Rubber Science and Technics Toward the Next Century: A Prospective View
Rubber science has to be in harmony with the sustainable development idea, and is expected to accelerate further progress of rubber technics at the transportation society, too. In order to fulfill these objectives, modern rubber science is detined to make
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Rubber Science and Technics Toward the Next Century: A Prospective View
6.1
Sustainability and Rubber
Sustainable development (SD) of the present human beings on the earth is the most important issue of this century. In other words, how we can develop ourselves without further damaging all the natural existences is the question we are facing now. For a moment, we have to be practical in living a life in accordance with SD. In other words, SD may be an ideology itself, but it is now to be practiced in our everyday life. Otherwise, the next century could be the last one for us to live on the earth—is one of the possible consequences by scientific thought or by a priori thinking as has been suggested by the well-known THE CLUB OF ROMES report which has been disseminated since 1972 [1]. The basic idea of SD is a harmony between the activity of human beings and the nature. This idea is very old, since nature is much older than human beings. We were totally under the control of natural incidents in the past, and human beings are much older than science. Nature was active, and we were passive then [2, 3]. On the other hands, technics was as old as human beings. Note that “technology” has been used instead of “technics” in the past, but technology had better be a science on technics as described in Chap. 1. Hence, technology is a branch of science, and rubber science is a sub-branch of technology. In other words, we have to distinguish technology from technics itself for the usage in this chapter. The human beings began to use a simple tool made of wood and/or stone (the origin of technics) in labor and use language in the community or in the families. Both technics and language have been the essential tools of human beings for their evolution as well as their survival on the earth. In spite of using tools and language, our passiveness against the nature might have been ubiquitous before the civilization, i.e., until the beginning of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, which was followed by the increasing utilization of ironware [4–8]. When hunting-and-gathering economy had been predominant, people were forced to move, chasing the catch and wild eatable plants. Agricultural © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 Y. Ikeda et al., Rubber Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2938-7_6
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activity, even with its primitive technics, enabled us to settle down for a longer time at a place where flat lands and water were available. After settling down to engage in agricultural activities, people modified the encircling nature by using hand tools, to result in the formation of environment instead of the genuine nature. That is, civilization began with agriculture, the development was accelerated by using iron tools, and the process of converting nature to environment has been accelerated since then [2, 4–6, 9, 10] (see Fig. 1.3 in Chap. 1). The conversion of nature to environment was a result of their struggling for survival and might not be their int
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