The ’special’ dilemma

During my final year at medical college a professor made a joke “Soon we will reach such a high level of specialization that there will be a ‘Left index finger’ surgeon”. Of course we all laughed at the idea.

Through ever increasing number of ‘experiments’ and ‘research’ there is now so much literature and technique that each subject needs so many sub-divisions which further need more sub-divisions. Many sub-divisions have now become subjects on their own now. How does this affect the environment ( when I say ‘environment’ I mean ‘everything’) ?

A medical physiology lecturer needs a kind of frog which breeds only in a lake in a remote village which borders the Bandipur forest of South India. Students can learn about the functioning of muscle and heart from experimenting on the frog. Therefore the frogs are in demand. The tribal have been displaced from the forest by the government officers in the name of ‘conservation’. For a living they have few options, therefore they catch the frogs for the medical college lab. Due to relentless catching of the frogs (coupled with chemical run-offs of pesticides and fertilizers from farms and also climate change) the number of frogs decrease to such an extent that the lab get fewer by the month. The conservationist blames the tribals for the threatening the species of frogs. Alongside all this, a malaria epidemic occurs in the village after a long time. The local medical officers order DDT to be sprayed in the area and give drugs to all the susceptible people. This decreases the frog population even further.

The doctors donot know about (or are not concerned about) the fact that the frogs are the keystone and indicator species in the ecosystem which keep insect populations under control. They just want the frogs for the experiments. The conservationists donot know that the doctors are the ones creating the demand for the frogs. The tribals just need some money to get some food to stay alive. The frogs disappear and hence the mosquitoes increase creating a situation for malaria. The local medical officers are taught that DDT is the only solution for malaria producing mosquitoes. They’re only worry is malaria. The tribals have to move on to other jobs. The above situation is just a small example I’ve given to show the blindfolds within which each of us are probably working. The definition of the problem at each juncture is different depending on who poses the question.

This specialization business is not just in the academic circle. In every area of enterprise, anywhere from production to consumption there is now a highly ‘evolved’ division of labour. There are so many things to take care of that people are needed for so many jobs. Since the job becomes very specific, the only thing the person becomes concerned about is the input and the output of her/his job. They are not very concerned about where the raw materials come from, how they’ve come and who brought them. They have the raw materials and are expected to make something out of them. Once something has been made from the raw materials, the first level products are taken to the next level of assembly and so on and so forth. After the chain of events, the products reach the level of consumers.

People want cars. The car manufacturer wants the iron and steel, the iron smelter needs the ore. Iron ore is found ususlly in thickly forested areas and hence is a major threat to them. The person who is getting the ore mined wants to minimise his costs to give the best price to the smelter and hence he orders open-caste mining to be done. This destroys the forest. But he gets good customers as the price for his ore is the cheapest. The Smelter uses inadequate pollution control mechanisms to minimize his costs and hence releases lots of chemicals in the air and heat into the rivers. The car manufacturer gets all this and produces a hybrid car and calls it ‘eco-friendly’ and the seemingly ‘conscious consumer’ buys the car to show that he is concerned about the environment.

What are inter-disciplinary sciences? In the realization that people are losing perspective of the inter-relatedness of everything, some forums and academies have opened where people look at subjects from more than one perspective. This ensures more responsible science and also it has become a necessity to take research further.

Holistic perspective. The key ingredient missing in today’s world. Everyone is so busy playing their ‘parts’ that the ‘whole’ becomes irrelevant. It has hence led to a situation where each one doesnot consider the other’s problem to be his own. Each person has his own way of dealing with each problem and feels that there’s no need for a holistic approach. Only with the advent of such a perspective can one hope for the environmental situation to get better. “Only by knowing the whole can the parts be understood and not the other way around” (The Limits to Growth, 1972). Specialists, are they really?