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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
We are a very wasteful society. The world's population has just breached the 8 billion mark. This is creating a crisis of unsustainability. Can we continue to advance technologically as well as achieve economic growth without endangering the planet Earth? How can the past help us?
Speaker 1:My name is Shadreck Chirikure. I am an Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. I am a Fellow of the British Academy. I am an archaeological scientist. I draw from different disciplinary techniques to study technology and its history and how it influenced the development of societies of different time periods from the past to the present.
Speaker 1:We are very fortunate that in archaeology we deal with societies of different time periods which have accumulated different sets of experiences. But maybe the main issue is about the worldviews. By worldviews, I mean how we think about the world, our ideas, our beliefs, and how we think also about the relationship between the heavens and earth. If we are to zoom into the present, we can identify two worldviews. One of them is that we need to use big technology to achieve economic growth, and unfortunately, that a big technology and economic growth sometimes it affects the health of the planet.
Speaker 1:Part of the same worldview also says that, well, we need to scale back on big technology, and maybe we need also to scale back on our emphasis on growth, growth, growth, and maybe think about other ways that will ensure that we meet our needs without endangering the sustainability of the planet and without endangering it for the future generations. Is that even possible? Well, let's go to the nineteenth century, particularly the end of that century. We realised that the beginning of industrialisation, the rise of science and technology as we know it in the modern world, as well as colonialism and its expansion to other parts of the world. We see this cosmology developing where there is a separation between nature and culture.
Speaker 1:We see that technology, which as I said, is a result of a cosmology, is believed to be in the service of us as human beings. So we must exploit and exploit the planet for our own benefit and for our own comfort. If you increase the scale then, that creates the problems of sustainability that we have today. However, what we learn from archaeology and archaeological science is that there are other alternative worldviews that very successful civilisations that existed before us, some of them used and with some remarkable degrees of success. Let's go to ancient Egypt, for example, which is one of those successful civilisations that developed along the Nile River.
Speaker 1:To the ancient Egyptians, the Nile was not just a watercourse, it was a source of life. It was inbuilt into the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians. There are gods and goddesses that were created or invented to ensure that the sanctity of the Nile River remained and indeed the ecological balance and the sustainability of ancient Egypt. It was not just development at the development for development's sake. Then we can also go to the southern part of the continent and talk about a civilisation that developed and flourished at Great Zimbabwe.
Speaker 1:Great Zimbabwe was a sophisticated civilisation that developed in the Southern Part of Africa. It had a vibrant economic base dominated by production, engineering, and also localised regional and long distance trade and exchange with North Africa, with India, as well as with the Far East. Sustainability was also inbuilt into Great Zimbabwe. The result was that the civilisation thrived for at least six hundred years without any ecological disaster. And again, one of the main reasons was a cosmology that respected the planet, that respected the earth, and that respected the sustainability, what we are going to live for future generations.
Speaker 1:And there are also other examples of cosmologies, for example, in the Amazon in Brazil, as well as amongst the Maya people. These tell us that it is possible for societies to develop economically, to be advanced technologically, but also with good sense of stewardship to the environment. In conclusion, the world's population will continue to increase, we will continue to need economic growth, and we will continue to need technology. Is it naive, therefore, to think that the world views that worked for other groups such as the Egyptians and for Great Zimbabwe can work in the changed circumstances of the present? I don't think so.
Speaker 1:I think that we need a mindset shift and that we can learn from these other cosmologies to change some of our mindsets so that we can achieve both the needs of the present and future generations without endangering the health of planet Earth and without compromising the sustainability of generations that will come after us.