The Activist Engineer?
The moment I heard that schoolkids were going on strike, I knew that something was awry.
I am an engineer. I endured years of study to become an engineer. I completed a doctorate in which I could predict the movement and transformation of atmospheric pollutants as they were transported across the globe.
This took four years of long days, long nights, and on into the early morning. By the time I had finished this research, I felt that I had offered some small contribution to the environmental sciences, and had applied all that engineering and science education to achieve some good. I then moved onto a couple of years post doc study in the same — the most fun you can have at university.
You can raise a banner to blame political imperatives, economic incentives or a financial reward structure that provokes the proliferation of technologies that pollute the land, sea and air. However, the foundation of those harms that may be inflicted upon the environment is technology itself.
The pollution of air, land and sea is a technical problem which demands a technical solution. Unless one is mired in a deeply Malthusian funk, the lights must stay on, homes must remain warm and food must be on the table.
Having kids will focus the mind, and under our current highly productive but polluting means to provide these amenities, there still remain a great number that continue to live without. Unless one demands that we join them to all live colder, hungrier and more isolated lives, the problem is technology and the solution to these problems will be better technology.
These solutions are likely to be found in the sciences and engineering. This will require human ingenuity. Other acts in support of the sciences and engineers are no less important, as these are the means to marshal the cash, resources and motivation required to develop and deploy these solutions.
However, the search for technology is the ultimate goal, unless you like sitting in the cold and dark.
When I heard that school kids had elected to solve the problem by depriving themselves of education, it seemed like something beyond the development of that much needed ingenuity was going on. Particularly as there are plenty of kids in the world without such opportunity who would welcome the chance and the education to solve the problem.
To deprive oneself of an education is not an act of defiance, inconvenience or nuisance that will pressure others to your demands. To deprive oneself of an education is an act of self harm. Teaching now anxious, angry kids to harm themselves until their demands are met does not seem like a healthy lesson.
What kind of relationship bellows, now look what you made me do!
Those who feel powerless to provoke a shift to more sustainable solutions only become more so by denying themselves an education. Ultimately, they may find themselves sitting outside the school or sitting in the road demanding that someone else solves the problem. Someone with an engineering degree, or an aptitude for science, skills at finance, a head for business or an understanding of the political vagaries of the human condition.
The very idea that anyone with a passion for environmental protection would deprive themselves of education seems like the opposite of a solution. There are so many other options to solve the problem that are available to an enthusiastic youth, and a good education supports them all.
Well educated, well informed, well motivated, happy, confident and well supported kids alive to the idea that their ingenuity can save the world, will offer a diversity of exciting ideas far beyond those achieved sitting angrily outside in the cold.
The last thing we want is for them to miss a class.
