Environmental Ethics & Value Crises

8/17/2019 Environmental Ethics & Value Crises

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Environmental Ethics & Value Crises

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Environmental Ethics & Value crises

Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be here again. In all probabilities, I was here during the

inaugural session of your batch two years ago. Dr Nandi contacted me and asked me if I would speak to

you all. I seldom miss an opportunity of meeting and talking to students. But what riveted me was the

topic Dr Nandi asked me to speak on! He wanted me to speak on ‘Environmental ethics and Value crises’,

emphasizing on ‘Mental pollution’.

Before I start my lecture, I wish to ask you all one question. We must answer that clearly, and

unanimously. Only then can we go forward. The question is – ‘What are you all getting trained in this

college to become?’ [Many answer that they are training to become engineers.]

That’s settled then. We are all going to be engineers. We are getting trained for that. You see, an

engineer’s mind is different from the rest of the people in this world. There is a very particular type of

thinking that makes you an engineer. One important characteristic of that mind is that it gravitates to the

specifics. In any situation, it won’t beat around the bush. It goes to the root of the situation and

concentrates on the specific details. That is a common feature you will find in any good engineer. So,

with that information, let us look at the topic again. I do not understand what is meant. I understand what

environment means. I also understand what Ethics means. But I don’t understand what environmentalethics means! First time I heard of that term! Then there is the term Value Crises, as if to hint that crises

in values is essentially related to the ethics associated with environment! I don’t know. I think, we might

as well say ‘Environmental Values and Ethical Crises’ or ‘Environmental crises and ethical values’. This

is something we engineers don’t do. We don’t play with words. We play with things. We deal with ideas

only insofar as they are directly related to things. I may read five pages of poetry that my poet friend has

composed. All I understand is that ‘the sky is blue’. That is all he has effectively said. He may have filled

up five full pages about what he felt and blah, blah, blah. But what it all finally means is – the sky is blue.

Of course, this is not to denigrate the topic in any way. I just used the opportunity to explain on

aspect of an engineer’s mind to you. The environment is indeed a bugbear with us engineers. Every so

often, we hear of the damage we engineers are making to the environment. So, let us look at that for a

little while. Every work we do in our field is on the world around us. We don’t work with or on feelings.

We work with and on things. We work on the environment. Any work of substance that we engineers do

will obviously damage the environment. We cannot help it. If an engineer is afraid of ‘damaging’ the

environment, he will not be able to work at all. It is like a doctor who is afraid of blood, or a doctor who

is afraid that he will hurt his patient. Every work a doctor does relates to the body of a living person. If

you touch the body, it hurts. Hurting is part of a doctor’s job. Of course, the motive is something that is

totally different from hurting. The motive is to cure. Similarly, the motive of all our engineering jobs is

never to damage the world. Nevertheless, I have to admit that our motive as engineers is also not

expressly to conserve the world either. Engineering and exploitation of natural resources are too closely

connected, although none of us would like that word ‘exploitation’ to be used in our context. But, if you

want to call a spade as a spade, that is what it is.

What are the criteria on which engineers work? I hold that engineers work on two criteria.

Anything we do has to answer two questions in the positive. One – is it useful to us? Two – is it

economical, cheap? We understand what useful means. Something that makes our lives easier, more

comfortable. How do we understand cheap? Nothing is cheap. It is always a relative term. It is always

cheaper than something. Hence, all that we do has to be cheaper than what we already have. Only then

will an engineer accept the outcome. You will notice that impact on the environment is never a

consideration in our work. That is how we have developed ourselves. Today we hear about our


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environment being damaged. Who is talking of that? Are they engineers? They can never be engineers. It

is always the ‘twelve steppers’, the ‘green- peace activists’ who talk about that. As engineers, we are sure

that if what we have done is damaging the environment, we will find a way out of that using our brains

and hands.

Technology is dynamic. Depending on the inputs we receive from the world around us, we evolve

better, more efficient technology. And this exercise is always driven by economics. Take the history ofthe IC engines. Why did they gain popularity back in the 19th century? Those days, the streets of London

were filled with horse-drawn carriages. Hundreds and thousands of them were on the streets. Horses shat

all over the streets. The cost of keeping the streets clean were going up by the day. That was when the

need was felt to go for a ‘cleaner’ alternative’. IC engines were the answer. Ironically, a technology that

we today hold responsible for environmental damage was hailed in as ‘green’ technology a century ago!

Similarly if you look at the trends in thermal power generation, you will find that up to the 1980s, the

generation was very polluting. Then awareness grew and today we have newer technologies like the

Integrated Gas-Coal Power plants which are much more efficient and much less polluting. You know that

the flue gases are scrubbed before they are released into the atmosphere. Thermal power generation & IC

engines – these are the two main air polluting sources. As awareness of pollution is rising, engineers are

working on developing better technologies to answer that problem. This is the line along which you allwill have to think. Just because environmental damage occurs due to engineering, we cannot stop our

work and go back to cottage industries. That is not even an option for us. I am saying this specifically

because if you look at some of the developments in our country, I feel sad. We have the Hon’ble Supreme

Court passing a judgement that SUVs will be banned in Delhi because they pollute the air! We have a big

group led by activists like Medha Patkar who have stopped construction of a dam on the Narmada! We

have another activist group that has stopped mining in Orissa because of which Korean Steel giant

POSCO has left the country! This is not the way in which we will achieve 8% GDP growth. On the one

hand we wish to grow economically and overtake China; on the other hand we have qualms with the

‘damage’ our work does to the environment. This conflict in our national mind is what is slowing us

down in the world.

This conflict in the national consciousness has to be addressed as quickly as possible. Take the

Clean Ganga Project. Few thousand crores have been spent every year for the last few years in so-called

‘cleaning’ the Ganga. What is the result? Studies are now telling us that Ganga is polluted beyond

acceptable standards; so also with the Yamuna River. I do not understand this situation at all. It is a river,

for god’s sake, not a lake! Stop pouring effluents into it and in one month, you have a new river with

fresh, clean water again! It is that simple. The crores of rupees can be better used in financing alternative

methods of dealing with the effluents we are throwing into the river. You see, that is another

characteristic of and engineer. A good engineer has no judgements about anything as being ‘waste’.

Nothing is an absolute waste for him. Take the case of Tata Steel Company in Jamshedpur. As a result of

the steel making process, so many so-called ‘waste’ products are produced, in huge quantities. They can

all be dumped somewhere as waste. They don’t do that. Each of those ‘waste’ products are put to further

use. How? The slag is sent to Cement Industries. Do you know that slag, which is a waste product of anymetal industry, is a raw material in cement manufacturing? So also the fly-ash which produced as a waster

from thermal power stations. Fly-ash is also used as raw material in cement industry. Many years after

starting Tata Steel, they started a new company called Tata Pigments. Do you know why? Many chemical

‘waste’ products were treated in this new factory and used as raw materials for paints & lubricants

industries!


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The whole thing depends on economics, you know. A day will come when it will make economic

sense to treat the liquid effluents, urban fluid sewage, etc. and use it for something else other than just

dumping them into the Ganga. That is when the Ganga will become clean again. You must certainly be

aware that sewage can now be treated to such an extent that potable quality water can be reclaimed from

it. Of course, we Indians may have social, cultural and psychological reservations about using such water,

but, wait till such a step starts making economic sense. Then you will find a mad rush for implementing

that technology.

But do you know where the problem with our field is? We engineers lack something that ancient

Indians possessed. Let us say we found out a new technology, which is much more efficient and much

more cost effective. What do we do? We jump headlong into it and implement it everywhere. We do not

understand the long term ramifications of what we are doing now. If something is useful and cheap now,

we go for it. This creates problems for us in some other areas. The IC engine solution at the end of the

19th century is a classic example of what I am trying to tell you here. It was brought in as a much needed

relief from one kind of problem that the society was facing. When we adopted that new technology,

which was much more efficient and certainly cheaper, we were all happy. It was only 100 years later that

we realized that this new technology was slowly creating problems elsewhere, i.e. polluting the air we

breathe. Now, can we overcome this extreme shortsightedness that we engineers have?

I believe we can. Ancient India had indeed solved this problem. How? By developing a world-

view that had amazing interconnectedness. They had a term for this interconnectedness called Rtam. In

fact, when I came to Bengal, I was surprised to find that boys had this word for their name! We had a

couple of students in my College called Rtam Mallik and Rtam Bhowmick. Every one of us in this world

is connected to everyone else. Not just people, even animals, trees, birds, insects, germs, things, stars –

everything is actually inseparably interconnected. This led to the development of a sense of sacredness in

our daily lives. Our ancient Indians used this world, even as we are doing now, but with a sense of

sacredness attached to it. Once we bring in this idea of sacredness into the whole picture, exploitation

stops. We develop a sense where we can start feeling how much is too much and how much is enough.

We can use the things of this world. In fact, the driving motto of the ancient Indians was ‘The world for

the soul, and not the soul for the world’. But, we get an intuitive sense of how much load to put on the

natural resources of this world. You must understand that Earth can replenish itself. There is a rate at

which we can draw from its bowers and then it replenishes itself. That rate, our ancient Indians knew

intuitively. Their world-view gave them that sense.

How I imagine it is like this: We had this amazing knowledge with us, up until the 15 th century,

roughly. Then, for various reasons, we went into a deep slumber for about 400 years. Then we woke up,

or were flogged out of our sleep. And when we woke up, we had forgotten what we knew and found

ourselves in English dress and hats and boots! I mean, ever since we woke up from the centuries-long

sleep, we have adopted the western world-view, which is highly individualistic, where every one

considers himself an island, unconnected with everyone else. Slowly, we are realizing where we have

faltered. There is no need to reverse our steps. All we need is a course correction, a small change in ouroutlook. Let me explain with a small story.

There was once a farmer who was able to produce the best harvest year after year from his field.

The Dep’t of Agriculture noticed his consistent performance and decided to study his practices. They

asked him his secret. He said, “I choose the best quality seeds and distribute them among all my

neighbors.” The officers couldn’t understand why he had to do that. It would be logical if he himself used

the best quality seeds. Why distribute them among his neighbors? He replied, “My harvest is determined


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by the quality of the pollens that come from the flowers of my neighbors’ fields. If they are of the best

quality, my harvest turns out great.”

Is this kind of thinking compatible with our present world-view? No. This farmer would be

termed an idiot by most of us. We shall take care of ourselves. We are not here to feed the neighborhood!

That line of thinking has to change. We have to learn to factor in the whole world into our personal lives.

Our own development is irrevocably connected with the development of the world around us. We don’t have to bother about the planet, in fact. As George Carlin once said, “The Planet’s doing fine. It’s been

through much worse than what we have wrought. We are in danger. We will be soon gone, if we don’t

change our lifestyles. We will be gone, and the Planet will consider us as an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and

the Blue Ball will still go on revolving around the Sun!”

So, this idea of Rtam has to be incorporated into our teaching-learning process itself. As

engineers, we are not taught to think along those lines. We must do that now. You hear a lot about

‘Sustainable development’ these days. I don’t understand what they are talking about. What indeed is

sustainable in the way we are functioning now? Take any of the technology we have now. Not one of

them is sustainable. All of them use resources that are limited and it’s just a matter of time before we run

out of them. What indeed is sustainable then? All that they mean is – protracted usage, that’s all. What

would be over in 100 years may get extended to 200 years. But after 200 years, it will still be over. What

is sustainable in that then? Real sustainability lies in recognizing that this world is a self-replenishing

system. Real sustainability lies in honoring that rate at which the world can bear our burden of

consumption. Real sustainability lies in learning to rein our rapacious nature.

I accept that my generation has failed to do this. It is my faith that you all will learn to deal with

this world in this sane manner. We will be engineers, better engineers than the previous generation, but

we will also learn to rise beyond utilitarianism and economic consideration. I will end my lecture by

telling you a small story.

There was once a small girl whose father wanted her to mow the lawn in their house. As usual,

the girl was not very happy. Again, as usual, her father tried bribing her. He said, “You remember that

beautiful dress you liked in the shop the other day? I will get you that dress if you finish mowing the lawn

by evening.” When he returned from the office, he went with his daughter to inspect the lawn. It was

indeed done very well, but he saw that towards the edge, on one side, the small girl had left a small patch

of grass uncut. He pointed it out to her and said, “Uh-huh. That won’t do. You must cut the whole thing.

You have left out a small patch over there.” The small girl very clearly said, “Well then, I don’t need that

dress. I cannot cut that patch.” The father went near and saw what was there in that patch of grass. He saw

that there was a fat frog that had made that portion of lawn as its home, and the girl didn’t want to drive it

away. The rest of the lawn however was cut clean and sharp.

You may all ask me, ‘what exactly did you convey to us, Swamiji, though today’s lecture?’ It

does seem like I didn’t give you any conclusions today. I came here to instigate your thoughts on a very

important issue concerning our work as engineers. I have given you mainly three ideas. One – engineering basically deals with ‘using’ the environment; so, we cannot afford to get too sensitive about not hurting

the environment when we are engineers, or we simply won’t be able to work at all. Two – as engineers,

our tendency should always be to develop more energy efficient technology and processes. Three – we

need to develop a world-view of interconnectedness with this world, a sense of sacredness towards this

world, so that we can overcome the exploitative streak that seems to be inbuilt into the engineering

mindset.

Thank you all.

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Environmental Ethics & Value Crises