¶ … Technology on the Environment We do not tread lightly on the earth, we children of this high-tech age. All of our machines, which we have designed to help us live longer and more enjoyable - and more carefree - lives have damaged the world we live in, in some cases to the extent that the very good life that we have tried to engineer into being is itself in danger. We have for millennia increased the sophistication of our machines, but we have now come to a point in our historical and biological evolution that technology can most certainly not be counted upon to save us and we must ask ourselves very serious questions about what the relationship between technology and the environment is and what the future may hold for us.

When considering the impact of human technology upon the environment, we should look to the centuries just before the Industrial Revolution. This is not to say that there were not significant effects on the environment before the Industrial Revolution (the most important of these being the result of agrarian reshaping of the land) but it was at the point of the Industrial Revolution that the impact of human technology began to speed up so dramatically - and in many cases so drastically.

It should perhaps be pointed out that the technology has had both good and bad effects upon people as well as upon the planet. One of the essential elements industrialization was that machines - and no longer humans and draft animals - would be doing most of the hard labor. Because of this, most people would over the course of several centuries move from the land to the cities.

With machines doing most of the work on farms, workers could go to cities and enter factories, causing radically new distinctions between family...

At one level, we may consider the shift from agrarian to industrial society a simple substitution of one form of economic behavior for another, hanging up the hat of the farmer to put on the hat of the factory worker. But there was in fact a substantial shift in nearly everything about daily life for those generations caught up in the transition from rural to urban worlds. The most obvious change was in the relationship between people and the land itself. No longer were people defined by their place of birth, by where they had always lived. They were defined - by others as well as themselves - by a series of portable skills.
This shift was advantageous for some, disadvantageous for many, for the choice to stay and farm or go to the city was often that of landlords rather than poor workers. The overall effect of industrialization was an increase in wealth and in leisure for a growing percentage of people. In other words, the rise of a middle class was based on the increased wealth that industrialization produced. This was perhaps of some comfort to the poorest members of society in that they might believe that they too some day might become middle class.

Industrialization was both a blessing and a curse for workers, with most of us ending up better off as the result of industrialization, although many have also suffered. But the effect on the environment has been far less ambiguous, and far less beneficial.

While all people living on earth today are all united by the fact that we share a single and fragile environment, the particular environmental problems…