A World Thrists for Leadership - Page 2

Engineering a global system
Much stress is placed today on educating systems engineers. But when your “system” includes the entire planet and its hydrological history, your educational mission must be equally expansive, extending beyond basic ecology to include social and political challenges scarce imagined by the designers of microchips.

Welcome to Georgia, a country that, along with Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Russia, underscores the interdependence of nations in protecting common water resources—here the Black Sea. Except for Turkey, this challenge has been compounded by a legacy of Soviet-era policies that emphasized massive agricultural and industrial production, together with conformity in education at the expense of more innovative approaches to the environmental degradation caused by these policies.

But that’s no reason for Americans to congratulate themselves. “As recently as the seventies,” Kanwar reminds, “we didn’t have very good treatment facilities ourselves. We let waste and animal manure flush into rivers, the rivers took it to the ocean, and we thought the system would ‘cure’ it.

“That’s the Soviet model,” Kanwar adds. “Our science assumed a tremendous natural capacity to digest all this waste, and that’s just not true.”

That assumption was still very much alive last March in Tbilisi as ABE Assistant Professor Amy Kaleita watched raw sewage pour directly from an outhouse pipe into the river that ultimately would carry it, untreated, through neighboring Azerbaijan to the Caspian Sea. Surprising as that was, Kaleita found the attitudes of average Georgians even more alarming.

“They said it’s not a problem,” Kaleita relates, “because it’s just small concentrations and the river cleans itself.”

An expert in precision agriculture and advanced techniques for measuring soil moisture, Kaleita had traveled to Georgia to consult with her counterparts at a local university about developing a master’s program in water management. The logic underlying their attitudes toward sewage from cities, she found, extended to farms as well.

“They’re really not concerned about agricultural runoff,” Kaleita says. “They said, ‘we’re not using synthetic chemicals; we’re using animal manure for fertilizer.’ They feel that since it’s ‘natural’ there are no water quality problems associated with it.
“But,” she adds, “the nutrient concentrations aren’t in the balance crops need. You always have leftover—and that’s got to go somewhere.”

A native daughter’s challenge
None of this is news to World Bank operations officer Darejan Kapanadze, who works with Ramesh Kanwar and other experts on projects in the Black Sea riparian countries. As a Georgian, she is intimately familiar with the social, economic, and environmental legacy of a century of Soviet domination of her country. And as a graduate of Tbilisi State University, she is equally aware of the challenge to Georgia’s educational system to remedy the damage that domination left in its wake.

“This is a bitter truth,” Kapanadze acknowledges. “The vast majority of Georgia’s population instinctively throws any refuse into water bodies. There is an almost unbelievable lack of public awareness.”

Kapanadze, who also has a master’s degree in public administration from Columbia University, traces Georgians’ attitudes, at least in part, to Soviet-era policies. In a command economy that valued quantity over quality of goods, she notes, environmental degradation was inevitable as engineers drained wetlands and converted them to agricultural production. From municipal water and sanitation to irrigation and hydroelectric generation, she says, the country’s entire infrastructure was developed with little view to its impact on the environment.

Not that much would have changed had Georgians known. “If someone had been aware,” Kapanadze remarks, “she wouldn’t dare speak out.”

In the fifteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, fear no longer excuses public ignorance, let alone inaction. Yet part of the wreckage bequeathed to Kapanadze’s generation is an educational system that, while functional under the Soviets, has fallen into the same disrepair that afflicts the nation’s physical infrastructure.

“Their system is still very Soviet-era, top-down, instructor-at-the-front,” Kaleita observes. “Students just sit there and have information thrown at them. There’s not a lot of interaction or opportunity to be creative, so they’re not in the best position to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers on solving these problems.”

“While higher education is slowly being reformed, most schools are still struggling,” Kapanadze adds, reciting a litany of woes. “Teaching materials and equipment? Obsolete. Textbooks? Outdated. Teachers? Miserable salaries and no motivation.”
And Kaleita’s consultation on that prospective master’s program in water management? “I assume,” Kapanadze says, “that in the short term the program will be taught in the U.S. or by a mix of visiting U.S. and local teachers. Otherwise, the quality will not be acceptable.”

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