Choosing technology for a healthier environment

Do technology and innovation provide solutions for environmental issues related to economic growth, or are they a cause of some of the environmental problems we face? How can the two be better balanced?

The spectacular improvements in our lives over the past 200 years have not come without cost. There is growing evidence that the production systems and consumption patters of our economies can’t be sustained for much longer.

Rampant unemployment with accelerating inflation; growing supplies accompanied by depleting resources; food surpluses and widespread hunger—these are the flip sides of many economies today, no less in the industrialized countries of the North than in the low income nations in the South.

Those who have benefited the most from these developments credit much of their material well being to the huge strides made by technology. Others see the negative impacts of the same technology as the main issue, ascribing to it much of the deterioration that has taken place in the human condition.

Each opinion has its validity. That technology has both positive outcomes and negative impacts is widely understood. What is less well understood is how technology can be designed so as to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. Fundamentally, this means we must learn to actively choose from the wide range of technology options now available, and aim to balance the different features valued by society. Much of the negative spin-offs of technology arise from the preference for grand engineering projects, activities that are large-scale centralized, capital-intensive and that also happen to be energy-guzzling and highly waste generating. By focusing on raising the productivity of labor at the expense of land, water and energy productivity, these types of projects end up with many associated costs such as unemployment, pollutions and accelerated resource depletion.

The economic theories on which our present systems of production, distribution and consumption rest simply do not work. Growth, they have claimed, must come first, even if the cost is distributive injustice and human misery. Efficiency over equity. The rich before the poor. Machines above people. Wealth even at the expense of nature. The technologies we now need must empower people and their communities to solve all their problems, not just create wealth for the few.

To do this, there must also be technologies of a very different nature from the ones we are used to: small, decentralized, using local, renewable resources and creating large numbers of jobs.