Technology on the Environment We Do Not

¶ … 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 life and work life. 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 faced in different parts of the world (and the potential solutions to those problems) can vary substantially from one region to another.

As Chiras etal argue (viz. 101, 111), wealthy and poor nations face very different choices in designing and implementing environmental policy. The far-seeing leaders of poorer countries understand just as well as the far-seeing leaders of wealthy countries that population growth must be limited, land set aside, pollution controlled. But poorer countries have far fewer choices because of their lesser political and economic power. Brazilian leaders and workers, for example, understand the environmental costs of open pit mines, but Brazil is also saddled with immense national debt. It does not have enough money to build up clean industry, and so its workers must struggle in mines (or in slash-and-burn agriculture) to struggle to make enough money to feed their families. First World citizens debate about whether they should drive SUVs - and then drive them anyway - while poorer nations try to deal with issues of cities with untreated sewage in the streets and citizens so poor that they will gladly kill an endangered animal if it means that their families may eat.

Poorer nations are dealing with the most acute environmental problems - severe water and air pollution, erosion, desertification, massive unplanned urbanization, high rates of population growth. Their governments try to meet these problems, but tend to do so in piecemeal fashion while the First World, with less severe problems (even as First World nations contribute far more to the greenhouse effect and global warming) have the political luxury of trying to create more holistic solutions.

One of the worst consequences of technological change on the planet has been the onset of global warming. Chiras etal's description of what we may have let ourselves in for should certainly make each one of us reconsider our own actions and those of our governments (Chiras etal 506-8).

Among the possible negative effects of global warming are large-scale die-offs of sea life as the oceans warm up to a point where many animals (adopted to cold waters) may die. One way to combat this consequence of global warming is to limit fishing now, which will help bring various marine populations up to a level that they may survive.