Message-ID: <19961004001857875.AAA47@smtp.persocom.com.br> Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 00:19:02 +0000 From: Joaquim Moura <mailto:joaquim.moura@PERSOCOM.COM.BR> Subject: "Adequate" appropriate technology To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Two issues that can clarify our discussion:1. If the average citizen of a "developed" country like the USA spends many times more natural resources and produces even more times wastes and pollution than the average citizen of an "underdeveloped" country, what shall we wait from this fact?
a) that we cannot "develop" the poor "peripherical" countries to the same level as the rich ones, because the planet would not stand with... unless the rich populations agree that they need spend and waste less and less than today... Will they agree with this reduction? They will, if they understand that this is the only way make viable their own future, and if they perceive that they will lose luxurious and superfluous goods but they will reach a healthier and happier existence. So, "appropriate technologies" are an issue that also the "developed" populations are invited to consider as an actual option for their future...
b) that to live this "new age" existence, people will perceive that they must pursue the maximum personal self-reliance and community self-sufficiency possible. It is just the opposite of the current trend toward globalization. Would you believe, as a scientist or as biologist etc., in a living ecological system that increasingly depends on foreign resources to exist? Let's start with the basic: food - do you think that a system that brings food from the other side of the world, traveling by boat or plane, paying customs and insurance and freight, is a safe and economical system? The same with clothes, housing, energy, health and work. It doesn't matter what the economists propose, about globalization... If we analyze what is going on the planet, we perceive that the most sure, for the long long range, is maximum personal self-reliance combined to maximum local community self-sufficiency. This path includes what we call "appropriate technology", i.e., community-level technology, allowing the local people's production and consumption of their basic needs: food, clothes, housing, health, energy, labor etc. Of course there will be need for "imported" and "intensive capital and technology" goods, as French and American food, American clothes and shoes, highly technological medicine drugs and therapies, energy coming from distant plants, people working for Japanese corporations etc... but most population shall rely on their own local capacity and organization to attend their needs...
And where we would like to see the "state-of-the-art" capital intensive technologies? Following Ivan Illitch, there are two areas where they are very welcome: transportation and telecommunication. If we stop producing so many superfluous and pernicious products and gadgets, if people reduce their childish hankering for material goods and learn to appreciate full human development more, there would be natural resources and money enough to produce trains, buses, even family cars, computers (and the new $500 "network computers") to keep people and ideas in touch... And remember that not everybody wants to travel or to communicate. So, there would be transportation and communication for everyone who really loves and needs to interchange with other people. As we do...
2. I would like to comment a Reinaldo's phrase that I cannot agree with (maybe because I am not so academic...)
>>"As other academics might agree, the first thing I was taught
>>in my degree was to interpretate every author in his particular
>>context. Schumacher, and Cardoso, Furtado, Galeano and Prebisch had
>>a historical context. Now such context is different. Unfortunely, we
>>must move on. Their basic ideas live with us."
Just mediocre analyzers (short-minded, short-sighted, tunnel-vision etc.) are limited to their context. The authors I prefer are those who have overcame their context's limits and perceived the deeper structures. Your relativist vision finished in the 60s, when the ecological sciences have shown us that there are some contexts where we cannot be so "relativistic": nature and its balances, our biological bodies etc... So, Schumacher - who was ecology aware, soil aware etc., was talking about facts that are far beyond any short- minded context. The trends you find so impressive and long lasting will prove to be very short-breath exactly because they are unappropriated for real nature and for biological people. Thanks.
Thanks, I hope to see you in this "gentle new world" we are striving to build together. Joaquim ################################################################# Joaquim Moura - Partners of the Americas Brasilia / Washington D.C. chapter Youth and Citizenship Development Commission SHCGN 713 - Bloco I - apt. 202 - Brasilia DF - 70760-739 - Brasil
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