Technology's Role in Curbing Environmental Degradation

I don't think that technology alone will save us. In environmental terms, saving "us" means allowing humans to coexist with nature at some level that doesn't lead to the complete destruction of one or the other. We certainly cannot exist without the environment. Technology can be very helpful, since it can maximize our efficient use of resources, expand production capacity and limit pollution in certain ways. However, the obsession with consumption (the root of the problem, in my opinion), is actually perpetuated. It's like we've mentioned in class - a person can recycle all the time, but he/she is still ultimately adding to the pile of waste created by human excesses. Therefore, I see pollution as compensating for human kind's propensity towards ever-increasing consumption, but on the other hand providing a rationalization, or a metaphorical "crutch," to use when exploiting the environment.

The case of stratospheric ozone depletion and how it was handled by the international community was, and still is, unprecedented. Technology certainly played a role, since the development of alternatives to CFCs and ODCs was logistically essential in phasing out these harmful chemicals. However, most surprisingly, the Northern countries gave up some decision making power to the Southern nations, since the former realized that they couldn't affect meaningful change without help from the latter. Also, the North was in the unique position of more acutely feeling the adverse effects of ozone depletion, whereas the South, with 75% of the world's population at the time, hadn't started to fully utilize these chemicals nor benefit from their short-term economic advantages. Therefore, the South was able to play a major role in guiding the direction of the conventions, and the result was a very successful, global effort at phasing out these emissions. In this case, compromises were as important as, if not slighly more important than, technology when it came to tackling this international problem.

After assessing all of these arguments and examples, I believe that, for the time being, both technological advances and conservation techniques should be advanced, although the conservationist attitude will have to be more fully espoused to address the root causes of environmental degradation.

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.

I think technology plays an important role in solving the environmental crisis, but we should not expect it to save us.

As Nick said, technological advances should lead to a more efficient use of our resources. I think technology production that is green (or that tries to be green) is certainly a step in the right direction. Further development of renewable energy (wind, solar), is pivotal to the future of the environmental movement. These types of energy sources would significantly decrease how much harm we do to the planet. But it can't save us. Lifestyles of individuals and societies need to drastically change. Also, people need to keep in mind that technology isn't always a good thing. People thought CFCs were GREAT when they were first used commercially, it took more than 50 years to discover that it was creating a huge hole in the O-zone. So, while some technology may greatly improve our situation, we make accidentally create a technology that comes back to haunt us years later.

Though I do not think that technology can save us, I think that many people do believe so. Our society's dependence on technology creates the notion that people cannot help the environment unless they are engineers or chemists. People often use the "technology will solve it" mindset to excuse their personal inaction. That lifestyle shift that was mentioned above is also needed to "solve" the environmental crisis.

When people refer to technology as providing the potential to overcome our environmental issues, people are more often than not referring to means by which we can produce and use energy more efficiently from cleaner and less environmentally harmful forces. By harnessing the power of human innovation and technological progress, we have the potential to develop new ways to create the energy that we need in order to survive. By investing our time and resources in producing environmentally friendly energy sources, we can free ourselves up to tackle some of the other burdens of our environmental footprint.

However, technological advance doesn't always have to focus on the production side of our economic activity. Our advances can have the potential to also revolutionize the way in which we use our environmental sinks. Advances can lead to better, more efficient recycling of materials and more environmentally friendly manners of disposing of our waste.

I personally do not see a vision of the technological future to be like the Jetson Analogy used in class. I foresee our technology allowing us to better, more efficiently use the resources that the planet has for us to provide for a better quality of life for all peoples of the world, not just those who live in the developed world.

The article reminded me of one of my favorite quotes "anything easy ain't worth a damn."
This genuine pearl of wisdom was bestowed to us by the legendary Ohio State football coach, Woody Hayes. Reflecting on what Woody had to say about football, it is easy to apply his rationale to virtually all aspects of life. The things that mean the most to us are those things that we have worked hard to achieve, those things that we have sacrificed for are the very things that are most valuable. The children's author Antione de Saint-Exuperey echoed this sentiment in his classic book The Little Prince saying "It is the time that you have wasted for your Rose that makes your Rose so important."

Carrying on in the tradition of these two great, and very different men, the same can be said for environmental change. If working for environmental change is something that we must sacrifice for and waste our time, energy, and even our money for, that will make the results, the fruits of our labor, that much sweeter to us. Looking back, our children will scoff at the idea that many people during our time truly believed that we could reverse environmental degradation by simply turning off the lights when we leave a room. The "lazy environmentalist" approach as illustrated in the article is exposed as just plain naive.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

In 1962 President Kennedy spoke on the United States's goal of reaching the moon before the decades end. He exhorted his fellow Americans that "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

As I read Maniates' piece I could not help but have his words echo in my mind. We are constantly being bombarded by messages telling us that we can acheive what we desire the easy way, if only we knew how. From plastic surgergy to carbon subsidies, consumer culture would have the world believe it can purchase its way out of any problem. That is the easy solution. The problem with these types of solutions Maniates presents is that they are predicated on zero sacrifice of modern luxurgy. Without sacrifice there can be no real change and, even to the individual, without sacrifice there is no self-satisfaction in achieving something. The United States did not succeed in the race to space because it could skate by without sacrifice, but precisely because doing those things was beyond our grasp, because they were hard.

And while consumer culture is based on the idea of rewards for sacrificing nothing, I think that all Americans need is a substantial leader to push them towards the greater challenge of actual environmental nuetrality. It is in the american spirit to push beyond what is knpown and what is easy and go beyond. From our earliest experiences on this continent we pushed beyond our boundries to settle hostile lands. When framed like this it seems that space is not humanities final frontier, but rather it is the earth and the way we live within it.

Maniates rightly points out that these types of easy solutions are patronizing to American adults. They infantalize them and it is offensive. The clearest way to change something, Maniates feels and I agree, is to lay out the problem, recognize it as a problem and make the necessary changes. The changes could be easy but more likely are hard-and that is why we must make them. Because without sacrfice, without confronting the harsh realities of the world there can be no meaningful and positive change.

Maniates Article

Maniates definitely brings up a good, and often overlooked, point when he says that we shouldn't let easy, half-hearted solutions kill our hard-working, collective potential when it comes to solving the climate crisis. There's definitely something to be said about rising to the occasion and doing what needs to be done, and I sincerely hope that we as a nation can somehow manage to do that in a timely fashion.

However, I think the reason that so many environmental groups tout "lazier" environmental actions is because our society is, at this point, simply too consumeristic to care much about enacting anything on a larger scale. I like to think of changing light bulbs, recycling and taking shorter showers as baby steps that implant the general importance of conservation in citizens' minds. Eventually, though, I absolutely think it is necessary to collectively move to the next level, as in meaningful, sweeping policy solutions to really tackle the problem.

In the meantime, though, it's also important that at least a few key U.S. politicians shift the discourse to focus more on the severity of global warming and the need to orchestrate a calculated domestic and global approach to fend off incoming disaster. Hopefully these actions will facilitate the public's shift towards a more conscious environmental awareness and willingness to act.

I'm not that optimistic, but change needs to start somewhere. It's unfortunately never as fast as we'd like it to be.