Environmental and Social Aspects of Domestic Bathing - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 196

clean water. This may be readily seen from the, often amusing and always
informative, accounts and illustrations of bathing in earlier times (Allen 1976 ;
Aschenburg 2007 ; Friendly Traveller 1775 ; Lupton and Miller 1992 ; Scott 1939 ;
Smith 2007 ; Wright 1960 ).

4 Social and Personal Aspects of Bathing

Here I attend fi rst to the political, economic and personal aspects of bathing, since
these are fundamental. In a later main section, I will address the technical aspects of
bathing. It is the engineer's specifi c job to fi nd the best possible technical solutions
and if something is not technically possible, to say so. This is, however, not to say
that engineers can leave the political, economic and personal aspects wholly to oth-
ers. They have the usual citizen's responsibilities but weighted in a way that refl ects
their expertise and also, as far as possible, avoids that ever-present danger for all
specialists, the misuse of expertise in self-interested pleading or lobbying.

4.1 Political

The main political point is that, in the currently dominant ideology of neo-liberalism,
net growth of the existing kinds of economic activity is a necessity. It follows that
any reductions from gains in effi ciency must be compensated by even greater growth
than would otherwise be 'suffi cient'. Therefore, no proposals for achieving, or even
moving nearer to, a just and sustainable world can have any net positive effect until
the dominant political ideology of the last half-century is decisively rejected. The
world has, indeed, come to a condition that demands a basic change of attitude, as
indicated earlier - from one of exploitation to one of cohabitation. The relevance of
this for the later parts of this chapter is that some of the simple suggestions I make
about frugal bathing are to be understood in the spirit of ideas do not have to make
sense in the world in which they are proposed. They have to make sense in the world
in which they will be used - a slight adaptation of an aphorism attributed to Ray
Kurzweil (O'Reilly 2003 ).

4.2 Economic

Apart from the general economic implications of the basic political shift indicated
above, there are two specifi c economic propositions I make here which will underlie
all that follows about bathing. A large reduction in the profl igate use of energy and
water is necessary, yet a certain amount of water and of energy are fundamental
necessities of life. It follows that their price structures should be steeply progressive.