As a sustainable development professional and environmental science
professor focusing on how to help us reach our UN Millennium goals I
constantly reflect on the distinction between “techne” (knowledge that
is immutable, universal and transferable) and “metis” (knowledge that is
ever changing, intensely local and can't be replicated elsewhere). As a
National Geogaphic Explorer I confront the distinctions on a first hand
basis through my travel to as many as 10 different countries every year.
For example we don't all have the same access to sunlight, to wind, to
sources of heating or cooling, to fresh water, to wood and rock and
fertile soil. And we can't always rely on importation of vital resources
from outside. To create a sustainable situation we have to find solutions
based on what is available and reliable using our metis. But at the same
time our knowledge of the physical, chemical and biological constants of
nature enable us to take certain materials and environments anywhere
and create new technologies that can simplify our lives. The area where
techne and metis meet that I focus on is in the universals that we all
share as human beings. The fundamental one for me, besides my
observation that the same proportions of human kindness, curiosity,
compassion and genius are found everywhere, is that we all have food
waste and toilet waste, and we all have the good microbes that can
transform them into fuel and fertilizer. These constants have been
ignored as a fundamental solution to our problems and because of this
created terrible problems – diseases, pollution, deforestation, and loss of
soil fertility chief among them. But now that we know through our own
study and experience that organic wastes can be fairly easily transduced
into constant renewable energy and soil which can be used to cook,
light, heat, refrigerate, and generate electricity in quantities enough to
meet our baseline needs, I am a lot more confident that the other
solutions that depend on unique local characteristics and resources can
guarantee a high quality life for people anywhere.
You are giving lectures about energy, clean technologies, reducing environmental pollution
and saving methods. Your works in Cairo are really impressive. However, each country has
different conditions and most of the time; the one that works for a location is not convenient
for the other. In the context of these works, what do you think about the difference between
cultures and social structure of a society? Can you give us a couple of examples concerning
these differences?