Photo courtesy of Nalaka Gunawardene
“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?”
Ray Wijewardene (1924-2010) often quoted these words by the English poet Robert Browning, embedded in the poem Andrea del Sarto.
An engineer, aviator, inventor, farmer and a public intellectual of the highest calibre, Ray was renowned for his unorthodox ideas and audacious experiments. Using his personal funds and working out of his garage or family farm, he tackled big problems in renewable energy, farmer productivity, land care and environmental sustainability.
As a farmer, Ray took the “toad’s eye view” of ground level realities; as an aviator, he also had the “bird’s eye view”. The rare combination gave him a unique perspective. He didn’t always find the right answers or solutions but very often he asked the right questions. And if some of his quests didn’t fully succeed, it was because the necessary technologies were not invented in his lifetime.
As we mark his birth centenary, the real world seems to be finally catching up with Ray Wijewardene’s visionary thinking. We can now better appreciate how much the man was ahead of his time.
Consider these trends:
- Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass are becoming part of the mainstream, with their share of electricity generation growing slowly but surely;
- Smart agriculture based on data, sensors and other precision tools is spreading, as is natural farming (a concept wider than organic farming);
- While the world is still hooked on petroleum for transport, electric vehicles are gaining in their range, speed and market share.
Meanwhile, drones have become indispensable eyes in the sky helping monitor environmental quality, detect forest fires and aid farmers to keep an eye on their crops among many other services.
A quarter into the 21st century, the world is getting closer to tech-enabled problem solving that Ray championed all his life. There is also a growing realisation that technology needs to be human centric, contextual and affordable. At the same time, the wicked problems he studied have also become more entrenched. Revisiting his legacy of systems thinking and practical approaches can help us to cope with the formidable challenges of food security, energy scarcities and climate change impacts.
Systems thinker
But first, how to describe this colourful personality in one sentence? It’s not easy as Ray spent his 86 years being completely unpigeonholeable. Educated at two of the most prestigious universities in the world (Cambridge and Harvard), he excelled in many different areas of human endeavour: agriculture (researching and practicing small scale farming), aviation (both designing and flying small aircraft), engineering design, renewable energy technologies and water sports (at Asian Games and Olympic levels).
Yet his credentials and accomplishments rested lightly on him. He far preferred to introduce himself as a “farmer and mechanic who got his hands dirty”. That he did for sure but he also had the rare ability to see the bigger picture in every sphere he dabbled in. That made him a systems thinker – one who tries to make sense of the complexity of our world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts.
Throughout his professional life, which spanned from the 1950s to the early 2000s, Ray kept asking questions about how things worked and why some things failed. The aim was to make things better, to find lasting solutions. This quest for answers took him to far corners of the world where he listened to experts and practitioners, always keeping an open mind and asking sharp questions. Where relevant and feasible, he adapted ancient wisdom and traditional knowledge but demanded intellectual rigour and integrity in doing so. Most importantly, he avoided ideological and intellectual dogmas that trapped many educated men and women of his generation.
Along the way, there were some moments of truth that challenged him fundamentally and changed his whole outlook. One such incident happened at Harvard. Having designed the world’s first two wheeled hand tractor in 1955, Ray spent the next decade marketing and promoting it on behalf of its manufacturer, Landmaster Ltd of UK. Tens of thousands of this user friendly unit were bought by small farmers in the tropics across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In 1964, he was sharing his experiences to a class in agri-business at the Harvard Business School. Buckminster Fuller, the celebrated American architect, inventor and systems theorist, who was in the audience, asked: “Did your tractor mechanise tropical farming – or just the buffalo?” That question left Ray speechless (“I was floored!”) and triggered a total change of thinking. “Ultimately, the tractor only mechanised the buffalo, and that too, not very well,” he reflected later. “It didn’t have the reproductive capability of the buffalo! Nor could it produce milk as the buffalo did or fertilize our fields! So, our initial attempt to introduce tractors was indeed a big mistake.” Associating Fuller from then on significantly influenced Ray’s thinking on the appropriate use of science and technology to meet development needs. He soon realised the inherent limits of new farming methods that were being promoted by development agencies and agrochemical companies as part of the Green Revolution. “All along in the Green Revolution, its promoters focused on maximising yields through massive (external) inputs. But they forgot that what the farmer really wants is to maximise profits, not necessarily yields.” he admitted.
Walking the talk
By the late 1960s, Ray realised that farming with high external inputs was not sustainable either economically or ecologically. He started investigating natural methods of nurturing soil fertility with minimal or no external inputs. Unlike many who critiqued the Green Revolution, however, he neither demonised modern technology nor romanticised the traditional practices. Instead, he looked for ways to optimise – not maximise – the available land to produce more food and improve the lot of small, tropical farmers.
But he was not fundamentally opposed to the use of external inputs in farming. “I believe we have to use some external inputs, but in an appropriate manner,” he said in an extensive interview I did for an Indian magazine in 1995. “I call it replenishing the land’s fertility. Especially where export crops are concerned, we have been extracting the fertility of our lands and sending it out (overseas). We need to put it back or else we deplete our soils.” By ignoring this basic scientific fact, Sri Lanka’s government banned chemical fertilizer imports in 2021 and tried to convert all farming to organic in one season with catastrophic results.
Another moment of truth came during the 1970s when Ray was working as principal scientist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria. He was promoting an improved crop variety to a group of African farmers but one of them refused to try it out. “I will not take advice from anyone whose fate is not tied to their advice,” the farmer insisted. In other words, experts like Ray were not really walking their talk. Ray never forgot that rebuttal. From then on, he would only promote a design, practice or solution after he had personally tried it out, usually at his own cost.
After returning to Sri Lanka in 1980, he carried out most of his experiments at his family’s Kohombe estate near Chilaw. For the next three decades, it became his real-world laboratory. On his estate, where coconut was the main crop, he found ways to optimise yields without adding any nitrogen containing urea fertilizer. This was achieved by inter cropping coconut with Gliricidia, a fast growing legume plant capable of capturing atmospheric nitrogen essential for plant growth. In short, a natural fertilizer fixer. Using such natural methods and taking good care of his trees, Ray achieved the highest coconut yields in Sri Lanka (around 6,000 nuts per acre when the national average was 2,500) year after year.
Grow your energy
Kohombe estate was also where Ray demonstrated how Gliricidia wood can be an ideal raw material for dendro power, where biomass is burnt in a gasifier to generate electricity. Having advocated dendro power for several years but failing to get any state entity to test its feasibility, Ray decided to do it himself. In the early 1990s, he fixed a 4kW biomass gasifier at his estate and operated it using Gliricidia stems. Electricity generated was used to pump water and to provide electricity to the 10 households within the compound. With proof of concept thus established, Ray and engineer P.G. Joseph convinced the Ministry of Science and Technology to set up and operate a 35 kW electric generator exclusively with chopped Gliricidia wood. As Joseph later recalled, “This unit was installed at the premises of Lanka Transformers Limited (LTL) and operated as a demonstration unit to convince all Doubting Thomases on Dendro power.”
In a landmark paper in 2002, the duo worked out not only the technological aspects of dendro power but also the economic and societal factors. They showed how Gliricidia could be grown on marginal lands unsuitable for any food crops and calculated how using 500,000 hectares (out of the country’s total land area of 6,552,500 ha) could conservatively produce 10 million tonnes of fuelwood annually and on an ongoing basis. The wood can be used to generate 10,000 GWh of electricity annually. Such an enterprise would “generate considerable rural employment in the management of plantations and the operation of power plants” they said. If one third of the country’s total degraded/under-utilised land were converted to biomass energy plantations, that could provide employment for 150,000 rural families, they estimated.
For years, energy planners and engineers at the state electricity monopoly CEB used to ridicule dendro power (and all other renewable sources besides hydro) but things have changed. Dendro power is now proven both technologically and economically although its adoption is still at a modest scale due to lack of priority and investments. Ray lived just long enough to see early signs of its commercial uses.
In 2005, due to years of advocacy by Ray, the government recognised Gliricidia as the country’s fourth plantation crop (after tea, rubber and coconut). Dendro power is now officially a category of Non-Conventional Renewable Energy (NCRE) in the country’s energy mix. Sri Lanka’s total installed electricity generation capacity (CEB & private) of 4,084 MW by end 2022 included 27 MW of dendro power contributed by nine power plants. Lucky Dissanayake, founder and CEO of Biomass Group, is one entrepreneur who readily acknowledges being inspired by Ray’s vision and analyses of growing our energy. As she wrote in 2020, her company works with thousands of rural smallholder farmers who produce “deforestation-free, ethical, traceable, internationally certified biomass resources for local industry use”.
Electric car advocacy
Another area where Ray was ahead of his time was in advocating electric cars. Back in the early 2000s, when electric cars were making their tentative entry into markets and were not yet taken seriously, he predicted: “One day, soon, all passenger vehicles will be electric.” Again, Ray walked his talk. He started driving an electric car at the age of 80. In fact, he was the first to import a REVA micro electric car made by the Indian manufacturer Reva Electric Car Company. At the time, the registrar of motor vehicles had no category for battery powered electric cars and Ray had to push for a system change with the bureaucracy. With his REVA registered, the octogenarian enthusiastically offered to drive his visitors around Viharamahadevi Park, which lay across the street from his home. The sight of big made Ray driving the rather small REVA model was a bit like (Pixar animation’s) Mr Incredible after his superhero days. On one of our last encounters Ray insisted on driving me in his REVA before he let me take the wheel. The car was steady, very quiet in motion and had zero carbon emissions. He noted how an electric car was less messy and much simpler to maintain. Just as Ray predicted, electric cars have come a long way since then. By end 2023, over 40 million electric vehicles were in use worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency. Electric cars accounted for around 18% of all cars sold worldwide in 2023.
Had he lived to a 100, Ray would have been proud to see Vega Innovations, a Sri Lankan company manufacturing all types of electric vehicles and competing with international vehicle makers (they unveiled the first ever electric super car in South Asia in 2020). In particular, he would be thrilled to see their subsidiary Elektrateq that is innovating three wheeled electric vehicles.
Climate crisis
Given his deep engagement with food security and energy issues, Ray took an early interest in climate change when it became clear in the late 1980s that human activity had aggravated natural climate variability.
Ray was especially concerned about how climate change could impact the farming of both short term crops such as rice and perennials such as coconut. In October 1988, having attended an international scientific meeting at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, he shared the discussion highlights with agricultural research institutes in Sri Lanka. In it he underscored the need for local research on how farming needs to adapt to a warmer and wetter world projected for the coming decades. Again, he was ahead of his time but trying to nudge others along.
In the last decade of his life in the 2000s Ray was preoccupied climate change, focusing on both mitigation (how to prevent further damage) and adaptation (coping with the inevitable impacts). He asked researchers to develop crop varieties more resilient to drought, salinity and higher temperatures. He also advocated carbon bio-sequestration with large scale growing of plants like maize, sugarcane and bamboo that were particularly efficient in carbon capture through photosynthesis (known as C-4 plants). He wondered if rice and coconut could and should be genetically manipulated to become C-4.
Ray grasped the magnitude of the climate crisis and also saw it as an opportunity. As he noted in our last media interview in mid-2008: “Climate change challenges us to rethink all our energy and land use practices – something we should have done years ago.”
As we head into uncertain times, and a ‘perfect storm’ of problems that has been predicted by 2030, systemic thinking and integrated solutions are urgently needed. Ray Wijewardene’s legacy could well be how he has left in his various writings a survival guide for a climate stressed world.