In 1995 I was invited to an international conference on sustainability near Barcelona (Xercavins, 1996).  The (Catalan) title, in English, was "Sustainable Development and Disequilibrium," and my contribution was part of a panel on graduate education.  My thoughts there seem to me to deserve repetition and amplification here.  My focus at the conference (Durbin, 1996), on graduate education in sustainability, was narrower than my focus in this book, but I think the approach I espoused there fits my broader focus here.  As throughout this book, I emphasized activism, and the approach seems both transferable (for example, to graduate education in bioethics; see chapter V, above) and generalizable (to graduate education in any aspect of philosophy of technology).

    For over a hundred years, graduate education in general but particularly graduate education in philosophy has been criticized.  Among American Pragmatist philosophers, it was William James who first attacked American graduate education, at its very beginning (James, 1903).  For almost all the philosophers in that tradition, graduate work in philosophy has seemed problematic.  Among James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, only Mead had any significant number of graduate students; and, though several of them achieved prominence in the field, none generated a school to match the so-called Chicago School in sociology that was so strongly influenced by Mead (see Bulmer, 1984).

    All of this makes sense if we accept Ralph Sleeper's (1986) characterization of Dewey's philosophy (shared in all its main lines by the other two), namely, that it is "fundamentally meliorist."  Sleeper contrasts Dewey's approach with two other philosophers sometimes called "pragmatic" in some sense, but definitely not activist.  The two contrasted philosophers are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, both of whom have had legions of graduate students follow in their footsteps.  Here is what Sleeper says:

Although Wittgenstein and Heidegger share something of Dewey's concern for the release of philosophy from the constraints of tradition, they share little or nothing of Dewey's concern with the application of philosophy once released.  They have none of Dewey's concern regarding the practice of philosophy in social and political criticism (p. 206).

Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of those minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems:  problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline (p. 129).

As philosophy became analytic, the reading habits of aspiring graduate students changed in a way that parallels recent changes in the habits of graduate students of literature.  Fewer old books were read, and more recent articles (p. 130).

Romance, genius, charisma, . . . prophets . . . have been out of style in anglophone philosophy for several generations.  I doubt that they will ever come back into fashion, just as I doubt that American sociology departments will ever again be . . . centers of social activism (p. 131).

    Although my graduate training was in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of science, rather than the customary analytical approach, I was as academically driven as anyone else at the time.  But two things happened to keep me from a narrow academic path.

    First, I chose for my dissertation a topic on the logic of discovery in science (see Durbin, 1968), and research on it led me to the writings of Mead on the social nature of the scientific method.  At first, I thought of a Meadian approach as complementary to the social version of a Thomistic philosophy of science that I was developing, but after a sort of philosophical conversion I began to see myself as falling within the American Pragmatist tradition.  Coincidentally, I began — after graduating — to focus on problems associated with applications of science and engineering, exemplified at their worst in the Vietnam War; and this moved me even further away from a narrow philosophy of science toward what I have focused on ever since, philosophy of technology.

    The second fortunate happenstance was that I moved to the University of Delaware precisely at the time when what was supposed to be a high-powered program in philosophy of science folded.  As the only philosopher of science left, I was given complete freedom to focus on applied science and engineering in the land of DuPont, "the chemical capital of the world."  The failure of the proposed doctoral program in philosophy of science, and of any other Ph.D. program at Delaware, pretty much kept me from doing any graduate training for awhile.  That did not bother me as I got involved in establishing the Society for Philosophy and Technology, where several of my colleagues welcomed my Pragmatist approach.

    When, after a few years, I was able to start mentoring graduate students, it was in the University's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, where activism on the part of graduate students was encouraged rather than discouraged as it would have been in a philosophy department.

    In that setting my focus has been primarily on graduate students from the less-developed world.  All of them have had a deep and abiding interest in issues of sustainable development.

    Here I highlight -- and give credit to -- four of these doctoral students.  They have managed admirably to integrate sustainability concepts within the research projects that formed the basis of their doctoral dissertations.

    Two things are notable about their research.  In each, a definition and application of notions of sustainability is central.  Also, in each case, democratic activism is an integral part of the application process -- which is what ties their work to my own philosophical emphasis.

    This seems to me to be a direct way of saying something concrete -- and, I hope, valuable -- in response to the central question that I addressed at Barcelona (Durbin, 1996) and that I address in this chapter.  Namely, how can sustainability concerns be integrated into graduate programs, whether in environmental ethics, science and technology studies, or science/technology/society programs?

    Here are my examples:

    1.  Subodh Wagle's thesis, "Toward a Praxis of Sustainable and Empowered Livelihoods" (1996), focuses on his native India, and in particular on Maharashtra Province, where Bombay is located.  The theoretical issue that Wagle faces is that, as traditional development theory has come to be challenged, the theoretical challenges themselves have come under attack -- including attacks by Wagle himself.  What he says we need is only partly theoretical:  we need a challenge based on what he calls "the grassroots standpoint," activist efforts of villagers in his part of India both resisting classical development efforts and attempting to devise their own alternatives for village-level sustainable development.  His examples are resistance both to the building of a dam on the Narmada River and to the efforts of the Enron Development Corporation to construct a large-scale thermal power plant.

    Wagle has either worked in these resistance-plus-alternatives efforts or been in close contact with the activists who have.  His thesis is openly activist in orientation, but it has a strong intellectual focus.  Toward the end of the thesis, Wagle says:

We now come to the third objective of this dissertation -- an examination of efforts of grassroots groups to evolve development alternatives.  Evolution of grassroots development alternatives essentially means translating the grassroots standpoint and its underlying theory into the design of a practicable alternative to the current conventional development model (Wagle, 1996, p. 316).

    I will give you a talisman.  Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test.  Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.

    2.  Shih Jung Hsu's "Environmental Protest, the Authoritarian State, and Civil Society:  The Case of Taiwan" (1995) is my second example.

    As Hsu recognizes, Taiwan has commonly been touted as an economic miracle because of its rapid economic growth over the last three decades.  But the Taiwanese state has been willing to sacrifice the natural environment for its spectacular economic growth.  In recent years, popular protest has emerged in different communities to challenge the state's single-minded economic development policy.  A new civil society emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, pressing the government to take action against widespread environmental pollution.

    Hsu's dissertation focuses on petrochemical-based pollution in one metropolitan area, Kaohsiung.  It examines three polluted communities as case studies of collective action.  The method is in-depth interviews.  Hsu identifies three major factors as explaining the emergence of Taiwan's environmental movements:

(1)  a collective sense of violation by the state-industry pro-growth alliance with a corresponding lack of belief in mainstream politics as an effective form of redress; (2) a strengthening of community identity and its use to mobilize residents; and (3) political opportunities created by the state's relaxation of authoritarian controls.

    3.  Bo Shen's "Sustainable Energy for the Rural Developing World:  The Potential for Renewable Energy" (1998) is my third example.  The situation in China, of course, is different from that in Taiwan.  And even if Shen had wanted to promote activism there, he would have had to keep in mind Tiananmen Square -- an experience that affected him and his family personally.  But Shen's intentions were different anyway.

    What Shen does in his dissertation is demonstrate two things.  First, he summarizes the data to support the following claim:

Although China has made significant progress in alleviating rural poverty and improving rural life in past decades, it still has over 50 million rural people below the country's official poverty line — less than US $55 a year.

    Shen's second point is that extending urban electrical production through power lines to rural areas is no solution.  It would be extremely costly, and preliminary efforts have mostly failed.  Besides, expanding energy production in China, for urban areas, is contributing significantly to the build-up of greenhouse gases worldwide, and will contribute still more as production increases.

    Shen's conclusion is that what Inner Mongolia and other rural areas need is renewable energy resources.  He focuses on photovoltaics, wind systems, and especially PV/wind hybrids.  And the bulk of the dissertation is a demonstration that such systems can supply these areas' energy needs, and that resistance to the effort can be overcome.

    Even before Shen's dissertation was finalized, his work had been praised by Dr. William Wallace of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab.  Staff of that program have visited Inner Mongolia, to see the hybrid systems at work, and recommended that President Clinton should comment on these developments in his historic visit to China in 1998.

    Shen recognizes that this move toward sustainability is possible only with support from the central government, and is neither a grassroots initiative nor a result of citizen activism.  But this may be all that is possible in China at the present time.  And his point is that the effort can contribute to sustainable development.

    4.  Cesar Cuello Nieto's "Sustainable Development in Theory and Practice:  A Costa Rican Case Study" (1997), my final example, has been discussed at length, above, in chapter VII.  At the end of that chapter, I talked about how he has been working, since he finished his dissertation, on protecting the rainforests of the Osa Peninsula from depradations.  I did not talk, in chapter VII, about the background or much of the theoretical content of Cuello's dissertation.

    Costa Rica is often taken to be a shining example among Latin American countries of how to go about sustainable development.  And the focus of Cuello's dissertation was on contrasting public statements of the Costa Rican government (along with supporting documents in the private sector) with what is actually going on, especially in the Osa Peninsula.  When Cuello did most of his research, he was working for the Fundacion Neotropica, one of the leading internationally-funded environmental non-governmental agencies in Costa Rica.  Osa is just one object of their efforts.

    What Cuello and the Fundacion have encountered is a reality very different from what the sustainability rhetoric of governmental statements would suggest.  But they have also found that continuing deforestation and other environmental ills can be dealt with through educational and activist measures.  Development of the Osa Peninsula, including ecotourism and similar ventures, may never fully match the ideal of sustainability as spelled out in official documents (let alone as modeled in Cuello's ideal/holistic scheme discussed in chapter VII).  But the right kind of citizen action can make a difference, and Cuello is continuing his efforts.  (If I can find a way, I hope to join him in those efforts, and take other students along to learn how.)

    Conclusion:  All four examples demonstrate that it is possible, in a technology teaching and research program that focuses on sustainability, to incorporate these concerns within theoretically rigorous research projects that also manage to accomplish something in terms of sustainable outcomes.

    With one of these students, Cuello, I have argued elsewhere (Cuello Nieto and Durbin, 1993) that "sustainability" and "sustainable development," as slogans, may be almost bereft of meaningful content.  Each user of the slogans gives them a meaning in line with his or her own intellectual or political interests.  Nonetheless, the examples discussed here -- and the overall research thrust of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Delaware -- seem to me to demonstrate that, when a researcher defines sustainability appropriately, it is possible to use sustainability concepts in a way that can bring about real social reform -- the tailoring of development to the real needs of Indian villagers as expressed in local grassroots movements; environmental protest movements (and a concomitant strengthening of civil liberties and civil society) in Taiwan; renewable energy policies for rural China as that vast country moves toward rapid development (with the potential for enormous and worldwide ecological damage because of China's  large population); and genuine protection of rainforests in Costa Rica (without sacrificing local citizens' interests).

    Sustainability may run the risk of becoming an empty slogan.  But the right kind of sustainability-related graduate education, if joined with real-world progressive activism, can have good consequences for our troubled world.

    I think that my experience in this program is generalizable.  Graduate programs in biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, applied ethics generally, even in philosophy of technology (in the few cases where such programs exist) could, if managed appropriately, train both competent scholars and activists dedicated to the solution of urgent technosocial problems.  The problems will certainly never be solved by philosophical efforts alone, but appropriately humble philosophers of technology can contribute their support to the activist groups that might possibly be able to do something about these problems.

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