Page 70 - The Drucker Lectures

Politics and Economics of the Environment [ 51

the time foresaw that the American and Japanese armies would
export the screen window to the four corners of the earth, which
is the real secret of the “population explosion.” Between 60 and
80 percent of the increased birth rate in the tropical countries
is the result of the screen window; and that’s hardly sensational
technology, by the way. The screen window explains in large
part why babies no longer die of fly-borne diarrhea before they
reach the age of two. One cannot prophesy. One can only say
that success always creates problems.
Another major reason why we are not making much progress
in our fight to save the environment is that we go about the job
by trying to punish instead of by trying to create incentives. If
there is one thing we know, it is that punishments do not work—
but incentives do.
We are trying to pretend that the environment can be han-
dled by becoming again children of nature. (You know chil-
dren of nature today play electronic guitars. Every time I hear
an antitechnology ballad sung on an electronic guitar with the
latest amplifiers, I kind of wonder.) My generation (including
myself) did that too, in the ’20s. Yet we did not end up anti-
technologically, we ended up with the atom bomb. Perhaps if we
had learned more about technology instead of singing romantic
“blood and soil” ballads we would have done better.
The environment is probably the toughest technological
challenge we have faced. Nobody need apply who is not ab-
solutely first rate in science and technology and systems work
analysis. Folk singers are not going to solve the environmen-
tal crisis. They could not even build a sewage treatment plant.
(This is the time, by the way, when one tells a youngster not
to fall for the nonsense that we do not need engineers. This
is the time to go in for engineering. Eight years from now we
will need them badly and are going to be very short of trained
technologists.)