Will technology save us? I’ve been asking myself this for a while. When I think of technology I see iPods, laptops, Blackberries and blue tooth. Day in and day out I am surrounded by people who want the best, newest and most expensive shiny pieces of plastic that money can buy and upgrade the next day. Basically, faster, sleeker, smaller technologies that will make our increasingly hectic and stressful lives easier with a push of a button. And then there’s me.

I am a naturalist. I think if I had my way I’d live in a hut. Free from the world constrained by SONY, Dell, Apple and Toshiba. We would all walk wherever we needed to go and nobody would complain. Life would be clean, green, and technology-free. I dream of a fantasy world free of the e-waste we can’t escape and instead filled with reusable, decomposable everything. With pure air, uncontaminated water, and decomposable materials. And then I wake up.

It’s safe to say it would take a miracle to get American’s to want to live in the tree-hugging world I’ve created for myself. Nobody wants to give up the car they’ve been pouring money into for years to walk to work and save the planet. And I couldn’t tell you a single person I know who would give up their cell phone for even one day. To my greatest dismay and horror, my generation is addicted to technology. But since we cannot reverse our codependent attitudes we can maybe use our addictions for good.

When I think about technology I sometimes forget about hybrid cars, solar panels, and giant wind turbines that will one day power our entire globe. I throw our positive advancements in with our negative ones because it’s easy to lump the two together. We can never reverse the damage we’ve done. We can’t go back to life before the industrial revolution, to before man outsmarted nature. I wish we could. But we can work with nature to guide us in the right direction. Marrying technology and nature to conserve and save our planet will ultimately save us all.