Low-Tech Greentech: What Thomas Friedman can learn from clotheslines and bicycles

Just the other night, I was at a party, getting my ear bent about the joys of globalization and how it would all make sense if I just read The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.  I haven't read the book, though I have read a review of it in The Hindu and another one in The San Francisco Chronicle.  I was too tired to argue, so I gave Mrs. Batti our super-secret "rescue me" signal.  She responded, gracefully as always, and I made my escape.

Had I not been so tired, or had I thought there was at least a two percent chance that I could influence this fellow's thinking on globalization even one tiny bit, then I might have talked to him about those reviews.  Or I might have engaged him in a discussion of Hot Flat and Crowded, the book Friedman wrote after The World is Flat.  In Hot Flat and Crowded, Friedman concedes that the world is facing huge environmental problems.  I didn't read that book either, but I did read some some really interesting reviews of it, including one by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books.  McKibben is not completely unsympathetic to Friedman, but he does question Friedman's assumption that the way to save the planet is first to re-make it into a greener version of an ever-growing, high-tech America:

[Friedman believes that] world is a growth machine and "nobody can turn it off." Everyone wants "an American style of life," and "their governments will not be able to deny" it to them. So the only option is to tinker with the American style of life to make it greener. Hence the longest soliloquy in the book, a hymn to the soon-to-be smart home, where the solar panel calls up to tell the "utility" when there's been a blackout, where the smart lights in your office are triggered by motion sensors, where you plug in your "Smart Card" ("sponsored by Visa and United Airlines Mileage Plus") into your Sun Ray computer terminal to start your workday. All this gear is so intelligent, in fact, that "when the sun is shining brightly and the wind is howling" (i.e., when your house is generating solar and wind power), your utility turns on your dryer to finish your laundry....Does it ever occur to him, in the grip of a fantasia like this, that if the sun is shining brightly, or the breeze is blowing steadily, you could dry your clothes on a $14 piece of rope strung off your back deck, or for that matter on a foldable rack in the apartment hallway? And that since most of the world already knows how to do it, we might be smarter moving in their direction instead of insisting that they buy into our entire high-technology suburban dream?

I have nothing against high-tech solutions to our problems.  I was pleased to read in The Hindu that an Indian American rocket scientist has just invented a really useful electrical device, though apart from being "just like a laptop of the power sector," I confess I'm still not sure exactly what the device is supposed to do, even after reading the article twice.  

But I have always argued that the world will be transformed though a mix of low-tech, traditional technologies and high-tech modern ones.  On the very same day that The Hindu announced the rocket scientist's electrical invention, they also ran a story about a Mr. Mansukbhai Jagani of Amreli district, Gujarat, who has invented a labour-saving, bicycle-powered alternative to the tractor for sowing seeds and applying fertilizer. Now that's something even I can understand!  I love this quote from the article about the invention:

According to Professor Anil Gupta, Vice Chairperson, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, when we refer to India as a knowledge economy, we assume rural people will be employed only in the lowest value-adding activities and never as providers of knowledge ...“That is absurd. It is not only in modern and IT-intensive India that innovation drives people. It is driven by economic enterprise and is well supported by government policies and professionally-educated individuals. The latter [rural inventiveness] is the creation of necessity.

Mr. Thomas Friedman is no doubt right about a lot of things, and computerized houses may be part our future someday.  But I think we should all pay a bit more attention to other types of "greentech": clotheslines, bicycles, water coolers, and ceiling fans. The kind of things people are already using--and the kinds of things that don't require a degree in rocket science to invent or improve.