Science and Engineering Ethics 2001 7 105 115 The Greening of Engineers A Cross Cultural Experience Ali Ansari Centre for Holistic Learning and Development India Keywords engineering worldview environmental education cross cultural studies technothink ABSTRACT Experience with a group of mechanical engineering seniors at the University of Colorado led to an informal experiment with engineering students in India An attempt was made to qualitatively gauge the students ability to appreciate a worldview different from the standard engineering worldview that of a mechanical universe Qualitative differences between organic and mechanical systems were used as a point of discussion Both groups were found to exhibit distinct thought and behavior patterns which provide important clues for sensitizing engineers to environmental issues in future educational initiatives Cross cultural and global dimensions of these initiatives are discussed I INTRODUCTION One of the wonders of human communication is the ability to capture in a word so to speak the consciousness of an age The term green is one of these magical words One can think of few symbols in literature or even in folklore that have had as much impact on the imagination and consciousness of entire societies around the world in recent times as this simple word The word itself represents a rather wide and loosely defined spectrum of thought attitudes philosophy and practice centered around the common theme of concern for and protection of the environment Address for correspondence Ali Ansari Centre for Holistic Learning and Development 22 A Sundaram Layout Ramanathapuram Coimbatore 641045 India aliansari vsnl com email Paper received 10 February 2000 revised 1 August 1999 accepted 10 July 2000 1353 2452 2001 Opragen Publications POB 54 Guildford GU1 2YF UK http www opragen co uk Science and Engineering Ethics Volume 7 Issue 1 2001 105 A Ansari As might be expected this spectrum represents different shades of green At the one end are the deep ecologists with a worldview that would be considered radical by many people both in its analysis of environmental problems and the proposed solutions This group calls for a fundamental reorientation of values goals priorities and life style to make human society blend in with Earth s ecology At the other end of the green spectrum are the growing numbers of people all over the world whose concern for the state of the environment has caused them to call technology into account but only in this particular area This shade of green consciousness and opinion would have technology manage its impact without necessarily modifying its overall pattern of development In the middle of this spectrum is a sizable body of thought associated with the mainstream environmental movement as represented by the Sierra Club for example which opposes the present pattern of development calling into question the very notion of development as a good in itself It envisions instead a stable sustainable society supported by technology with a human face made up of small decentralized systems In its theoretical forms this line of thought questions not only the philosophy but also the sensibility of modern industrial and post industrial society reflected in everincreasing consumption levels and demands for higher standards of living as a means to a better life 1 2 Green Thought as represented by mainstream environmental thinking may thus be said to constitute a worldview which may be contrasted with the mainstream view of engineers on a variety of fundamental questions For example the green worldview assumes ecology to be a basic theoretical and empirical discipline rather than an offshoot of other fundamental branches of science The engineering worldview on the other hand either implicitly or explicitly uses physics and chemistry as the basic theoretical and practical framework for problem solving The two contrasting frameworks organic and mechanistic often lead to fundamentally different perceptions analyses and solutions of environmental problems at the interface of engineering and the environment The interface between green philosophy and classical engineering theory and practice is only just beginning to form largely in response to the pressure on industry to conform to environmental laws and standards As such the considerations have been more or less piecemeal and in no way amount to a revision of fundamental assumptions as called for by a green critique of western science and technology There is another basic difficulty Characteristically the philosophical assumptions of engineering are implicit in its theory and practice and can only be intuitively deduced They are not necessarily synonymous with the implicit assumptions of science on which a considerable body of analytical and philosophical literature exists 3 With the development of quantum mechanics science or at least physics has become much less rigid in its descriptions of things Notions of causality locality etc have become increasingly difficult to pin down However these theoretical problems and their philosophical implications have remained purely academic matters The gulf between the physical and the life sciences has tended to become wider rather than narrower except for certain esoteric interface areas This gulf is dramatized in the 106 Science and Engineering Ethics Volume 7 Issue 1 2001 The Greening of Engineers A Cross Cultural Experience encounter between engineering and green philosophy as a result of the domination of engineering by the ethos of classical physics As reported in this paper I did not attempt to systematically gauge or quantify the reactions of students to the green viewpoint Rather I simply made it a point to allow the students to express themselves on a variety of social and philosophical issues related to the impact of technology The green point of view was presented as a basis for discussion As it turned out teaching experiences with two very different groups of students yielded a harvest of valuable data so it is not entirely inappropriate to label them experiments in retrospect The first group was a class of mechanical engineering seniors at the University of Colorado at Denver The second consisted of final year mechanical engineering students at Kumaraguru College of Technology a small private engineering college located at Coimbatore in South India In the latter case I was guided not only by my earlier experience with the Colorado