A Rice student checks a net that collects water from fog, part of a Baker Institute Energy Forum project on sustainable development in Ifni, Morocco.
A few months ago, the Economist magazine posted an online debate on the topic of whether “sustainable development is unsustainable.” David Victor, a well-respected environmental commentator, suggested that sustainable development had become an “intellectually bankrupt” concept that had led governments to “wrongheaded thinking about the real causes of economic and environmental troubles,” leading to “terrible policies.” Among Victor’s complaints was the overuse of renewable energy.
When I first read this debate, the entire content bothered me in its distant effeteness. What about the lives of the actual individual people who are suffering from hardship? On my recent two-and-a-half hour mule ride down the spectacular mountain of Boutmezguida in Morocco (with a group of Rice University engineering students following on foot behind me), I had a long time to think about this bookish intellectual debate and how disconnected it was from the facts on the ground.
In my three years traveling in Africa with Rice faculty and students to do survey research on poverty and the link with lack of sustainable fuel and water, I am struck by the reality of the challenge. Institutions and academia are trying to teach and create a global viewpoint, such as expressed in the Economist debate, but the solutions to such problems are not global at all. They are community-specific and require a deep knowledge of specific cultural, geographic and socio-political conditions. That means site-specific survey work — and people don’t like to face that reality because it forces the realization of how much manpower and time it will take to provide any kind of sustainable solution.
The factors to be considered in villages of Boutmezguida have little in common with those in Masianokeng, Lesotho, for example. True, the impact of poverty on women’s lives is painful to hear about in both communities. But the engineering solutions that could be offered are site-specific. There is sadly no “one-size-fits-all” technical solution that can be delivered across cultures. Creating solutions related to sustainable development will require a major commitment of manpower in thousands of locations around the world by dedicated individuals, willing to stay long enough to learn about local customs, hardships and geography.
In this mountain region of Morocco, scarcity of water is a critical issue. During my survey tour with a local anthropologist to glimpse into the lives of women in this mountain region, I was struck by the complexity of designing an engineering solution to assist this community. Family members travel on foot sometimes for days at a time hoping to find a liter of well water that might be used to sustain their families through the dry summer months, even though the mountainous region is replete with prevalent fog mist that might provide sustenance through some kind of novel collection system. The challenge of both the science and engineering and cultural implementation is large and the predestined condition of geography and nature hard to overcome. Ironically, the life of my guide on the mountain is overwhelmed by the search for water but he can make a cell phone call from his donkey. I contemplate the irony of what technologies he can be easily provided, and which remain elusive. Water and energy are the key to human health and progress. And yet even in our digital age, we still struggle to find technological solutions to provide these basic needs to more than a third of the world’s population.
Amy Myers Jaffe is the Baker Institute Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies and director of the Energy Forum.