Written By: Jonas Burke
I love my laptop and use it daily. It is a sleek powerful machine that, in milliseconds, can tell me anything I care to Google. But behind the glamor of this dazzling piece of technology resides a truth that is at odds with my environmentally focused conscious –namely, this manufactured product has a large environmental footprint. Rarely do I stop to consider how my laptop is recycled, what toxic chemical lie dormant underneath my keypad, or how much energy I consumed typing this very sentence. I’m not saying we should all revert back to typewriters, but I think it is valuable to question the role of technology in sustainability. Is technological ingenuity the solution to our current environmental woes or does it create more problems than it solves? I think it is both.
There is a school of environmental theorists, called Cornicopians, who believe that continued industrial progress and market consumerism can be counteracted by continued advancements in technology. Fundamentally, their ideology is that there will always be an incentive to increase technological efficiency and thus we have infinite resources.
In direct contrast, is a school of thought called Neo-Malthusianism, argues that limits are imposed on us by the environment. Neo-Malthusianists are concerned that overpopulation will increase resource depletion and environmental degradation to such a degree that it will trigger an ecological collapse. Their solution is not one of technological ingenuity, but rather of social ingenuity. Namely, we most change the social paradigm in which we operate (our throw-away consumerist based life-styles) if we hope to solve climate change.
I believe that answer lies somewhere between the two extremes. Yes, we need to change our societal structure and re-evaluate our role within the larger ecosystem –but this change will not come over night. Let us not forget the generations of hard work it took the civil rights movement to usher in a more egalitarian social order. I’m not convinced that we have the time –without help from technological ingenuity that is. By increasing automotive efficiency and investing in alternative energy sources we can buy ourselves time. The internet has also allowed us to discuss these important questions on a global scale. Technology will help us, but only if we are willing to help ourselves.