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'The central concept of modern science is thus fused with one kind of resource-utilization.' Thus the fate of our forests during the colonial period. The symbiotic relationship between villagers and forests was broken, once imperial definitions were applied in India. A tax was imposed and the utilization of forest produce by the local people for fuel restricted. The use of wood for fuel became now 'low-efficiency', whereas its use for big industry, as raw material for industrial processes, became scientific.
The claim that the scientific method itself brought into being a fresh and permanent rationale for expansion of the industrial machine, to replace the increasingly disreputable mode of colonial exploitation of third-world resources, is difficult to refute. At the heart of this rationale is the second law, for it provides the cast-iron rule that if there is only one highly efficient mode of resource use, it must be followed, an attractive argument in an age of increasing scarcity.
As Seshadri points out, both nature and the non-western world are losers in this new definition. For example, the monsoon, transporting millions of tons of water across a subcontinent, is 'inefficient' since it does its work at ambient temperatures.
Mark also that this novel legitimation does not appear merely in England, but also in America, as an identifier of the Anglo-Saxon race. Wrote Josiah Strong in 1885:
Only those races which have produced machinery seem capable of using it with the best results. It is the most advanced races which are its masters. Those races which, like the African and the Malay, are many centuries behind the Anglo-Saxon in development, seem as incapable of operating complicated machinery as they are of adopting and successfully administering representative government.20
This justification for imperialism and expansionism into Africa and Asia was based on the same ideology that had enabled English immigrants to the United States to hunt, displace, and exterminate millions of American Indians. Then it had been argued that no one had a 'natural right' to land, that those who utilized the land and used its wealth efficiently had the sole right to it. Indians had lost the right because they permitted land to remain 'waste'.21 (Almost identical phrases are nowadays used to hunt tribals from our forests: they do not need all that forest, and certainly are inefficient users of forest wealth!) The right to own and control land depended on political and 'scientific' fitness. And one is driven to argue that without the ideology of modern science, imperialism would have been compelled to appear without its clothes.
Besides providing part of the ideology of imperialism, modern science itself practiced its own form of colonialism, particularly in its encounter with the sciences and technologies of other cultures. The basic feature of colonialism - intolerance of other cultures - has remained with science even after the colonies were given up. Lord Macaulay in his notorious Minute of 1835 observed:
The intrinsic superiority of the western literature is indeed fully admitted... I have never found one amongst them [orientalists] who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
Later, he demanded that no artificial encouragement should be given at all to 'absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd theology'.
Macaulay was in good company. The English philosopher, David Hume, had already observed the consequences of Galileo's conception of 'true' knowledge and proposed:
When we run over libraries persuaded by these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.22
Before modern science aligned itself with colonialism, there had always been separate, often interacting, epistemologies in history. Colonialism added a new burden on modern science: it was compelled to claim a monopoly in knowledge in order to retain its claimed superiority. This monopoly is based on the premise that all other forms of acquisition or accumulation of knowledge, all other epistemologies, are worthless, antiquated, magical, and must be eliminated.
Gradually this attitude was to infect not merely the conservatives but, equally, the 'progressive' social activists. Thus the people's science movements that have sprung up in different parts of India actively crusade for the dissemination of the scientific temper and modern knowledge in basically poor, rural communities. They mount frontal attacks on what are called traditions or superstitions and seek to replace such traditional superstitions with superstitions unique to modern science.
Sharing the colonizing thrust of modern science, such science movements - with members usually from the upper classes - take the mere existence of alternative knowledge systems and ways of life as a provocation. It is as if the underprivileged have an offensive quality to their thinking that needs to be exorcised.
Similarly with modern technology. It is fundamentally hostile to other technologies (or definitions) because the different criteria they have for resource use make their very existence an affront to the megamachine. Modernity cannot bear to see modern technology ignored by people who insist on using older techniques. The niche required by modern technology requires the evacuation of all other niches by all other species, seen as belonging not merely to the animal and plant world, but to other cultures as well. I have described this process extensively elsewhere as 'de-industrialization', in which science-based technologies replace experience-based systems, even if, when all things are considered, the latter fulfil the same purposes better.
Colonial science has survived colonialism's formal departure from the third world in the form of the Trojan Horse. It has allowed third-world élites to legitimate a manner of handling the world that reduces to worthlessness intellectual traditions of systematic inquiry everywhere except the west, and ridicules all lifestyles uninfected by it as infantile or uncivilized.
III. Method against life
We now widen our canvas to examine the impact of modern science on living processes both in the 'advanced' nations and in the third world.
Modern science signalled a major break from earlier approaches to intervention in life processes. Earlier, the emphasis had been either on natural principles or processes, or on insights that closely paralleled such processes in practice. By and large, practices were organic. Now, in practically all areas of human endeavour, the attempt is to extend the modern west's technological vision. Thus, in the great 'development decades' of the UN system a vital component was the transfer of western science and technology to replace indigenous techniques in the third world. Key words used to justify the substitution have included modern concepts of efficiency and productivity. But seldom was an independent criterion used for selection. It was taken for granted by decision-makers that modern science was superior. It is now possible to demonstrate in a number of specific areas that modern science, because of its method, has led to destruction of a kind and on a scale that the earlier approaches could never have achieved.
It is not that there were no predatory societies earlier in history. There is evidence, for example, for the destruction of forests in earlier periods. But it is the construction of nature according to the designs and plans of modern science that is without precedent. I shall give some examples from forestry, agriculture, medicine and natural feeding.
Afforestation as Deforestation
Focusing on the wood, one misses the trees. Focusing on the trees, one often ignores the forest.
The word 'forest' has undergone a complete transformation in meaning after the invention of 'scientific forestry'. Modern science has changed the meaning of the term to make the term fit the modern design. A forest, a natural forest untouched by man, is a community of living organisms complete with a self-sustaining forest soil and full complement of useless species (useless, that is, to man). Modern science cannot re-create a natural forest. A natural forest re-creates itself over time: the human hand must be excluded for such re-creation to take place. Such has been the case, for example, of the Bandipur Wild Life Sanctuary in Karnataka, where for the past seven years, the forest, left to itself, fully protected from man, has re-created its own ecosystem.
In the past, attempts have been made to re-create ecosystems, in which trees have formed a crucial part; these do not constitute forests by any means. Again, certain trees have been selected for their use in agriculture. Such trees are suited not merely to the local environment and local resources, but also to local needs. Thus, though traditional forestry is not forestry in the original sense, it is an intermediate stage. At any rate, farmers who create groves do not pretend to having created forests along scientific lines. They know that in the intermediate stage the numbers of tree species are drastically reduced, useless trees are eliminated, and so are wild animals, an essential part of natural forest systems.
In contrast to a natural forest or to the efforts of farmers, the scientific forestry of Government departments in India applies to trees its concept of monocultures. The soil is seen merely as a holding station for inputs and not in relation to the lifeblood of the planet. The soil is indeed treated as if it were no more than agar in a petrie dish - a medium for growth - and all that one needs to do to make the system work is use nitrogen inputs and herbicides.
The symbols of such scientific forestry in India are teak, eucalyptus or pine plantations. In such forestry, reduced to tree-planting, the replacement of a natural forest by a monoculture species becomes only another name for effective deforestation. Such a method is more subtle and complete than clear felling. Clear felling can be termed primitive and placed at the door of contractors or timber merchants, while monoculture plantations from scientific forestry can be made official policy, geared to creating an illusion of the regeneration of forests and replacing a community of species by an army of near-clones.
It is obvious that scientific forestry perfectly fits the requirements of modern industry. A natural forest exists in its own right, as part of living nature. It could meet the needs of industry, but this is only one of the many useful functions it performs. If it were sacrificed to this sole function, it could not perform any of the other functions forests are responsible for. The same could be said of agro-forests: since they meet the needs of farmers, they cannot at the same time meet the needs of industry. This is the reason why scientific forestry (social forestry) cannot propagate multispecies trees, or trees that are useful to farmers or trees that are useless to the human race, but have their function in a living ecosystem, serving some other plant or animal species.
Since it becomes necessary to legitimate the creation of monoculture forests, science simply redefines all the values of a natural forest. In this redefinition the main argument is that since science cannot reproduce the values of a natural forest they are invalid, and need not exist in the future. Sometimes, fortunately, two forms of scientific rationality come into conflict despite such redefinition, as happened in the case of the Silent Valley forest in Kerala. The first involved the raising of a dam, the construction of which would have destroyed a major part of the virgin forest. The other was a discovery, coming late to science in general, that certain species of fauna and flora would be lost to science itself if the dam were built. It can be argued, however, that the destruction of earlier forests was equally against science. How could what had once been scientific now turn unscientific? One possible answer is: it was not that a virgin forest had a right to survive; its survival was necessary for a utilitarian purpose sanctioned by modern science. We shall come back to this.
Where modern science and its 'forests' begin to make a direct and disastrous impact on the lives of people, the collusion between scientific forestry and industry is too obvious not to be noticed. The only reaction can be an open attack on such monocultures. Perhaps the uprooting of eucalyptus in some parts of Karnataka is an indication of future trends.
On 8 August 1983, villagers from the Korategere taluk in the Tumkur district of Karnataka entered the Holanthaalu Government nursery in large numbers and destroyed thousands of eucalyptus saplings. On 14 August, villagers entered a Forest Department nursery near Negilahaalu and removed thousands of eucalyptus seedlings. Despite a massive show of force by the police in the service of the science establishment, the villagers not merely uprooted seedlings; in their place, they planted indigenous trees. There are signs that the anti-eucalyptus movement, as a form of ludditism, may develop into a larger agitation by Indian farmers, all too aware that the interests of eucalyptus plantations coincide with those of modern science and not with their own.
Food and Warfare
We are fond of extolling the achievements of man and are apt to talk with pride of his 'conquest of Nature'. This is at present of the same order as the Nazi conquest of Europe. As Europe is in revolt against the tyrant, so is nature in revolt against the exploitation of man. When man preys upon man it is a form of cannibalism. When man sets out to 'conquer' nature by exploitation, it is no less a form of cannibalism, for man is a part of nature. - E. B. Balfour23
Balfour, who wrote these lines in 1943, and scientists like Albert Howard, who invented the Indore method of composting, were already in their own time disturbed at the conversion of agriculture based on organic inputs to one dominated by chemicals which had begun after the discoveries of Justus Liebig. In his essay, 'Chemistry in its application to Agriculture and Physiology', published in 1840,24 Liebig proposed that everything that a living plant required could be found in the mineral salts present in the ash of such a plant after all organic matter had been destroyed. These came in the form of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous and potash). If they were fed to the plant, the plant would prosper and yield. Physics and chemistry thus refined on biology, and the plant became a processing machine.
This reductionist methodology produced its own range of problems. The plant became susceptible to attacks from pests and fungal diseases. Neither could it cope with weeds. The soil became deficient as nutrients were lost, and dead as chemical fertilizers eliminated earthworms. Liebig's science, guided only by the urge to control, had a single goal: higher output. The quality of the seed, its nutritive value, were sacrificed.
Seshadri and Balaji have shown that the concept of fertility on which modern science has based its agriculture is hollow. They begin by observing that modern agriculture based on scientific principles provides a radically different concept of fertility of the soil. It ignores, for example, the importance of humus in maintaining such fertility, which has been the preoccupation of traditional agriculture. Soil nutrition has been converted into a branch of the chemical industry. While the high yields are undisputed, it is also undisputed that soil fertility declines.25
Between 1946 and 1968, the use of nitrogen fertilizers in the U.S.A. increased by 534 per cent. In 1968 it took 57,000 tons of nitrogen to produce a crop that required a mere 11,000 tons in 1949. In Illinois, for example, in 1949, 20,000 tons of nitrogen produced 50 bushels of corn per acre: in 1968, it took 600,000 tons of the same fertilizer to produce 93 bushels per acre. Further, the application of chemicals also led to a loss in soil nitrogen. Seshadri and Balaji write:
The broad conclusion we can arrive at would be that the modern concept of fertility can treat soil only as a reactor, whose output changes/increases with changes in the input. This concept seems to be directly related to the industrial mode of utilization, wherein increased input is expected to give increased output. Thus, one needs to imagine some input whose increase can increase the output immediately and the NPK concept provides the basis for producing such inputs. The industrial production unit is usually a 'steady-state' system within which processes go on, independent of time, day or night. Clearly, the agricultural plot cannot be thought of as such a unit.
Therefore, right at this level a conceptual mismatch has come up. Because of such a conceptual block, even when it is realized that the soil fertility is on the decline through repeated application of artificials, no serious attempt has been made to overcome such a difficulty. The usual answer in such a situation was that so long as fossil fuel remained cheap, one could go on increasing fertilizer production and come out of the difficulty. This view leads us to realize that efficiency of modern agriculture is largely an empty term, as it does not refer to agriculture but to the sector controlling its input.26
To use the language of the scale of restrictions, the single goal of productivity was sought to be attained by eliminating the 'noise' due to diversity - multicropping, rotation, soil life, organic material from trees, the nutritive quality of the final output, the seed. This 'productive' agriculture has now been given the name of scientific agriculture. It needs a vast array of poisons to do its work: pesticides, weedicides and fungicides. It has become a massive war machine in order to produce food for human life. This war has become increasingly dangerous not only for pests but for human life. And there is no evidence that we can either control or eliminate the pests we have created. Created, for, in nature and for nature, pests do not exist. We shall see below how identical methods directed by an identical understanding have produced a similar vicious circle in modern medicine.
Can agronomy at any time come to match nature in maintaining seed variability? Obviously not. Pat Mooney observes:
Subsistent farmers in the Third World have been cultivating major food crops for over ten thousand years. By observing natural process of mutation and by careful seed selection over the centuries, these farmers have developed an astonishing range of crop variability. This diversity has been necessary for survival. No one wheat or rice variety can provide adequate protection against monsoon failures, pests, rusts or blights. Practical farmers welcome a dozen or more varieties of wheat to their fields, because come drought, flood or rust, something will make it to harvest time. Despite recent impressive advances in genetic engineering, most agronomists would continue to argue that science cannot begin to match the variability of nature, and that no adequate technological replacement exists for the Vavilov Centres. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, in its 1971 report, advised that induced germ plasm mutations through radiation is no alternative to the conservation and screening of natural germ plasm sources.27
In agriculture we get a clear indication of the difference between plant growth according to natural principles and plant growth according to the principles of modern science, backed by modern agro-business and the global scientific establishment. A forest, I have already indicated, is a form of natural agriculture based on a non-violent, cyclical process of generation of plant tissue, an ideally closed system, capable of maintaining itself for centuries, if not disturbed. So-called wild plants are merely plants not domesticated by man; no one finds such plants dying of disease or attacked by pests.
Masanobu Fukuoka, has demonstrated that if one can bring agriculture into close approximation with nature's methods, one can throw the entirety of modern agricultural science out of the window. This he himself has achieved.28 Fukuoka's yields have turned out higher than those of the leading agriculture research stations in Japan. What is more significant, his soils are full of life, insects live in symbiosis with his plants, and the conception of weeds has been thrown out of use. The bankruptcy of modern agronomy and its violence against nature has no better proof than what Fukuoka has provided.
Medicine as Warfare
The other major area where western scientific intervention in the life processes has taken place is modern medicine. Medical interventions parallel the interventions in agriculture. The processes of restriction are at work; the same distortions are actively produced. Despite all the sophisticated gadgetry, health remains a dream; in fact, so expensive has modern medicine become that even the dream is fast receding in industrialized countries.
The unifying principle of allopathic practice, on which India's medical development programme is based, is its philosophy of treating illness by counteracting the indicators of illness. Thus, if high blood pressure indicates a disease, anti-hypertensive drugs are administered; if serious inflammation occurs on the body, surface anti-inflammatory medications are prescribed. Such a principle of treatment distinguishes allopathy from Indian or Chinese medical systems which rely less on external drugs and more on the body's own regenerative powers, granted in principle by natural evolution to all living organisms.
Charaka, a physician of ancient India, defined disease as imbalance or inequilibrium. When analysing, say, infectious diseases within such a frame, the initial causative change is not seen as an invasion by germs, but changes within the person that permit a breakdown of the normal harmonious balance between the body and the micro-organisms within it or without. The frame allows one to recognize that all but a tiny percentage of all bacteria are harmless and, in fact, essential to the well-being of life forms.
For example, staphylococci are normal inhabitants of our body. Most of the time, their relationship to us is symbiotic; only sometimes does the balance break down. The problem is to restore the balance, not to make the germ disappear altogether. Those operating with a crude germ theory of disease use agents such as antibiotics to destroy those very germs that are most inclined to form harmonious relationships with their hosts, and allow the ones with a less genial inclination to survive. Modern hospitals have virtually become factories for turning out new resistant strains of staphylococci that are not only highly resistant to several generations of antibiotics, but also more aggressive in their attacks on their human hosts.
As in agriculture, so in medicine. As cell physiologists testify, the differences between our own cellular life processes and those of pests are less important than the similarities. Consequently, the application of insecticides must rebound on us. Insecticides are a foolhardy and poor substitute for natural selection. In the same way, antibiotics have become selective agents modifying the evolution of bacteria. Their increasing use over the past thirty years correlates neatly with the appearance in greater and greater numbers of organisms that are ever more virulent in their parasitic relationships with man, and adept at developing resistance to the new antibiotics being churned out.
The more powerful antibiotics are also more toxic to humans and can be as dangerous as a generalized infection. Penicillin, the first true antibiotic to be discovered, interferes with the cell-wall formation of certain bacteria, and bacterial cell walls are different in important ways from human cell walls. But newer, more powerful antibiotics are toxic to basic cellular processes - processes we have in common with bacteria.
It is, however, resistance that ultimately defeats the purpose of antibiotics. Biologists have now discovered that resistance to certain drugs can be transmitted directly from one bacterium to another, whether or not these were from the same genus. With such transmissions, we have a situation in which bacteria essential to life are capable of becoming pathological or disease-causing, and resistant to a whole range of antibiotics. Even in people who have never had antibiotic treatment.
And then there is the observation, made in the 1960s, that people treated with antibiotics did not develop as complete a natural immunity to reinfection as might have been expected. This was thought to be so because the elimination of the disease-causing bacteria apparently reduced the opportunity for normal immune reactions to take place. But it could also be that the 'immune-deficiency diseases' which have emerged in recent times are not unrelated to the increasing use of antibiotics. Diseases of this kind, which involve the failure of the intricate and powerful natural defence systems that have evolved over many millions of years to protect man and animals from disease, did not appear till after the use of antibiotics became widespread.
What is the final record of modern medicine? After Illich's criticism, some have defended the record by saying that modern medicine is after all in its infancy. If so, why leave it so unmonitored? Why is it not restricted to small experimental groups? Why are its concerns infecting other systems? To these questions there can be no easy answer. But it is significant that Ayurveda, which began once as the science of nutrition and health, has increasingly focused on the treatment of disease under the pressure of modern medicine. The patient in India is now forced to choose between an anti-life allopathic system or a perverted indigenous system.
In this context, Manu Kothari and Lopa Mehta sum up the achievement record of modern medicine as follows:
'It is a sobering thought that after several decades of research, a number of international conferences and many other meetings, seminars and symposia, the problem of human malformations remains essentially unchanged.' Having so introduced a symposium, McKeown proceeds to chastise Modern Medicine (MM) further on human malformations - etiology unknown, rate unchanged, relative contribution to infant mortality greatly increased. Trauma, MM can 'treat', for God, à la Ambroise Pare, continues to head the wound with the same pristine secrecy that a century's research on wound-healing has not scratched even on the surface.
A few things are certain in life, and the rapid appearance of bacterial resistance to a newly introduced drug is one of them. The latest bug to bug antibioticism is the penicillinophagic gonococcus, reported from St Thomas's, London. Dubos begins his chapter with a disquieting heading - THE SO-CALLED CONQUEST OF MICROBIAL DISEASES - pointing out that there has been no decline in the percentage of hospital beds occupied by patients with infections, as compared to 50 years ago. On the tumour front, the outcome of untold man-hours of research and uncountable moneys - now more people live on cancer than die of cancer - has been 'precisely nil', the whole anticancer crusade having been declared as 'scientifically bankrupt, therapeutically ineffective and wasteful'.
Diabetes mellitus, as a paradigm of metabolic disorders, continues to ail from definitionlessness and is comprehended the less and less, the more and more we know about it. Cardiovascular disorders have not decided where they etiologically belong and research on its leading members - myocardial infarction, hypertension, stroke - offers nothing special to write home about. On the senescent front, rats kept in a 'Rat Palace' senesce the same way as do rats in sewers, forcing the investigators to declare that degeneration and death are unalterably, and predictably, built into the rats, the rat findings being comfortably extrapolated to the human situation. While hopes are raised that some wundermittel might decay of aging, Selye concluded a gerontologic symposium on a totally pessimistic note.29
In the process, the image of the human body has metamorphosed from that of a living organism concerned with nutrition and health into a pathological, hopelessly weak entity, permanently dis-eased, constantly on artificial inputs and doctors. Modern medicine has become little else but a bag of increasingly refined techniques of warfare against microbes or bacteria, generating living beings constantly in 'dread' of, and not in symbiosis with, other living beings in the environment. In the United States bacteria and other 'causes' of illnesses are probed as severely as communists.
Natural Feeding
Few better examples of the supplanting of natural organic processes by machine-made ones are available than the case of breast milk. The breast-feeding of infants is an instance that falls squarely at one extreme of the scale of restrictions; using breast-milk substitutes and baby-food powder falls at the other. The two ends are connected by the effort of modern science to transfer all autonomous processes that are outside its domain to an area under its control.
Science sometimes intervenes as aid and as imitation nature. Baby foods are scientifically formulated to be exactly like nature's original. After decades of such claims, modern science has admitted its inadequacy and has now begun to patronize a return to breast-feeding. Now breast-feeding is regarded as a result of modern scientific knowledge: it is science that has 'determined' that breast-feeding is best. (Others, more circumspect, have argued that it is not that breast-feeding is scientific, but that its virtues, its operative mechanism, are all 'trans-science', just as the terrifyingly beautiful diversity of a virgin forest is also beyond science.)
It is possible to view the bottle-feed campaign of multinational companies like Nestle and their Indian imitators like Amul as an instance of violence. High-powered sales of baby food, justified in the name of science, have led to a decline in breast-feeding, in turn upsetting the delicate balance between breast-feeding, hormone release and fertility, and creating an imbalance in population growth. Millions of children have grown up with their right to proper nutrition sacrificed at the altar of development. Though the story has been told in full in the richer countries, it is only now unwinding in the third world.
IV. Method as pollutant
There is general agreement that science is necessarily incomplete: hypothesis competes with hypothesis and the best one wins, which in turn falls prey to competing ones in the future. Technology freezes science at the level or period of invention. That is why as science progresses, so must technology; obsolescence is part and parcel of the same system.
There is growing evidence that the scientific image of nature is incomplete and the application of such incomplete images has led to devastating effects. Pollution is the first indicator that modern science ill fits nature. And because the scientific remedies suggested for pollution are all technological fixes, we arrive at a notion of circular science which, in Fukuoka's vivid imagery, feeds on its deficiencies and almost blunders its way through nature before it is compelled to repeal its principles. In cases like radioactive wastes, even the talk of technological fixes is abandoned, for all that has been recommended by science are sophisticated means of dumping the problem on future generations. If we are not to fall for the false promise of the technological fix, the roots of the problem must be explored. Scientific laws are accounts of the working of experimental machinery into which a part of nature, after being 'purified' and made consistent with the man-made mechanism, has been incorporated. There is no reason to suppose that such machines are models of nature's hidden mechanisms, or that nature left to herself is deterministic. Determinism is a human creation in machines that do violence to nature by denying chance interference. Seen thus, science is concerned only with 'artificial nature', man-made experiments, be it in agriculture or in industry. This nature has nothing to do with 'natural nature', which has its own rules of operation, and which can be only vaguely understood through statistical probability, and in which human intervention must be intuitive and modest.
Therefore, as far as engineering is concerned, it is a moot point whether nature or modern science produces better results. No better answer to this is available than in the catalogue of plant engineering produced by Felix Paturi, and the documentation on animal architecture prepared by Karl von Frisch. I shall discuss the former volume in some detail, using it to refine my distinctions between artificial nature and natural nature, between principles from nature's development and design from modern science.
Nature, argues Paturi, is certainly a better designer than man and the engineering products of plants in particular are vastly superior to those of ours, and more spectacular too. A few years ago, for example, a European optics manufacturer, Zeiss, announced the invention of sunglasses that adapt to any intensity of light. The glasses were labelled 'umbramatic' and rated as one of the supreme examples of industrial development. In the shade (umbra, Latin, shade), the glasses are clear; with increasing brightness, they become darker, until they become deep brown in brilliant light. The manufacture of such glasses is very complicated, and oculists assure clients that nothing so ingenious has ever been seen before.
What the oculists do not know is that green plants have been using the same technique for millions of years. Leaves and shoots that grow in the shade are a delicate light green or yellow, but become brownish in brighter light and turn almost brown in very sunny places. Shading pigments appear on the surface of the leaf to protect the delicate and sensitive chlorophyll, and these constitute sunglasses or filters of a very sophisticated kind, for the shading is automatic and infinitely variable.
The umbramatic ability of plants is merely one example of plant intelligence. There are many others. Moreover, the context within which nature develops its artefacts is even more impressive. One has merely to compare nature's output with that of the machine, to come to some pretty humiliating conclusions. Writes Paturi:
For 50 harvested energy units the American farmer invests 250 fuel energy units, the Chinese farmer only a single unit of human energy. This means simply that the primitive countryman of the East works at an efficiency rate of 5,000 per cent, and the US farmer, equipped with the most advanced technical aids, at an efficiency rate of only 20 per cent.30
Industrialization based on modern science assumes that resources are infinite and that the earth can digest ever larger quantities of gas, heat and dust.
The latest statistics are horrifying: the amount per head of exhaust fumes and dust poured into the air of West Germany alone in the course of a single year weighs more than the domestic refuse per head which accumulates or is scrapped during the same period. The figures are: eight million tons of highly poisonous carbon dioxide, four million tons of no less noxious sulphur dioxide, four million tons of dust and rust to poison the lungs and larynx, two million tons of nitric oxides, and as many tons of hydrocarbons.31
It is often argued that some amount of pollution is inevitable, if one desires a higher standard of living. This is refuted by Paturi. Plants have tackled some of the same problems that man does today, and for millions of years too, often on a scale larger than man can ever hope to reach. Yet their technical solutions have raised no ecological worries, no shortage of materials, no filth. History shows that whenever man has imitated plants, he has done so to his own advantage.
The blunder lies in design that is inconsistent with its ecological context. The mark of good design is that it meets the requirements of ecology in the present and in the future. This may seem to be an old-fashioned criterion when entire economies are being constructed on the principle of planned obsolescence. But the issue is not whether one technical invention in the plant world is better than its equivalent in the human world. It is that, unlike the plant, human technology often solves problems in a self-defeating way, so that the solution itself raises a host of new problems.
To give another illustration from Paturi, we do not yet know how to make direct use of sunlight on a large scale. So far we have some forms of solar energy exploitation with spacecraft: these have very expensive and highly complicated tracking systems, which, after sensing the sun's beams, move their solar panels to face the sun directly. Plants, however, are masters of phototropism and, unlike our spacecraft, their entire apparatus - for measurement of the direction of light, interpretation, control, propulsion and the part to be controlled - occupies little space, and in the extreme case of unicellular bacteria, the space required is a thousandth part of a millimetre in size.
Or take the specifically human problem of waste and garbage. Paturi observes how every single thing that is produced by man today is potential rubbish and that we never think of the problem of disposal at the manufacturing stage of a product. Our language, he observes, 'has up to now lacked even an approximate term for the process contrary to production, that of reducing manufactured goods to their original materials, and this shows how one-sided our production thinking is, how completely devoid of a sense of building up and breaking down.'32
Plants are 'inspired' exploiters of refuse and have long ago reached the most perfect balance imaginable between production and 'de-production'. The recycling has been going on for the past 450 million years.
In architecture, plants have provided the best of models - some of the world's finest architects were gardeners. Joseph Paxton, for example, a former gardener, designed the famous Crystal Palace of 1851, using a variety of water lily as his model. The Palace was later seen by art historians as a landmark in architectural design. Other architectural devices, such as stiffening materials by folding, the corrugated iron principle, the principles of column architecture and reinforced concrete, have all been long utilized by the plant world. (Reinforced concrete was in fact also discovered by a gardener.)33
It should be obvious by now that there are two fundamentally distinct approaches to the solution of technical problems, one adopted by man through modern science, the other by the plant kingdom. Man, according to Paturi, has a specific mode of progress which is 'design'. Nature, on the other hand, 'develops'. Designs (another term for them could be 'constructs') ignore all environmental factors which are not immediately relevant to their aims - they are not tied to the effect of their action on the ecology. And almost all solutions to technical problems today are devised in conditions isolated from natural environments, often in laboratories.
Science creates, invents, or throws up theories as well as designs that exploit those theories. However, except for a few general laws, all scientific theories are not merely incomplete, they are temporary. Which means that designs based on them will carry with them an inherently limited knowledge about their impact on the environmental system. 'Designs', writes Paturi, 'must first stand the test of practice. The products of (nature's) development have already stood the test by developing. Designs can be mistaken; developments cannot.'34
Secondly, developments follow environmental conditions, whereas designs have other time standards; designs can be speeded up at will. So there is always the chance of designs outstripping the environment's ability to adapt to them. In fact, the product par excellence of design, the machine, does not belong to the environment of natural man; rather
natural man belongs to the biological environment of the artificial machine. The dilemma of our time consists in man having to adapt himself to the machine, because its maturing principle, which is design, advances more rapidly than the maturing principle of man, which is development. Hence the progress of the machine may prove fatal for man. And since he himself is its design engineer, he is committing suicide.35
Is Paturi exaggerating? The first Citizens' Report on the Indian environment, published in 1982, documents on practically every page major infringements of ecological law; many of these arise from modern industries and technological processes.36 Air pollution has gone up: levels of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter now exceed permissible limits. Rivers and water sources are contaminated by poisons, including mercury.
It is modern economics that has often aided the techno-industrial complexes to appear more reasonable than they actually are. Sixty per cent of Calcutta's residents suffer from respiratory diseases because of air pollution. The citizens' Report observes that in a 158 km stretch of the Hooghly river, the average annual yield of fish in the unpolluted and polluted zones was 719.25 and 124.94 tonnes respectively. Such losses remain outside the industrialist's profit calculations as well as the theories of economics. Diseases caused by polluted water, the victims' medical bills, the loss of cattle or sheep, the decline in agricultural productivity, the overall reduced quality of life - none of these costs figure in profit-and-loss accounts or in business theories.
Modern economics takes into account the goods produced by a unit, not the environmental debilities produced by it. There is often a time gap between the two, and a factory can show a sharp profit within a few years when its ecological costs do not show up. However, the costs eventually do emerge, and, balanced against the profits of the early years, there is a net loss. A forest cut down for quick profit (like mining) will years later produce economic costs in the form of erosion, destruction of fertile fields, reduced rainfall and so on. It is certain that if economics adds the cost in terms of ecology to all industrial operations, few will show any profit at all.
The re-emergence of an organic perspective on life, and the widespread conviction that planet earth is a delicate ecosystem, is resulting gradually in a corresponding re-evaluation of technologies that respect the integrity of living organisms. Man is beginning to grasp the savage lesson that activities alien to evolved biological systems are likely to have damaging results and that almost every aspect of existing industrial technology (human business with nature) and medical technology (man's treatment of his own organism) is violent and will therefore provoke a biological backlash. The processes of nature are cyclical and organic; they also employ feedback loops. Those of industrial man are almost entirely open-ended. That may be a proper spirit for scientific inquiry, but it could be in the long run tragic for all living species including humanity.
Conclusion: The Luddite Proposal
Science and technology constitute two major oppressions of our time. Yet, if one goes by the literature, not only are science and technology seen as liberators (either from superstition, fear or material deprivation and want), those who control and direct them (technocrats, industrialists, etatists) are seen as liberators too.
A good proportion of India's progressive élites believe that it is lack of science that is the major lacuna in Indian society. I have in mind groups like the people's science movements, groups which speak of science for the people, and others who are convinced that if science is popularized, taken out of the control of reactionary élites, this will enable its better utilization by the non-élites. Science today, according to them, has become an esoteric activity, and access to its potential has been gradually restricted. These groups believe that the knowledge science affords is a good thing and, therefore, every effort should be made to see that it is disseminated.
Thus heroic efforts are often made by such groups to take telescopes into slums to enable people used to muck to look at least once at the stars. We have taken the view that the dissemination of scientific knowledge is dissemination of a specific corpus of knowledge, and, more often, of an alien cosmology that is exogenous to people's living environments and harvested through a method which must conflict with nature, and with the daily technology of the non-élites. Such scientific knowledge may produce sharply spectacular results in the short run, but in the long run its consequences on the environment and living beings are invariably played out on the lives of the already impoverished. I have given examples to show how the substitution of design for natural development has become central to this issue.
What I have said is not new. Lewis Mumford has developed some of these arguments against the pentagon of power with greater finesse and better scholarship. What I have attempted here is a view from a different kind of society and a view liable to be called an extremist view. But then I am consoled that nature itself, in its uniqueness and unrepealability, is often seen as an extreme case by scientific rationality.
In this context, it is the luddite response of the third world that is the most instructive and indicative of future directions. Since modern science is often imposed on communities without their opinion or invitation, and those who wish to impose it are not open to suggestion (the decisions having been made by experts), the natural consequence is often a major conflict over the introduction of such science and technology. The nuclear demonstrations in Europe, in which citizens have actively fought against the installations of nuclear plants or weapons, is a major instance of contemporary ludditism. The battle over the siting of Narita airport in Japan is another.
But it is in the third world generally that actual luddite wars have taken place. The fishing industry is the clearest example. Those using older boats and nets and maintaining the ecology of their areas over centuries have sometimes been forced to literally ambush and burn the mechanized trawlers brought in by modern industries and states to 'improve productivity'. This particular war has taken place all over Asia's shorelines, till governments have been forced to demarcate areas for the operations of the two different sciences.
A second instance could be the extension of the genetic resources of the western world into the gene-pools of India's indigenous livestock. We may soon see the beginnings of a struggle to maintain the indigenous gene-pools in as pure a state as is possible and to actively propagate schemes for the removal, destruction and annihilation of exotic sires and their genetic strains. The awareness is also growing that the propagation of indigenous varieties of seeds, crystallizing Indian science over the centuries, must go hand in hand with schemes to reduce the acreage given over to high-yielding varieties of seeds imported from laboratories controlled by private foundations and state bureaucracies.
These forces against the dual oppression of science and development have been strengthened by frontal attacks against scientific rationality, inaugurated by philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend. But an even more powerful effort to totally emasculate scientific rationality has come from strong cultures like India, which invariably compel scientists to compartmentalize their lives, one part given over to the practice of science, the other to the practice of their culture. When the two get mixed, we still fortunately have culture, not science. Such cultures have systematically ridiculed, attacked and debunked notions like the propagation of the scientific temper which they percive as strategies for the further colonization of popular consciousness.
Such ludditism may seem to many a frightening prospect, a surrender to 'irrationality'. Ludditism has never really won a point, let alone a battle in human history. Can such ludditism, the indoctrinated may ask, ever succeed?
All will not succeed. But some may. It is even conceivable that eventually all may succeed, aided by modern science's own crumbling foundations. The permanent eclipse of Galilean science is an idea whose time may have come.