sustainable development

1. 1
UNESCO/WTA
10th World Technopolis Association General Assembly
Keynote Address
Innovation for Local Sustainable Development
2016 Tangsel Global Innovation Forum
South Tangerang City, Indonesia
Richard A. Levao
President, Bloomfield College
New Jersey, USA
I am most honored to have join you at this meeting of the Global Innovation Forum. My
remarks today start with the problems in developing a basic tool set for a proper sustainability
analysis that is the limited extent to which we can anticipate or plan for the consequences of
development decisions and techniques. We often refer to “causation” or, in American law,
“proximate causation” a concept which usually is defined as the reasonably foreseeable
consequences of our actions, usually for liability purposes.
There are simple examples: it is obvious that if we push a brick off the top of a building gravity
will result in the brick falling to the street below. If it is a street that customarily is or may be
used by pedestrians the injury to a person below from the brick is a reasonably foreseeable
consequence of our act and our pushing the brick is said to be the cause, or a proximate cause, of
the injury.
But such a simple cause and effect analysis is not readily usable in development decisions and
strategies where a lengthy chain of impacts and consequences may make the effect difficult to
anticipate, and therefore easy to ignore. There are multiple difficulties, but I will identify a few:

2. 2
1. The benefits from a development may be immediate, or short term. The damaging
consequences may be long term and therefore seemingly of less importance. This is either
because the cost will be passed to another generation or passed to remote strangers in another
part of the world (as in cases of air pollution or climate change). While we focus here on local
sustainable development, sustainability issues may not obey the same geographic boundaries as
the proposed development. Alternatively, the risky conduct may be undertaken willingly in the
hope that remedial technology might be developed later to lessen the impact, thereby altering any
cost-benefit analysis. For example, the hope that future disposal technology will solvethe
problem of disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear power generation.
2. Uncertainty in the relationship between two events. The use of phosphates in
detergents and eutrofication, for example, was not initially understood and when it was
demonstrated, was debunked by those with a specific financial interest in continuing bad
practices. Even today, major policy makers dispute, despite widespread scientific consensus, the
causal relationship between burning fossil fuels and climate change including, as of this writing,
a man who has been nominated to run for President of the United States, who has called climate
change a “hoax.”
3. Multiple causes may combine to create an unsustainable development impact.
Dividing responsibility, setting priorities, assigning equitable costs or restrictions on many
regulated parties or, especially, political sovereignties is no easy matter. By way of example,
under American water pollution permitting law, each of several industries discharging pollutants
into a single stream may have different numerical limits imposed on each of their effluent so that
the total contaminant load to receiving waters is not exceeded. In other words, each permittee

3. 3
gets assigned a license to degrade water quality using a percent of total acceptable load, taking
into account availability and cost of control technology which results in differing limits.
4. The desire to avoid hardship from delaying or deferring development. The
consequences of slowing development differ tremendously from nation to nation or even region
to region: it might result in a reduction of earnings for investors in one locale, but might result in
widespread suffering, including malnutrition, lack of housing, even death and political instability
in another.
When we speak of sustainable development, the range of possible projects is very wide indeed,
but I want to focus on one which is very common and illustrative of the above discussion. All
development which results in increased urbanization profoundly increases division of labor and
therefore a separation of traditional survival activities for a society. Agricultural cultivation and
the harvesting, transporting and sale now becomes specialized and few city dwellers will raise
their own food sufficient to satisfy their needs. This results in a specialized agricultural
population, needed to feed the urbanized citizens, a differentiation which adds add layers of
complexity including pricing, supply, transportation, safety and fitness of food, increasing
productivity of the land and other considerations.
The American experience in this regard might be of interest and I want to share a series of events
that demonstrate just how complicated and unexpected some of these consequences are, and how
local development and urbanization has the capacity to set off a lengthy chain of causative
“dominoes.”

4. 4
Since the 1930s and the Great Depression, it was U.S. government’s policy through Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, to protect hard hit farmers through
protecting the price of corn and other crops by paying farmers NOT to plant. This kept the
supply/demand balance in one of relative scarcity - the less corn, the more difficult to meet
demand and, consequently, higher prices.
For many reasons, including the disastrous 1972 grain crop in the Soviet Union, and the danger
of world hunger as well as an opportunity for American farmers to earn more from the export
more grain, the Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, Earl Butz decided on a
fundamental change in the corn policy to one that encouraged and supported maximum
cultivation. The outcome was a tremendous increase in corn production, far beyond what could
be sold domestically or exported at a profitable price point.
One result is well known, the use of corn in the production of inexpensive high fructose corn
syrup. considered a factor in the recent public health concerns regarding obesity and Type II
diabetes. This causal link is not difficult to explain or to prove. But another series of
consequences followed, I hope illustrating the point of these remarks.
Excess corn was also used in animal feed, specifically for cattle. This highly nutritious and
calorie intensive feed allowed the beef industry to raise more cattle in smaller spaces due to the
lessened need for grazing acreage. Corn packs a much greater nutritional punch than grass. The
cows grew more quickly, leading to something called fat cow syndrome, but also the
carbohydrate rich diet led to greatly accelerated growth of bacteria in the cows’ stomachs. The

5. 5
bacteria, in turn, through their acidic secretions caused a medical condition known as rumen
acidosis, that is the cows’ stomachs or rumen were attacked by the low pH.
This was not a trivial matter as acidosis can paralyze the stomach of the cow resulting in a
variety of conditions, including death. The acid secretions of bacteria is one reason we are
reminded to brush our teeth after eating, particularly sweets, because the bacterial growth on
remaining sugar residues results in acidic secretions which dissolve our teeth’s protective
enamel, resulting in cavities.
Notwithstanding the acidic problems, the corn diet had great economic advantages. It was
cheaper, required less grazing acreage (ironically a good thing for environmental and land
conservation purposes) and allowed quicker “growth to market” for the cows, so a solution was
sought: antibiotics were added to cattle feed to combat the bacteria. Not only were the
antibiotics useful to combat the acidosis problem, the increasing concentration of cattle in
smaller holding areas, and in huge numbers, sometimes called “factory farms”, greatly enhanced
the possibility of contagions spreading rapidly through large numbers of cattle due to their
proximity and contact to one other’s waste, which also encouraged the use of antibiotics.
By 2011, approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold or distributed in the United States, a
total of 30 million pounds of pharmaceuticals, were sold for use in feed for food-producing
animals. Approximately 60 percent were considered "medically-important" drugs, that is, they
are also used in humans. This in turn caused the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which

6. 6
has now been traced to the promiscuous use of antibiotics and disinfectants in many areas,
including disinfectant consumer hand and bath soap, as well as antibiotic feed for cattle.
The mechanism from cattle feed seems to be simple evolutionary science: within any population
of bacteria there are variations among individual bacterium in that population. The antibiotics
disproportionately killed the bacteria most susceptible to the antibiotic, which increases the
reproductive opportunities for bacteria with a mutation rendering them less susceptible to or
immune from the drug. The end result is a migration in the bacterial population to resistance to
the antibiotic and the rise of “super bugs” notably MRSA, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus
aureus.
A hundred years ago a similar phenomenon was observed in that moths in 19th century London
“turned black” because pollution had darkened tree bark, giving an survival advantage to the
darker moths who could live to reproduce with better camouflage from predators when perched
on the pollution-blackened bark.
While the United States Food and Drug Administration has initiated a program to phase out use
of these antibiotics, legislative initiatives to compel and enforce such a ban were defeated or died
without action during 2015. The Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act of 2015 (PARA) and the
Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2013 (PAMTA) were proposed
amendments to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act which would limit such antibiotic use.
Both of these bills died in Congress in 2015. Perhaps this will be resolved by the new
administrative regulations.

7. 7
The above is to underscore the increasingly difficult-to-explain-and-predict causal relationships
stemming from new developments, here in agriculture. In the superbug case we can identify at
least nine causative links:
1. An act to uncap corn production which led to
2. Creation of a corn surplus which led to
3. Use of corn to feed livestock which led to
4. Promotion of bacterial growth in the cows’ gut which led to
5. Rise in incidences of rumen acidosis which led to
6. Treatment of the condition with antibiotics which led to
7. Killing of antibiotic sensitive bacteria within the bacterial populations which led to
8. Growth in numbers of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which led to
9. Spread of resistant bacterial infection to humans.
From the viewpoint of public policy, just imagine trying to justify restricting the cultivation of
corn in 1970 on the basis the the corn would, through a nine causative link chain, lead to the
growth of “super bugs.”
And yet in evaluating sustainable development, accommodating growing populations and
increasing concentrations in urban environments, we must be increasingly sensitive to complex
causative consequences, and respectful of data, as they are measured, analyzed and reported, and
alert to demonstrated effects, both expected and unexpected, and be prepared to act accordingly.

8. 8
This requires cooperation representatives of broader areas of expertise to collaborate on
consequences to sustainability.
In sensible planning it is important that as many variables and outcomes as possible be
considered at the inception of planning stages of the project, rather than considered an add-on or
assessed after impacts occur.
Initiatives in this direction through efforts such as Innovation 4.0, in which we seek a process
that would enable us to treat economic development in a way that enhances and benefits the
world at large and its global population is a step forward. It is far from certain, however, that
this goal can be achieved and one purpose for our convening here is to explore ways in which we
can address and incorporate new ways of looking at technology and innovation that result in a
broad-ranging and multi-disciplinary impact analysis, concerning not only environmental
impacts but social justice and sustainable outcomes. Sometimes this has been expressed as
“open innovation” or “transparent innovation and planning”, but these really don’t capture the
interaction among multiple causative impacts, local vs. regional considerations, impacts on social
and living standards, and a fair process for trading off contending claims from different
interested constituencies.
We ask ourselves, among other questions:
▪ How do we establish a process that will enable us to allocate fairly the benefits and risks
from technology?

9. 9
▪ How do we incentivize decision makers to utilize more capital intensive technology, for
example in power generation, that may require higher start-up costs but in the long run
will be less expensive to operate and less damaging to the environment?
▪ How do we build a system that is based on fair dealing including fair pricing of raw
materials and fair compensation to labor?
▪ With growing evidence that new high technology economies are accelerating the
concentration of wealth in a small elite, what is the role of policy setting bodies or, for
that matter, my own area, higher education institutions, given commitments to a more
egalitarian social outcome particularly when those very technological innovations may
have the opposite result?
Creating a holistic, or comprehensive, set of sustainability criteria is always an interim solution.
Like scientific inquiry itself, it must constantly change its approaches, its substantive subject
areas, and policy impact measurements as new development comes to local areas and new
research and experience causes us to re-think. Long term prosperity and sustainability demand
it.
The theme of the new or fourth industrial revolution has its echoes around the world in other
forums. For example, we note the German government’s project with respect to high tech
strategy known as Industry 4.0 which is striving toward the goal of the smart factory but is also

10. 10
concerned with the socio-economic impact. We also see “4.0 thinking” within private industries
such as Siemens which announces the rise of the digital factory and the “intelligent makeover” of
manufacturing. GE in the United States is working on the “industrial internet” to link industrial
innovation with modern, highly intelligent computer networks. Also in the United States an
initiative known as the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition is not only applying or
seeking to incorporate the latest developments in smart manufacturing, but also includes
representatives of universities, government agencies and independent laboratories, the sort of
multi disciplinary expertise which is needed.
It remains to be seen how universally the concerns of social justice will be incorporated into any
of these discussions. And, if incorporated, if there will be any meaningful strategies of
evaluation, standard setting, enforcement, and due process to be implemented in a timely way, so
that the impacts of the new industrial revolution can be directed and controlled to prevent
damage, e.g. environmental impacts, rather than relying on such systems to address damage after
the fact, thereby repeating the sorry history of global pollution and natural resource depletion and
contamination which are so much a part of our planet’s current crises. These include hazardous
waste, climate change, air pollution, contamination of drinking water sources, profligate use of
both non-renewable resources and failure to replace renewable resources and the like.
Of one thing we can be certain: irrespective of the development of new controls and new frames
of reference and even a vocabulary to describe these problems, we are still basically the same
human animals we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. And our track record is not
very good.

11. 11
The implications of the increasing interactivity and connectivity of manufacturing and industrial
production also relies on developments in data handling, processing and evaluation. Not
surprisingly, Microsoft Corporation has been an active participant in the discussion, sponsoring
the Manufacturing Innovation Summit held recently in Stuttgart. Microsoft stated in anticipation
of the conference:
“We all know that the trends of big data, cloud computing, social media and mobile
computing are going to impact businesses, but what we often need are some concrete examples
and dialogue around how these trends will shape the way that manufacturers will innovate,
perform and grow.”
The Manufacturing Innovation Summit hosted by Microsoft explored “Industry 4.0, a strategic
initiative and platform for the fourth industrial revolution that encompasses trends including big
data and the Internet of Things (IOT) known as Industrie 4.0 in Germany, the initiative is a
collaboration between the German government, industry, and academics.”
Innovation 4.0 is clearly with us whether we plan it or not. Government, industry, laboratories,
universities, and the like are all involved, but what of our larger responsibility to be certain that
our future is not one that is regimented in a way that degrades the condition of humanity, reduces
its opportunity for personal choice and satisfaction, and jeopardizes its well-being and social
structure? Even as we more efficiently compile and utilize data, we become subject to disruption
by invasion of private databases, hacking, state and individually initiated sabotage.

12. 12
None of this argues to stop local, national and international development. Much of the world’s
population continues to live in misery and in danger of starvation or malnutrition. We cannot
allow the compelling need to move forward with more development lead us, however, to forget
that as an increasingly sophisticated species, we owe it to our descendants to take our best
knowledge, across multiple fields of expertise, and utilize it to minimize dangerous impacts,
even those difficult to foresee, to promote the sustainability we require. ß