ENVIRONMENTALISM: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES (ECO-ECONOMICS OR GEO-SOCIOLOGY?)

Posted on 27/11/2022

Updated on 8th April, 2025 (GMT 09:13 hrs)

• DOI:  10.13140/RG.2.2.25054.48963/2

Abstract

The following papers, mainly written in Bangla, concentrate on the roles of social science and humanities in the domain of specialized environmental science. If the disasters caused by climate change are believed to be inevitable fact, as predicted by some of the scientists, what shall be done by the social “engineers” (!)? Is it not the moral responsibility of the organic intellectuals, barring technical intelligentsia, to leave their mechanical reproduction of cultural capital and join their hands to reduce the poisonous effects of contemporary military-industrial society?

Many of them, specially my institutional colleagues (both geologists and economists) do not ‘believe’ the entire notion of anthropogenic global warming and the sustainable retreat from the developmental paradigm is not in their priority list; some of my communist friends and students do not care  for such ‘myth’. All of them ridicule me for my concern.

However, my body is burning. I have never felt such heat. I can’t cope   with this situation….. (cf. Anthropogenic Global Heating and the Condition of Creative Speaking Subject) I, a member of social scientist tribe, subjectively felt this unusual warming with my corporeal, not with the scientific devices or instrumental rationality…..

When I wrote a series of articles on the conditions of Jute mills, brick industries and mines and in quarries West Bengal (cf. অর্থ–নেতি NEGATION OF ECONOMICS) l, one of his empathetic geologist friends suggested that all these writings should be categorized under a new discipline: Geo-Sociology (sociological interpretations of geology). I loved that name though I was thinking about another discipline, another portmanteau word: Eco-Economics—Ecology plus Economies, but not about Econophysics, where the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is evident enough as supposed nature is confused with supposed cultural phenomenon.    

However, it is not the time for creating a new disciplinary technology—it is high time for retreating from the civilized funded developmental paradigm. A popular Hollywood movie messaged: “Now we do not need engineers; we need farmers—caretakers of earth!”(Not a verbatim), but, it is matter of regret, my academic training did not facilitate me to perform farming, animal husbandry or weaving, i.e. socially necessary labor instead that had alienated me from the supposed ‘nature’! I had realized such alienation, when I had seen the supplementation of green architecture by anti-green buildings (cf.  in an institute of science. If SALE-brated scientists (many of them are Padmashree and Bhatnagar-awardees) are digging their own grave, who am I to speak?  

Keywords: samaśṛṇgāra, nisarga śṛṇgāra

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