Liberal Arts As A Tool To Promote Sustainable Development
Previously, when I thought of advocates of sustainable development or environment studies, I automatically pictured tree hugging climate change activists, or Al Gore saving a blue whale in distress while he tells us about the "inconvenient truth" about global warming. I came across this concept of planetary thresholds, coined by Johan Rockstrom, which are these 9 ecological balances whose natural resilience and carrying capacity should be unhampered with. Crossing any of these thresholds would have reverberating effects on the entire system due to its complex interlinkages. Humanity in its Anthropocene stage has already crossed three of these thresholds, which is climate change, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. The conventional view of sustainable development focuses on the outer layered planetary thresholds with active mobilization to work in that sphere. However, sustainable development actually advocates living in a "safe and just space" for humanity, which is below environmental limit, but above a certain social foundation, which are the basic standards of living everyone should be having. So ensuring that we stay in this doughnut area is a goal of the advocates of sustainable development in its latest rendition, requiring a multidisciplinary understanding of these factors. This is where Liberal Arts steps in.
My personal journey into this realm of liberal arts began with IB which was a truly holistic academic experience, and then BSc Economics in NMIMS a relatively new course trying to promote holistic learning through economics. Despite its supposed holistic approach towards the discipline, it still left me unsatisfied, ending up with me have a very single dimensional skewed perception of concepts like growth, markets, equity and other economic concepts. Growth seemed to be the end goal, the end which justified the means, and rapid economic 'growth' seemed to be an ideal priority for any policy-maker.
There were other problems with this single dimensional approach towards economics, such as the absence for tools to quantify factors like 'exogenous shocks' such as revolutions, wars or other major historical events which have significantly shaped societal norms, values and culture. But these factors still remained outside the scope of mainstream economic enquiry, would provide solutions to everything. Another thing poorly explored was quantifying environmental factors, biodiversity, ecological footprint, research into carrying capacities of different ecosystems with intangible economic value which were all compartmentalized into various unsatisfying theories of market failure. I began to realize that most of the economic models taught in the undergrad years, or even my school years fail to incorporate multidimensional thought into understanding our world, something for which liberal arts provides a better tool. With single dimensional models advocating rapid economic growth, increasing unfettered consumption and rapid environmental degradation, we are ultimately leading to the most catastrophic "tragedy of the commons". The commons in this case is our vulnerable, exploited planet Earth where there will be tragic consequences, if there isn't a radical shift in the culture, thinking and behavior of our society, which I personally believe an education in liberal arts can deliver.
When we look at our cost of living, we must talk about what the cost of choices and actions means beyond the conventional economic sense. In conventional economics, consumption is looked upon as a positive factor, which fuels growth, but recent history has shown the deep environmental implications of an over-consumerist society. And it is not just about waste creation.
For example, I learnt that not only do my direct water consumption activities such as bathing or brushing affect my overall water-footprint, but it is also increased by the indirect water footprint of the food I eat, in terms of the water required for irrigation, processing or manufacturing of that food item. So my direct water footprint I calculated was around 300 liters for a single day, while the indirect water footprint of a single meal of mine was around 2000 liters. Other than this, I found out that most of the products I use have some form of palm oil in them, which is mostly imported from Indonesian forests, thus I am indirectly destroying the homes of thousands of orangutans and causing large scale biodiversity loss. There are lots of other ways in which our personal choices and behaviors have larger implications on the natural world, most of which are latent to us due to lack of knowledge dispersion. All these questions mentioned were legit thoughts which popped up in my mind, and this will to inquire and actually get into the depths of these complex dynamics was reinforced by my engagement with the liberal arts. In economics, most of these are compartmentalized as Market Failures, which is an area dealing with concepts such as negative and positive externalities, where the true cost of the good is not borne by the consumer or producer. Tet the realm of environmental economics is not sufficient in addressing the true causes or the implications of this "market failure", an area which does a require multidisciplinary probing.
While crafting global climate policy or a global policy towards sustainable development, one must first understand that there can be none. Let's consider India's position and dilemma in the global climate policy-making. At the Paris climate conference, there was global pressure on India to curb pollution, given its current high rate of emission, urbanization and population growth. For India to actually meet its INDC targets to reduce emissions there is a large compromise required in terms of its growth model, consumption, production and so on. People argue that it's the Western Economies who have cumulatively emitted much more if we look at emissions as stock concept rather than a flow concept but the dilemma for India lies in the fact that not only does it have to actively play its part in fighting climate change requiring heavy investments, but it also has to raise the standard of living and eliminate poverty for a large section of society, who are perhaps not in a position to compromise and their ecological footprint is already low. When you have legislation protecting a forest from any disturbance due to single-dimensional thinking, one ignores the indigenous people who depend on the forest for their livelihood. There is always this trade-off between poverty alleviation and pro-environmental policies, a trade-off which India really must deal with soon.
The problem in crafting effective policies aimed towards sustainable development is of "isomorphic mimicry" which endorses copy-paste of global best practices for environmental protection and poverty alleviation, without any local context or indigenous research. I would like to advocate a "searchers" approach in policy-design, which is different from a "planners" approach as it takes a lot of contextual information, and indigenous learning to craft policies as a form of bottom-up intervention. However, a bottom-up approach can be as perilous as centralized, top-down approaches if done from a single disciplines perspective, requiring a liberal arts mindset for more effective reforms.
An 'incentive framework' through indigenous research should be designed from a multidisciplinary approach, on 3 levels.
The three levels of intervention as a liberal arts graduate is on the level of an individual agent who can alter behavior, on the level of influencing the system and the culture around us, and in level of the institutions and organizations we are a part of, to craft incentive frameworks towards this sustainable development.
On an individual level as a "change agent" which liberal arts graduates hope to become, we must "practice what we preach"- as a liberal arts education not geared towards a greater good is perhaps futile. I know that a lot of academicians and liberal arts graduates, just like me, tend to behave like a beacon of wisdom and knowledge, preaching to our fellow disciples, but without actually working actively towards these goals, is a waste of a liberal arts perspective. Information dissemination through a multidisciplinary approach becomes extremely important when intervening on an individual capacity making a liberal arts education all the more valuable. Very often information dispersion and awareness spreading is not done in an all-encompassing holistic format, but through a single disciplines lens, aimed towards short term unsustainable goals. The question of choice consciousness or the deep implications of individual actions, behaviors, values and norms is perhaps better understood through engagement with the liberal arts. I have already dwelled into the complex inter-linkages which govern our planetary thresholds and the foundations of a just society, hence to truly understand these linkages requires an academic inquiry into various humanities and sciences, propagated by a liberal arts curriculum. Lastly because perhaps I am a part of the social media generation, I believe that a platform for instantaneous information exchange and global knowledge transfer offers endless possibilities and immersing into such engaging debate and intellectual prowess on a social public domain may have endless positive spillovers. I am not advocating spending 23 hours on Facebook articles and selfies, but rather stimulating active community engagement into your own knowledge and learning.
On a systemic and cultural level, one should advocate Multi-dimensional, co-operative research throughout the educational spectrum. As far as actually making macro-improvements to society through education or other means, we must recognize the indispensability of liberal arts grads, engineers, economists, historians, journalists, philosophers, literature grads and every other discipline in instituting this systemic change. We need to move to a culture of collaborative co-production and co-consumption. While it may seem that there are socialist, anti-capitalist tendencies in this argument, I am actually advocating a shift away from conventional growth-centric models of development, to a world where the abundance of the top few can be trickled down to alleviate those at the bottom. With everyone collaborating to produce and consume in this equal, just society, one can imagine the safe doughnut space between the planetary thresholds and the just social foundation. What we need to truly understand is that 'sustainable living' is what in Game Theory we call a Positive Sum Game, where everyone is content, the nature is safe, and society has achieved a state Pareto-optimality, where one's gain doesn't imply someone else's loss.
On an organizational or institutional level, there is a dire need to redefine the economy in terms of the environment. So in Bhutan, the Gross National Happiness scale, which I always thought had something to do with psychological factors basically a metric they have designed to determine their development by incorporating their interaction with the natural world. Very from the normal GDP model which measures gross product without any environmental implications, it is perhaps not the perfect model effective model to emulate, but through academic dispersion and indigenous research, we can try to bridge this gap in awareness about the environmental implications of our production and consumption choices. Secondly, we must recognize policies or institutions which cater to alleviation in all dimensions. The Gujarat and Kerala Model of India, which are heavily researched and debated upon, upon investigation, reveal that these models have perhaps only addressed select dimensions of gender, poverty and development…perhaps due to the lack of liberal arts graduates in their policy cabinets.
Therefore in order to incentivize community engagement and public mobilization, multidisciplinary research into recognizing local needs, constraints and sustainability become extremely important. Lastly, in order to evaluate which policies work better and what programs to allocate more budgets in, one should not do it based on success of such a policy/program elsewhere, but locally demonstrated success of pilots in these programs based on local, context-specific research. This is actually based on a concept called Cash on Delivery in determining the recipients of foreign aid, but if this is used in a local setting for budget allocation purposes, we would perhaps have lesser failures in policy implementation and the drain of resources for inefficient unsustainable purposes. This will again require a true multidisciplinary understanding and research methodologies propagated by the pedagogy of liberal arts.
An author called Meadows advocates the slogan "not blind opposition to progress, but rather opposition to blind progress" which is basically a critique of unperturbed rapid economic growth and the consumerist culture. Liberal arts can provide us the tools explore and realize the power of indigenous learning in promoting sustainable development. Our choice, when guided by our collective holistic learning becomes our greatest tool in advocating movement towards this safe and just space for humanity. When I internalize my life using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I have come to terms with my own privileges and the responsibility to be altruistic given these privileges, especially since I got to engage so deeply with the liberal arts, unlike most of my own country's population. While liberal arts given me a great platform to reflect, internalize and introspect, it is rendered futile when not accompanied by extensive reading and experiencing. In economics, we learnt that the "invisible hand" balances all market forces, but only after truly engaging with the liberal arts did I realize that this "invisible hand" is our morality, when we consider the market as our planet earth, and how we use our holistic knowledge and acquired value systems to work towards a better world.
Lastly, I would just like to use Game of Thrones as an analogy for the impending climate change (portrayed by White Walkers in the show). While the kings and kingdoms quarrel about their own political advancement and internal conflicts, they ignore the biggest threat which may render all this fighting, and their existence useless, very similar to our world. Hence we as Liberal Arts Graduates, just like the Maesters in Westeros who learn a wide array of subjects in the Citadel, must use our infinite knowledge and wisdom to protect this realm from the catastrophe of the impending climate change and move towards a just, sustainable world.
