5.1 Introduction
In the previous chapters I have endeavored to provide a detailed account of the nature and magnitude of the Three Gorges Dam construction, with an aim and attempts to make explicit the severe environmental degradation and human suffering that has resulted directly or indirectly from this massive project. To date the major political discussion of environmental impacts has focused on the benefits that hydroelectric power offers by producing power without producing greenhouse gases. Engineering education in China and in much of the world has been primarily practical, and there has to date been no, or only little philosophically reflective training which would help engineers understand the comprehensive socio-cultural ramifications of so environmentally intrusive a dam as was planned for the Three Gorges Dam Project (TGDP). My objective in this final chapter is to argue that the dominant epistemological foundation which underpinned much of the planning discourse and political debate on the TGDP was grounded in what Laura has elsewhere called, the “Epistemology of Power” (Laura & Cotton, 1990). The elaboration I make of Laura’s critique of the epistemology of power thesis can be extrapolated and extended to deepen our understanding of the dangers and limitations associated with the traditional environmental education fragments provided form Chinese engineers and development planners. As a result of the power-driven presumptions advanced to justify the TGDP, it should now be clear that the determination to build to this mega dam was a fait accompli.
We observed earlier that the traditional form of educational training and approach to dam construction is undergirded by a particular theory of knowledge which is motivated by mankind‘s lust for power, dominance and control. The hydro-electric power produced by this dam construction remains unequalled on earth, and the sense of national esteem and global kudos it promised bequeath to the Chinese Government meant that the project plans would be pushed through, no matter how well-evidenced the protests against them, or how potentially egregious the humanitarian and environmental costs caused by them. The story of the suffering, homelessness, and social injustice done to more than 1.3 million people has been swept aside by the massive wake of the Three Gorges’ gigantic reservoir (Oliver-Smith, 2001). In this final chapter I will develop the idea that this obsession with power, dominance and control continues to create a fundamental ‘moral tension’ between the objectives of the politicization and power-politics of engineering pedagogy on the one hand, and the deeper purpose of environmental education on the other. This moral tension is particularly evident in the case of the TGDP, where the collision of conflicting value presumptions has led to massive ecological devastation and the blatant violation of humanitarian rights associated with the forced dislocation of local populations in the dam area. Although considerable engineering planning has gone into the construction of what is claimed to be the most significant dam project in the world (Gleick, 2008), the horrific decimation of its surrounding environment and the concomitant dislocation of so huge a population of local people, now believed to be in excess of 1.3 million (CWRC, 1993; Tan & Yao, 2006; Bridle, 2007; Challman, 2007; Heggelund, 2006; Ponseti & López-Pujol, 2007), betrays that the humanitarian and environmental impacts of the dam were hopelessly marginalized. Given China’s obsession with power and its environmental pedagogy dictating the dominance of nature, it is both unsurprising and incontestable that the environmental and humanitarian ramifications of the Project were badly neglected. I shall in what follows argue that ultimately the construction decisions about the dam were covertly dependent upon epistemological presumptions of value which have served to undermine the moral importance of the environmental and humanitarian issues involved.
The environmental and socio-cultural issues raised from the TGDP can be understood more profoundly, and with a greater degree of moral sensitivity, when the discourse in which they are embedded is ultimately defined by the development of our spiritual wholeness as a primary, and not a secondary value. This entails that the search for spiritual wholeness cannot be separated from our search for and affirmation of a philosophy of nature which recognizes that our moral awareness and mindfulness being inextricably knit into the seamless and indivisible unity of nature itself.
To develop this idea I try to show that Laura’s theory of transformative subjugation (Laura & Cotton, 2010), reveals convincingly why the qualitative components of epistemic investigation are structurally jettisoned in favor of a quantitative calculus for prediction and control. I shall then endeavor to show that the epistemology of power can be reconceptualized so that the way in which we come to ‘know’ the world is not dictated by our insatiable appetite for power and control. My aim will be to extrapolate and exhibit the relevance of Laura’s theory of ‘empathetic epistemology’ for the reconceptualization in radically new terms of environmental and humanitarian issues in engineering education. Rather than construing knowledge in terms of power, dominance, and control, Laura’s theory of empathetic epistemology fosters a form of knowing in which knowledge is motivated by our desire to connect empathetically with the world around us. From this it follows that a more comprehensive interpretation of environmental education is one which reflects not so much an epistemology of power as an epistemology of empathetic connectivity. It is my contention that by reconceptualizing power epistemology in such a way that knowledge it becomes grounded in the value of empathetic interaction, the task of reorienting engineering pedagogy in the service of humanitarian goals and environmental stewardship becomes achievable. Epistemology is thus reconceptualized, not as power and dominance, but as a form of ‘participatory consciousness.’ My aim is to show that the scope of Laura’s theory of empathetic epistemology can be translated into a richer discourse of explicatory interpretation when it is integrated with what I shall call ‘entanglement theory.’ On Laura’s view politics is by its very nature ‘epistemically corrupt.’ What he means by this is that politics is entrenched in ‘vested interest,’ and therefore that its decisions to act are vested with power, and in power. For Laura, knowledge is either driven by a lust for power, or it is not; there is no middle path. Entanglement theory reveals, however, that the concept of power is not monolithic in its structure. In a case such as politics it is not the power which is pernicious; it is the lust for power which corrupts a beneficent motive that might otherwise rely on power to have it brought to fruition. It is true that in general empathy serves better as a foundation for knowledge than the lust for power. My point is that ‘entanglement’ is not value-laden in the way in which Laura’s model of empathetic connectivity is. Therefore it provides a more fruitful basis for reconceptualizing knowledge within the context of educational pedagogy. Entanglement theory affords a qualitative dimension to the epistemology of power capable of sustaining a form of pedagogic consciousness comprehensive enough to integrate the concept of ‘eco-honoring’ through human decision and action which acknowledge the indivisible and seamless interconnectivity which characterizes the natural world. What the epistemology of empathetic connectivity requires is the recognition that some types of technology are so potentially disruptive of the established harmony of nature that they should never be used, but not as Laura believes, that they should never have been discovered. There is no resolution of the environmental and socio-cultural issues that confront the developed world until we acknowledge the extent to which our pedagogies of theory and praxis need to be grounded in an epistemological framework whose covert value presumptions are implicitly in tension with or contradict the intrinsic value of preserving and respecting the natural environment and human rights and autonomy.