TEN pairs of eyes were focused intently on an orange ping-pong ball which was bobbing up and down as it made its way down Liku River, a tributary of the Miri River.

“38 seconds!” the timekeeper announced satisfactorily as the ball crossed the ‘finish line’.

The scene brought back memories of ‘Pooh Sticks’, a game we used to play as children, which involved dropping twigs into the drain on one side of a culvert and rushing to the other side of it to see whose twig emerged first.

With a few simple measurements and calculations thrown in, we had the rudiments of river hydrology.

To further determine the health of the river, physical, chemical and biological monitoring were conducted.

Basically this translates to keen observation, some test kits and the identification of macro-invertebrates, which are good indicators of river water quality.

The 10 of us were part of a bigger group of 25 participants in the ‘RIVER Ranger — Training of Trainers Workshop’ organised by the Department of Irrigation and Drainage (DID) in Miri recently under the ‘One State One River’ programme.

Community leaders, teachers, NGOs and government servants were among those who attended the three-day two-night intensive workshop aimed at increasing community involvement in water resource management.

Up till now the management of rivers and river basins in Malaysia has fallen heavily upon the shoulders of DID.

The time has come for people to change their mindset and realise it is neither fair nor practical for DID alone to be responsible for keeping our rivers clean and healthy.

There should be greater local community participation to keep our rivers sustainable. After all each and every one of us lives in a river basin and hence there is no better custodian of rivers than ourselves. We are the main stakeholders.

Everything we do will somehow affect the land and waterways.

Ever wonder what happened to the tissue that flew away, that wokful of oil you poured down the sink, or the waste your pet excreted by the road verge when you took it out for its daily walk?

All of it gets washed away into our drains and eventually into our rivers.

Drains are really meant for rainwater only. Yet we find people, restaurants, factories and residential areas using them for the disposal of wastes.

Little do they realise that waste discharged into drains flows directly into our rivers without any treatment at all.

The impact of all the ‘small’ things we do cannot be ignored because our daily activities affect the environment — these activities will return to haunt us in the form of BIG problems.

Communities should think about where all the rubbish and wastewater ends up and do something about it.

Malaysia is blessed with abundant rainfall and we receive more water than is needed for our consumption.

Yet water shortages, water supply disruptions and even water rationing during times of ‘drought’ are not unheard of in our country.

The poor management of water resources is the main reason we face water shortages. Eleven per cent of our river basins are severely polluted and 39 per cent are polluted. That leaves only 50 per cent of all rivers classified as ‘clean’.

The lack of education and awareness among the general public about our water resources, how they are being managed and how they should be managed are key factors that have led to the deplorable state of our river water quality.

Another factor is the lack of skill for genuinely interested people to take action in river management.

It is hoped that through the ‘RIVER Ranger’ programme there will be better appreciation of the value of our rivers.

More importantly the general public will be equipped with the skills to take action on environmental matters.

In particular, community leaders and teachers who have attended the Training of Trainers workshop should be at the helm to reach out to the man on the street through their widespread networks.

Only then will our rivers be taken care of and our source of water safeguarded for generations to come.

Anyone can become a river ranger although not everyone is a trainer.

For more information on river rangers, visit www.riverranger.net.

WE are very often told, year in and year out, but especially before or during a general election, as well as during the peak of any national political crisis, that we must think and act rationally, and not let our emotions run amok.

On the superficial day-to-day level, this piece of advice may sound perfectly reasonable. We all know how unreasonable immature teenagers can be. They have just been driven by their hormones to discover a whole gamut of new feelings tearing them in all new directions, when their mind has yet to develop the capacity to work out how to handle this new surge of drives and instincts within them.

They may become withdrawn, all too quiet, or indulge in all kinds of rebellious behaviour and temper tantrums. Worse still, they may enter into conflicts with others without knowing how to resolve them. This is the crucial period when we teach them to be reasonable, and to control their feelings. Living a good life does require a set of skills in rational thinking. Being rational is a sign of adult maturity.

There is another dimension of applying this piece of advice. When we ask people t o rationalise, the rationality we imply is the scientific rationality that is supposed to dispel myths, superstitions, old wife’s tales, and deliberate lies.

For instance, we know now that an eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon’s movement around the earth, and not by a giant dog in the sky munching away at the fiery orb. Likewise, when we get sick, we see a doctor in the clinic; he has all the knowledge and skills to diagnose the cause of our illness, and prescribe a cure. If we go see a bomoh, he will try to drive out the evil spirit from us, and we may die from the infection in the end.

There is an assumption here that superstitious beliefs feast and thrive on our fear of the unknown, and with our scientific knowledge, we can overcome this fear. When Francis Bacon said, “knowledge is power”, he meant precisely scientific knowledge.

The idea that scientific knowledge is the highest paradigm of all knowledge, and that scientific rationality excels all other forms of reasoning, has taken root throughout the world since the 17th century. At the same time in Europe, the rise of Rationalism as a philosophical school following the Enlightenment Movement has given this idea theoretical force.

According to Rene Descartes, the Father of Modern Western Philosophy, thinking in search of the truth must follow the pattern of Euclidean geometry. You can argue about whether God exists until the cows come home and not be wiser at the end of the day. But you cannot argue with the truths of geometrical theorems!

After a few centuries of globalisation, we are all believers of the European Enlightenment; we have infinite faith in the power of reason, in cold facts and straight logic, in social progress and the ultimate value of the individual.

Some people even treat natural science like a new religion, and declare that if science cannot prove the existence of God, then God does not exist! Science and the ensuing technology, they would tell you, can and will solve all human problems, from global warming to ageing.

In the West in recent years, some thinkers are beginning to doubt the propositions of the Enlightenment. In recent centuries, Western philosophers have begun to question this blind faith in the power of human reason.

Take Euclidean geometry for instance. It is based on deductive logic, using definitions and premises to derive a series of self-evident theorems.

Deductive logic has its roots in Aristotle’s syllogism. An example is this. All men are mortal, Socrates I a man. So Socrates is mortal.

What it means is that the argument is valid, but the conclusion is not necessarily true. Take another argument for elucidation. All pigs fly. Kaypo is a pig. Therefore, kaypo can fly. The argument is valid, but the conclusion is not true, because both the major and the minor premises are false.

If you listen carefully to politicians and friends talking about major political, economic, and social issues around you on a daily basis, and if you have taken a course in formal logic, you will discover that many of their arguments are valid, but their conclusions may turn out to be false. To debunk the myths that they are trying to create, you just have to question their definitions and their premises.

Eventually, Euclidean Geometry is but a system of human constructs, which may and may not correspond to reality. In the 19th century, a new branch of geometry emerged, and claimed that the sum of angles in a triangle is always larger or smaller than two right angles, depending on which side of the spherical surface you are looking at!

Frankly, I feel that even the efficacy of logic is overrated. Whenever the argument about whether God exists between an atheist and a Christian, the non-believer likes to invoke the age old question of whether God can create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it. If he cannot create such a rock, he is not God. If he can, and then cannot lift the rock, then again, he is not God. Either way, the atheist wins. This is sophistry at its best.

This kind of argument works on Aristotle’s laws of logic: the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle. Things are either false or true, and there is no middle ground.

But our lived experience tells us that things are never so clear cut as either-or. For instance, how do you tell the difference between art and trash? Where is the borderline between classical music and hip-hop? The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger even proposed that logic can work only with objects in the natural world, and not man’s human, aesthetic, and spiritual world. Therefore, if God is almighty, he cannot be ruled by the laws of logic.

Even in the natural world, the logic of scientific knowledge is suspect. Take the laws of physics for instance. Momentum is the product of mass and speed, according to Newton. The energy released in splitting an atom is the product of its mass and the square of the speed of light, according to Einstein. These are supposed to be immutable eternal universal laws of nature.

Science also boasts of being very empirical. Scientists observe nature and look for recurring patterns. When they find one, they propose a hypothesis, test it by predicting future events, and adjusting it to overcome falsification.

Scientific empiricism works on the strength of the logic of induction. You observe so many events, and you notice a pattern. Then you extrapolate and propose a law for all time. There is no rational basis for this extrapolation except for an act of subjective faith. Just because the sun will rise to-morrow does not mean that it will rise forever.

In fact, the great philosopher of science Karl Popper declared that the greatness of science is its falsifiability; just as Einstein has proven Newton wrong, so too shall someone in the future prove Einstein wrong!

These are raging debates in Western academia, in ways that only Western academics are capable of. They try to think about thinking, and find that this so called rationality that everybody raves about is the most difficult thing to understand. In fact, if you think about thinking and about reasoning too much, you find your mind tied up in knots, and you end up with a giant headache.

Likewise, despite centuries of research and study into the human psyche, we do not really understand our emotions and feelings fully. The least understood and the most powerful feelings are love and hate.

All these difficulties just go to show that, 2500 years after Socrates has extolled our duty to know ourselves, we are far from making much progress in this all-important task.

Therefore, whenever prominent people ask us to think and act rationally, and not run amok with our emotions, I wonder if they know what they are talking about.