How Can We Educate Green Engineers? Reflections on Technology, Society and Ecological Modernization
In Sweden, nature was, from early on, a rather forbidding place - both in theory and practice - harsh and vast and somewhat mysterious, and the task, for science and engineering, was to control it, exploit it, use it effectively, colonize it, bring it under human mastery. Not for nothing has Linnaeus in the 18th century been called the initiator of an imperialist attitude to nature and the instigator of a managerial approach to environmental science, conceiving natural relationships in a mechanical, systemic way. And it was striking when I looked at the historical literature that many other Swedish scientists and engineers had shared this imperial, or mechanical attitude that was so apparent in Linnaeus. As the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger has put it in the book Mausoleum, his epic poem on the history of modernity, Linnaeus had a different folly from ours: the folly of a classic. `Any accidental feature must be rejected. Gathering, determining, naming. All obscure similarities were devised to the shame of science. Terminological knives, for the flesh of a blind and writhing world, to peel out the constancy. Inventories, nomenclatures, repertories. Nature a timeless rectangle, a motionless grid.’
Throughout Swedish history, we find systematizers, taxonomists, system-builders, modellers, both among scientists, philosophers and engineers - and even among politicians. And, of course, in many ways, this mechanical, systemic bent has served Sweden well.
It’s quite different in Denmark. There we find - or, at least, I found, when reviewing the historical literature - that the image of the workshop is a recurrent theme in the attitude to nature. The natural environment was to be worked with in a pragmatic way, not through theory or systemic distancing, but by a kind of organic interaction, or experimentation. We find, already in the middle ages, a practical bent among Danish philosophers, and an organic, experimental relation to nature. My own favorite example is Tycho Brahe from Skone, who almost alone among the great men in the history of science, has his reputation for practical work, for instrument-building and observing rather than for theorizing. Tycho was, of course, also one of the first organizers of science; on Ven he constrcuted one of the world’s first scientific communities, which lasted for twenty years, the practical utopia that provided inspiration for Francis Bacon and all the other theoretical utopians of the 17th century. Brahe was a classmate in Copenhagen with Peder Sorensen, or Petrus Severinus, a follower of Paracelsus, who was one of the first to challenge the idols of the past and urge experimental, practical methods over book learning. In 1571, Severinus captured well the Danish attitude to science: `Go my sons, sell your lands, your houses, your garments and your jewelry; burn up your books, buy yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains and the valleys, through the deserts, investigate the shores of the sea and the deepest recesses of the earth. Be not ashamed to learn by heart the astronomy and the terrestrial philosophy of the peasants. In this way will you arrive at a knowledge of things and their properties.’
In the 19th century, there was Hans Christian Oersted, whose fame again rested on a practical discovery of electromagnetism rather than on a theory: he never could explain how magnetism and electricity were connected. Oersted was an impassioned believer in the practical value of understanding nature’s secrets; almost uniquely in the Europe of his time he combined a romantic nature philosophy with a technically-orientyed utilitarianism. He wrote about the spirit in nature and gave lectures to industrialists about the importance of science. It is said that the Carlsberg laboratories were created on his inspiration: JC Jacobsen regularly attended Oersted’s lectures as a young man and went on to establish one of the world’s first industrial research laboratories, which Danes are still benefitting from.
But even more importantly, perhaps, there was Grundtvig, whose ideas about practical knowledge and the practical importance of myth and vision were so crucial for the modernization of Denmark in the 19th century. Not just the folk high schools, but also, we might argue, the system of technical consultancy that was so important in the development of the dairy and food processing industries, can be said to be derived from the rural populism that Grundtvig articulated. It is at the third of my conditioning levels - the institutional - where Denmark’s decentralized, rural based organizational structure linked together the artisanal attitude to technology with an agricultural economic orientation. In Sweden, there developed a number of large engineering firms in the 1870s and industrialization was largely based on the handful of companies that grew up at that time - Ericsson, Asea, Alfa-Laval, Nobel, Bofors - big, export oriented firms that drew on the Swedish mechanical and chemical heritage, and which derived their strength from a basic engineering competence. In Denmark, as I first learned from Esben Sloth Andersen, now at institute 3, there was instead a decentralized structure that developed in the 19th century, with technical consultants spread across the countryside and with the folk high schools and the various technical schools and institutes, like the one that developed here in Aalborg, providing the necessary training for the typically small-scale modernizers. The Danish national style of science and technology was thus quite different from the Swedish; and identifying some of its component parts helped me understand why Denmark could not only survive as an industrial country in the 20th century, but make some significant contributions to global science and technology, in spite of the country’s small size and rather limited natural resources.
These national components of science and technology are evident, not just in the energy movements of the 1970s, but also in the different approaches to technology policy and, indeed, to engineering education that are pursued in our two countries. In Sweden, the emphasis has long been on supporting basic technological research, and on using technology policy as a way to improve the international competiveness of the big Swedish engineering firms. There has been little attempt by the state authorities to steer or redirect technology, or, for that matter, to assess the social and environmental consequences of technological projects. Mechanization, rationalization - and now information technology - are seen as the main determinants of social change, and the emphasis in Sweden is to follow and support the systemic logic that further technological development requires. As such engineers are instructed in the basic sciences, and in the more abstract and theoretical aspects of engineering. There is little, if any, teaching in technology and society at the Swedish technological universities; the task is to stimulate further technification of the life-world, further technical gadgetry, not to raise questions about which techniques are humanly beneficial or to analyze the social, environmental, and cultural implications of technological change.
The interesting thing is that today we have a situation in Sweden where the industrial structure and its mechanical orientation serve as barriers or constraints for the much discussed ecological restructuring of industrial development - what some of our colleagues in Germany and Holland have started to refer to as ecological modernization. A program of ecological sustainability was one of the promises that Goran Persson made when he took office as prime minister last year, and, in what we might call typical Swedish fashion, he has seen the task in systemic terms. As with the so-called Swedish model in the 1930s and 40s, ecological modernization is to come from above, in the form of a comprehensive plan that is now being prepared by a committee of ministers, advised by a retired master architect, who was also involved in the massive building programs of the 1950s and 1960s.
In Denmark, the readjustment process has been much more gradual, much more piecemeal, much more decentralized. Cleaner technologies, environmental managament, pollution prevention have all been tested and evaluated and assessed at what might be termed the grass-roots level. We have an ecological modernization from below, and, as such, it has been somewhat limited and skewed in its impact on the broader society. There is little systematic investigation of the somewhat contradictory social processes of ecological modernization in Denmark, with deep ecologists and green consumers pulling in one direction, environmental managers and clean technologists in another. I hope, in the years to come, that I can bring a little Swedish systematizing to bear on research on ecological modernization and education of green engineering.
For there is, it seems to me, a certain amount of cross national learning that might be useful. I have always felt that the Swedes have much to learn from the Danes about the value of local experiments and technology assessment, while the Danes can learn from the Swedes something of systematization and more all encompassing planning and modelling. My own thinking about technology and society has benfited a great deal from such cross-national learning, more specifically from my interaction with Erik Baark, a Dane who has spent many years in Sweden. Erik and I found ourselves involved many years ago in a rather grandiose Swedish project - an ambitious attempt to compare technology in Europe and Asia - and we tried to find ways to make sense of what struck as a vast array of difference. What we came up with was a schema that has proved helpful in understanding processes of technological appropriation or assimilation.
The idea is that there is a cyclical interaction in all societies between technology and culture, and that, if technological development is to be successful, it is important to take account of the cultural responses, both the cultural critics and critical social movements, but also to traditional aesthetic principles and ways of life, in the formulation of technological policies. The relative success of Japan in the 20th century, for example, can be explained, at least in part, by the manner in which technological development was adapted to cultural patterns and traditions, to the distinctive combination of the chrysanthemum and the sword, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict so colorfully put it in the 1940s. The particular nature-inspired fascination with design, and the peculiar aesthetic of the miniature, have combined with the order and discipline of the Samurai tradition to lead the world in consumer electronics. Technology, we might say, was appropriated by Japanese society by using certain central elements of the cultural heritage, not imposed upon the country as an alien force. In India, by contrast, a dualism developed between western and Soviet oriented modernizers, on the one hand, who saw the Indian past as a barrier to development, and traditionalists who rejected modern technology as being inimical to the inward-oriented, spiritual character of Indian culture. It was the modernizing traditionalists who followed Gandhi’s lead - those who could mobilize traditional knowledges and technical skills in a selective fashion - who pointed out a possible middle way. In the concepts of appropriate or intermediate technology and in the various environmental movements that have emerged during the past 20 years, the Gandhian approach has lived on, but it has been subordinated to, and often marginalized by, the hegemonic conceptions of the dominant, western trained, increasingly neo-liberal political and economic elite. It was this general perspective that has led me to devote much of my research effort to trying to understand, in a systematic way, the role of the environmental movement in technological change. The environmental movement, I have come to argue, has been a kind of social laboratory for the articulation of new ideas, as well as for experimentation with new technical artefacts. What Ron Eyerman and I have called the cognitive praxis of the environmental movement has played a central role in subsequent processes of scientific and technological innovation. Indeed, I would now claim that the new political discourse of sustainable development and ecological modernization is, to a large extent, a translation of the collective identity of environmentalism into the idioms and life-worlds of engineering, management and economics.
Our conceptualization can perhaps be seen to have some basis in the Swedish systemic style, even though both of us are transplanted Americans. Our approach has, in any case, been inspired by JĀrgen Habermas’ early theorizing about knowledge-constituting interests and the different forms of rationality that are to be found in modern societies. What we have tried to do is to identify and describe the knowledge interests that are articulated in environmental and other social movements. In the 1970s, environmental movements integrated an ecological world view or philosophy with an anti-elitist organizational form, and, in some countries, like Denmark, actually developed alternative technologies as part of a movement cognitive praxis. These knowledge interests were an important part of the collective identity of the environmental movement. It was not just political campaigns or demonstrations that made up the life of the movement. Our argument was that the movements provided a new public space for knowledge production, for the working out of new technological projects and criteria, and also for the social innovation of new forms of knowledge production. In Denmark, there was OVE, the organization for renewable energy, and in the Netherlands, there were science shops that developed at the universities in the interface between student activists and environmental organizations. In other countries, this movement knowledge production and diffusion took other forms - in the United States, it encouraged the creation of a congressional office of technology assessment, and in Norway, it led to the deep ecological theorizing of Arne Naess and Hartvig Saetra. The point is that the movements provided a temporary space for experimentation with new modes of knowledge production, that had both cosmological, technological and organizational dimensions.
When we began to explore these issues in the mid 1980s, the environmental movements had begun to change character. New kinds of professional organizations had emerged, such as Greenpeace, and the activism that had been so widespread in the 1970s had begun to fade into the collective memory. There were also Green political parties that had begun to take part in the more formalized political arenas, and, most importantly, there were new kinds of activities in national and international politics, that were starting to be grouped together under the paradigmatic slogan of sustainable development.
Sociologically, one of the key processes which served to decompose, or break apart, the integrative cognitive praxis of the environmental movement into a disparate cluster of organizations and individuals, was professionalization. The knowledge interests of the environmental movement were transformed into various kinds of professional expertise, which made it possible to incorporate parts of the movement into the established political order, and shift at least some of the members of the movement from outsider to insider status. Some of the alternative technical projects proved commercially viable - biological agriculture, wind energy plants, waste recycling. Some of the alternative visions were taken up by professional philosophers and politicians, and the alternative contexts for knowledge production and dissemination either cleaned up their act and developed more sophisticated communication and information strategies or they eventually ran out of steam.
There were both internal and external reasons for this professionalization process. In the course of the energy debates of the 1970s, the environmental movement had generated within its own ranks a new range of expert competences in energy planning, energy policy, alternative energy production, environmental policy, and so forth. As the intensity of the public debate over energy futures waned in most of the industrialized countries during the early 1980s, either through over-exposure or some kind of definitive parliamentary decision, these so-called counter-experts thus found themselves in need of new sponsors to support their work and new instiutional locations. Some became professional consultants, working either in private consulting firms or in relation to the government, and some found jobs at non-governmental organizations, like Greenpeace, or the older, more established conservation societies. Others carved out niches in the media and the universities, creating new professional identities as environmental journalists, environmental and energy researchers. Still others moved into governmental and intergovernmental agencies, like the World Bank and the European Commission, to develop programs in energy efficiency and sustainable technology development.
What began to be noticeable in the mid-1980s, to a significant degree as a result of these professional outgrowths, or spin-offs, from the environmental movement, was a new kind of environmental policy agenda, the so-called global environmental agenda that focused on problems of biodiversity, climate change, and transborder pollution. These problems were, of course, identified by scientists and engineers as serious and urgent, particularly after the hole in the ozone layer was disclosed over Antarctica. It is, however, worth noting that most of these international environmental problems had been discussed at least since the 1940s by concerned scientists and nature-lovers, and, at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the global nature of environmental problems had been stressed by many scientific participants. What had changed in the meantime was the character of the international political economy. By the mid 1980s, production, in many branches, had become increasingly globalized, with research carried out in one part of the world, development in another, and manufacture in still another. Individual firms were increasingly nodes in transnational corporate networks. Economic life had more and more come to be governed by international patterns of production and diffusion, and this globalization trend was further accentuated by developments in telecommunications and information technology. It became possible, and, in a few short years, common practice, to plan industrial operations on a global basis, and to shift operations from country to country depending on changes in market and financial conditions. There are, of course, many elements to this globalization that are open to dispute, and there is, to say the least, a lively discussion of what all this means. For environmentalism, and environmental science and technology policy, globalization has meant a shift in substantive focus - from the local and national to the global, when it comes to the issues to be dealt with - as well as a shift in location - from national policy-making bodies to intergovernmental and international organs, when it comes to agenda-setting, and, increasingly implementation of research programs, as well. In actual research practice, the new information technologies have meant a great deal, in terms of the kinds of observations that can be simulated, the kinds of models that can be constructed, and the kinds of calculations that can be made. The social construction of scientific facts has been shifted from a more or less direct interaction with the environment and its component parts, to an ever more abstract and aggregate meta-environment of atmospheric, hydrological and geological processes that cannot be directly observed or, for that matter, studied.
It can be suggested that what has made these new issues particularly interesting for the new cadres of environmental professionals that had, as it were, grown out of the environmental movement, is that their solution requires something more than old- fashioned science and technology. They require rather a new kind, or mode of knowledge production that combines various disciplinary perspectives. Most importantly, these new global environmental problems require a new kind of socio-economic expertise to complement the traditional kinds of scientific-technical expertise that had previously dominated environmental science and technology policy.
In particular, there is need for an intermediary expertise between the global and the national, an expertise in the social, or, as it is often called, the human dimensions of global change. What this expertise often involves is a knowledge of particular methods of accounting, assessment, scenario building, forecasting, foresighting, prediction, and the like that seem to be called for in dealing with these extremely abstract and uncertain global problems. But it is also, at various levels and in various ways, an expertise in societal adjustment, environmental management, life-cycle analysis, risk assessment, the methodological and analytical toolbox of ecological modernization. The German social theorist Ulrich Beck calls it reflexive knowledge, a kind of knowledge that Beck sees as characteristic for the emerging risk society that, he has argued, has largely supplanted the modern industrial society with its production of goods and services. Now our societies are primarily managing the consequences of industrial production, dealing with the risks and uncertainties of large technical systems, rather than producing useful products.
I would contend that it was the environmental movement that first identified the coming of the risk society in the 1970s. Instead of calling it risk society, however, which, in many respects, implies an acceptance of continuous and ever more serious risks and dangers in our complex, technological societies, the environmental movement saw the social construction of risks as the problem to be overcome. It was industrial or capitalist development itself that was the problem, the project of modernity with its cornucopian vision of limitless progress; an ecological society would be one that lived within nature’s limits, however difficult it was to define those limits in practicable terms. The ecological society - ecotopia - proved, however, to be a vision that could not be realized in practice, at least not on a general, global scale. Risk society, on the other hand, can be lived with, but it requires new kinds of expertise in order to become sustainable.
I have called the new kind of movement that has emerged around the global environmental agenda for transnational environmentalism, in order to emphasize that the environmental non-governmental organizations that are contributing to science and technology policy increasingly transcend national borders and operate much like transnational corporations. They have sophisticated media and communications strategies, and they often contain experts in the new kinds of knowledge that are becoming ever more important in environmental research. We can contrast the cognitive praxis of this new transnational environmental movement with the cognitive praxis of the movement of the 1970s.
Ecological modernization can be seen as a result of this transformation of environmentalism - from a loosely organized, activist movement in the 1970s to an ever more integrated program of industrial and technological policy in the 1990s. The positive aspect - the good news, as they say in America - is that sustainable development is now something of a fashion in scientific and technological circles, and there is a real change in many industrial, administrative and instiutional practices. The problem, however - the bad news - is that there is a great deal of opportunism and rhetoric masquerading as substance. And it has become a real question what kind of competence, indeed what kind of knowledge, the new industrial practices actually represent. What is the cognitive core of cleaner production and environmental management, what kind of knowledge do ecological modernizers really need?
My own thoughts on the matter are still quite preliminary, but I do think there is a great deal that our own interdisciplinary subject area of technology and society can contribute. On the one hand, we can put some of these new activities into a historical perspective, as I have tried to do this afternoon in my highly schematic and personal way. We can explore the intellectual and cultural roots of the new ideas and technological principles. We can also try to distinguish, by means of our theories of technological change, between those cleaner technologies that are radical and those that are incremental, that is, between those improvements that based on new kinds of production principles and a different set of world view assumptions and those that are ecological in name only, what are really just good old-fashioned business practices cast in a different terminology. It is all of the variants in between the radical and the incremental, and the social and organizational implications that are associated with them that are interesting to study and assess. In terms of education, it is important to develop new categorizations, new ways of grouping the emerging cleaner technologies into clusters or systems, or ideal-types and classes, and seek to identify their common characteristics, so that we might be better able to suggest ways to reorganize the technical subject matter, even technolgoical disciplines along sustainable lines. These are, of course, major undertakings, which will require collaboration among historians, economists and sociologists together with engineers and environmental experts.
I think there is also a need for considering new kinds of courses and educational programs. As I see it, green engineering is not just a matter of eliminating waste products at their source, or of using natural resources and energy more efficiently. Nor can it be confined to so-called lifecycle analysis, which is undoubtedly an important new conceptual and analytical method in that it brings holism back to engineering, from where it has been away on a long modernist vacation. Green engineering requires also a change in attitude, or in what might be called a change in engineering ethos. So much of the environmental movement questions the underlying meranings of technological development. The entire mythology of progress, as articulated by Bacon and Descartes in the 17th century, and further refined by Comte and Marx in the 19th century, is seen as the root of the problems of environmental degradation. The linear model of innovation, and with it, the promethean, or masculine, project of artificiality, of making, manufacturing, industrializing, mechanizing has been brought into question by the environmental movement. And it is important to expose future green engineers to that questioning.
Already in 1948, Fairfield Osborn described man's war with nature' as he put it in one of the first environmentalist books, Our Plundered Planet, which came out in Danish the following year. Fifteen years later, Rachel Carson brought the war with nature to even broader public attention in her book, Silent Spring. With a mixture of scientific precision and poetic passion, Carson awakened the world to the environmental crisis and the need to reorient socio-economic development into ecological directions. As she put it,The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road - the one less traveled by - offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.’ It is important for engineers to remember, and read, the works of these pioneers of environmentalism, so that they may better understand what it is that they are trying to achieve.
Ecological modernization, we have been told by one of those who has studied it most closely - Maarten Hajer in the Netherlands - can be seen to have three conflicting sorts of social implications. On the one hand, it can be seen as a new technocratic project, a way of renewing business as usual, a new stage in the rationalization of nature and in the exploitation of nature for the benefit of humanity. On the other hand, ecological modernization can be seen as a social process of institutional learning, a pragmatic process of change much as it has been seen in Denmark, by which environmental concern seeps into social institutions in a piecemeal and largely unplanned manner. This is an instrumental strategy, and requires management competence, and an integration of ecology and economics. A third variant is ecological modernization as cultural politics, as a way of reorganizing humanity’s interactions with nature, readjusting the place of production in social life, and, most crucially, involving as many people as possible, as many so-called stakeholders in the actual process of technological development and use.
In our educational activity, we should prepare engineers not just for the hegemonic interpretation of ecological modernization; and most especially, I would argue, with Hajer, that the cultural elements need to be given much more emphasis than they have been given up till now. My own research focuses on the role of public participation in the new programs of sustainable science and technology. I am currently coordinating a European project, where we are investigating the ways in which environmental organizations and other direct and indirect representatives of the people are involved in the emerging innovation networks in environmental science and technology. In Beck’s risk society, there is a new risk that ecological modernization will put in place new power elites, new authoritarian forms of knowledge production and business management that are neither acessible or accountable to democratic forms of decision-making. And as environmentalists, particularly in developing countries, have been pointing out for some time now, the new discursive practices of sustainable development and ecological modernization can be seen as a reinvention of imperialist relations between the North and the South. As Vandana Shiva told a conference on science, technology and society in Goteburg in 1992:
The way global environmental problems' have been constructed hides the role and responsibility of the globalising local - (i.e., we in the west) - in the destruction of the environment which supports the subjugated locals.... Through a shift from the present to the future, the North gains a new political space to control the South. Theglobal’ thus creates the moral base for green imperialism.
And so, as we train the green engineers of the future, we need to educate them in the social and cultural implications of what they are doing. We need to devise new courses and create new competences. And I look forward in the years to come to work together with you in making some contributions to achieving these tasks.
This text is the greater part of Jamison’s inaugural lecture as professor in technology and society at Aalborg University, February 7, 1997.