surgical sutures. Do we know what could be the result of these scientifically induced mutations?

The Depletion of the Earth’s Resources

Classical market economics developed at a time when the world’s resources appeared to be infinite. Natural resources such as minerals, forests, clean air, and water were all considered to be freely available. Thus, classical economists saw no reason to build in notions like sustainability into their futuristic models.

This was naïve. Even in the eighteenth-century, a keen observer could have noticed that most of Europe’s forests had already been used up and the developing countries needed to get their timber from the Baltic or, increasingly, from Canada. Scottish merchants, who shipped them back to Glasgow and Great Britain during the nineteenth-century, quickly depleted the strands of timber in the Maritimes. In fact, many of the earth’s resources have been used up at an alarming rate between 1750 and the present. The cod fishery off the coast of Labrador was once the largest in the world. Despite a moratorium on cod fishing off the east coast of Canada, we don’t know if or when the cod fishery will return.

Those who put too great a faith in market forces may be inclined to argue that it doesn’t really matter if some resources are reduced or virtually eliminated. Humans will then develop the technology to develop other more marginal resources. Thus, the elimination of the forests of Europe led to mining for coal. The depletion of energy supplies on land led to the development of offshore oil exploration. The increasing cost of wood products encouraged the development of plastics and laminates.

The problem here is that our resources are part of complex eco-systems that depend on one another. The depletion of forests and fisheries may appear to be a clear case of extraction without attention to the renewal of resources for future generations. But the issue is far more complex than that. As forests disappear, so do entire eco-systems. The cutting down of forests in some countries has resulted in flooding and the erosion of the soil. Similarly, the loss of a single species in the ocean can have an impact on marine life generally. Seals depended on the cod; whales and polar bears depend on the seals.

We are all linked together in one giant eco-system. Any interference with the bio-diversity of this eco-system is risky. Change can be irreversible and damaging. Thus, pollution that is pumped into the ocean is damaging many forms of marine life. Those that survive may have high concentrations of mineral waste in their bodies. The fish that we eat could have mercury in their bodies that we will also absorb. Native society, that depends on fish stocks as a staple of their diet, now exhibit a number of new diseases that can, in part, be attributed to the fact that their diet is now more toxic.

Scientists often intervene in these eco-systems to remedy imbalances, but there is no guarantee that these interventions will work. An attempt to create a hardier and more productive bee led to the creation of the so-called killer bees that now threaten livestock and humans in the United States. The introduction of huge toads in Australia was supposed to be the solution to the havoc been wrought by the cane beetle. It turned out that the cane beetles were too high on the cane for the toads to eat, but they sure as hell ate everything else that came into their path. Now the toads are more of a problem than the beetles and they are devastating many of the ecosystems of Australia.

The point of citing these examples is to show you that scientific and technological solutions are never foolproof. You can’t assume that there will always be a solution to the problem, and you need to be aware that a seeming solution might actually cause more problems. Just as we can’t always predict the future, so too it is naïve in the extreme to think that science and technology can always fix any problems that occur.

Environment or Eco-System

The environment is part of our modern consciousness, so much so that the general population appears to be ahead of politicians and national governments in its awareness and concern about what is happening to the environment. A better term than environment - which means the surroundings outside of us - is the natural eco-system. The latter term shows that we are not something above or apart from nature. We are a part of a natural system that we abuse or deplete at our own risk.

The main danger to our eco-system is our increasing desire for consumption. It is this that causes us to deplete resources and deploy technologies that increase pollution. It used to be that pollution was confined to specific areas or industries and easier to dismiss as the price of economic well-being and progress. Today, however, the effects of modern manufacturing and technological development affect most people. For example, now we have a UV rating of the quality of air in the Greater Toronto Area. On some days, people with asthma or difficulty breathing are advised to stay at home rather than take the risk of breathing toxic air. The rates of asthma and lung disease are on the rise, presumably due to the increasingly poor quality of the air.

Increased consumption is often confused with the quality of life. Thus, for example George W. Bush associates present patterns of consumption with the American way of life and opposes restrictions on pollutants that would interfere with these patterns. But it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize that ever increasing consumption does not necessarily translate into a higher quality of life. In fact, the overall quality of life could easily deteriorate at the same time as consumption increases. Many people in the past, and some in the present, make choices to decrease the amount of energy they put into chasing consumer goods specifically because they want to enjoy life more fully. Industries have entire marketing departments teaching us to consume greater volumes of goods; the American and now the global economy is predicated on consumption. But that doesn’t mean that we need to swallow this ideology.

As we saw in our chapter on politics, this issue of ever increasing consumption has shifted from being an issue in the developed nations and now encompasses the developing nations. More and more, the manufacturing of consumer goods is shifting to the underdeveloped nations. What this means is that eventually the entire globe will be caught up in the modern capitalist economy based on increasing demand for goods. This also means that resources will be used up at an ever-increasing rate. Third World countries view the creation of factories for companies like The Gap and Nike as crucial ways to generate the capital for industrialization. The so-called tiger economies that are increasingly producing automobiles and other consumer goods are already becoming consumer societies.

What this means is that the generation of pollution and waste that was once the problem of advanced consumer societies is now beginning to spread around the world. Taiwan and Singapore already have a serious problem with waste. The problem is no more serious than in North America or Europe, but it is much more visible because of the small landmass involved and the difficulty of getting rid of waste. Putting the waste in landfill takes up valuable space. Burning the waste is highly polluting. The only viable long-term solution is to teach businesses and citizens to dramatically reduce waste. But efforts along those lines have not been very successful thus far.

Producing goods for consumption requires the use of energy. In order to sustain our individual lifestyle - yours and mine - we need to burn one ton of carbon-based fuels per year. An entire ton! The result of all these hydrocarbons going into the atmosphere would appear to be the greenhouse effect or the dangerous heating of the entire world as hydrocarbons in the atmosphere trap the heat. The greenhouse effect is already melting the polar cap - that will result in flooding; it also is changing our global climate and, by wearing away the ozone layer, making the sun our enemy rather than our friend.

Global warming is truly a global phenomenon. It has already passed the stage where the developed nations can easily control it. With the increased carbon emissions in the developing world, the situation will get much worse. Word leaders at the Framework Convention on Climate Change admitted that catastrophe could be the result if we do not take immediate steps to “reduce the rate of emitting greenhouse cases by 2005 to the 1990 level”. The problem with that is, with the use of carbon based fuels by developing countries, advanced countries like the United States and Canada would have to scale down to 20% of current levels in order to reach that target. Mr. Bush has already said that he is not prepared to do that because of the economic effects such a reduction would have upon American society. Australia has adopted a similar official position. And Canada has no position at all!

The Limits to Growth

Given the importance of the subjects that we are discussing in this lecture, it is interesting that governments and politicians haven’t taken them more seriously. Generally, the citizens of developed countries have demonstrated far greater concern about the deterioration of their eco-system than our politicians have. Moreover, some of the most important future forecasting has been conducted independently by non-governmental groups such as the Club of Rome.

It is to be expected that the defenders of big business and the advocates of unbridled technology would attack the predictions of the Club of Rome. In the document The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome put forward a number of arguments that went against the grain of market ideology and technocracy. These included:

1. Our earth is a closed eco-system with a finite capacity for growth and development.
2. At the present rate of use, growth on this planet will have reached its limits with 100 years.
3. The only remedy for this doomsday scenario is to: 1) limit population; 2) decrease productivity; 3) dramatically reduce pollution; 4) put into operation programs of soil preservation and enrichment; 5) redirect capital from the production of consumer goods to food production.

With respect to this massive redirection of capital, at least two points need to be made. The first is that the citizens of the developed world would have to stop their present patterns of consumption in order to ensure that people in other parts of the world are fed and have an opportunity for a decent life. The second is that the investment needed to be directed particularly to agriculture rather than livestock.

The eating patterns - i.e. meat consumption –of the developed world turn out to be particularly pernicious. The amount of land required to raise cattle, for example, is much greater than the nutritional equivalent in wheat. In the Third World and developing nations, land that could be used to provide life is literally wasted herding cattle and growing livestock. And the problem does not end there. In some parts of the developing world, the demand for meat in the developed world is increasing the conversion of arable land to pasture, throwing farmers off their plot of land, and increasing the rate of deforestation. In addition, cattle and other livestock emit gases that increase the greenhouse effect; their manure washes into waterways that are used by humans, thereby increasing disease. Even in Walkerton, Ontario, it would appear that the E. coli bacteria that killed six people had its origin in animal waste that flowed into the water supply.

The first publication of the Club of Rome was marred by the simplistic nature of some of its assumptions, particularly its lack of differentiation of the different conditions that applied in different parts of the world. In later publications, the Club of Rome remedied these deficiencies and presented a more complex and dynamic picture of the world as ten inter-dependent regions operating within an increasingly global economic system. Not only did this more subtle account reinforce the dangers from pollution and the present food supply, but also it pointed to the dangerous gap between the poor and the rich nations that would make global cooperation the challenge of the future.

Accepting the Challenge

The Club of Rome pointed to a number of ways that new technologies could help to solve these serious problems, especially the shift from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy (i.e. wind power, geothermal energy and photovoltaic cells using sunlight). But the main problem was to get the nations of the world on the same page with respect to sustainability.

In order for agreement to be achieved, there first has to be a plan for greater equity in the sharing of the earth’s limited resources. Third World and developing nations will never agree to a sustainable future if their populations have to suffer continuing poverty as a result. The right place for this discussion about equity and sustainability to take place is in, or under the auspices of the United Nations. Unfortunately, discussions in the UN tend to reflect the competition and not the cooperation of nations.

The United States could have played an important leadership role in the United Nations generally and in the movement towards a sustainable future. Unfortunately, the United States has been delinquent with respect to the UN because of its belief in its manifest destiny to spread American freedoms and the American way of life to the world. As the world’s richest nation, it is inexcusable that the US has yet to pay its dues to the UN. More inexcusable it the use of its power of veto to sabotage any joint efforts that appear to run contrary to American economic and political power.

The irony here is that the American people have become much more environmentally conscious since the early 1980s and more inclined to accept the need to limit their patterns of consumption. American governments appear to be lagging behind American public opinion, something that seems to demonstrate the power of the military-corporate lobby in the U.S. With the events of September 11, 2001, we can expect that government policy will focus even more on getting the economy moving forward and strengthening the industrial-military complex. Issues like the environment are likely to recede.

Some Canadian economists recently suggested that the American economy will soon lurch forward again based on the injection of funds into the industrial-military complex. Their suggestion is that the Canadian government does not really need to stimulate the economy more than it has done, because Canada will eventually reap the benefits of an American economy that is moving forward again. It is interesting to note the optimism of these economic observers about an increase in military spending as a sign of a progressive economy. As we said earlier, 15% of the world’s military budget could go a long way towards solving the present problems of the world.

The quality of our way of life is not easily measured in market terms. The GDP, or Gross National Product, includes manufacturing and technology for war. Arguably, that spending has a negative effect on our quality of life. Additionally, the GDP does not include “spectacular sunsets, clean air, the company of friends, housework, and volunteer work” - in other words many of the things that make life worthwhile. If we are intent on building a better world, we cannot let something as ambiguous as the GDP run our thinking. If we do, we are letting the tail wag the dog.

Choices

This lecture has been all about making choices. We have no crystal ball to ensure that the choices that we make will get the result that we want. But common sense tells us that people and nations who plan and make responsible choices usually do better than those who do not. Given the present danger to our planet, it is unethical to allow economics or technocracy to make the choices for us. It is an abnegation of our responsibility as citizens.

In the past, we have not been so well informed about the economic, technological and scientific decisions that shaped our lives. Today, there is no excuse for not knowing at least the general issues. There are many complexities and difficulties involved in changing the world towards greater sustainability, technological responsibility, and equity. But these are by no means insurmountable if we have the will.

The future is not an evolutionary given, but something that we ourselves shape. We can make decisions about conserving energy or reducing waste in our own homes and communities. We can lead by example and limit our consumption. We can pressure our politicians to espouse greener policies. We can belong to non-governmental organizations that act as lobby or pressure groups for a change towards a more sustainable future.

We also have the responsibility to be critical thinkers or, as a colleague once called it better shit detectors. In other words, we can question those who confuse the quality of life with a simplistic formula for economic progress. We can challenge those in the scientific or technological community who tell us that there is only one right science or technology to solve the problem. We can oppose those who would lure us into a false sense of optimism and we can inject a sense of urgency about the problems that we face and the need to effect change as quickly as possible.

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The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/