what are the impacts of technology on the society and the environment?

Answer 1

I am not saying that every environmental trend in every place and at every time is benign; there are plenty of things that are getting worse. Nor am I saying that technology cannot have bad environmental side effects. It can. What I am saying is that we often overlook how many environmental features are improving; and even more we overlook how those improvements are caused by new technology.

I realise that even to make these mild claims is highly unfashionable. Indeed, they are so against the conventional wisdom that they might be termed heresy. I know what happens to heretics: my ancestral relation, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, was burnt at the stake in Oxford for his views. I use the term heresy deliberately: showing your concern for the environment has become one of the superstitions and dogmas of our age. To bring reason to bear on it is considered bad form.

This is the vast benefit of fossil fuels: that they spare the landscape. Because we have them, we don't need to cook over wood fires, to dam streams for water mills, to grow hay for bullocks to cart our goods to market. So despite 55 million people crammed into a small island we can afford to leave many of our woods for nature, our streams for fishing and our paddocks for horseyculture. To try to turn the clock back to the medieval pattern of local renewable energy in the name of sustainability would do more harm than good.

If this is true of power generation, it is doubly true of agriculture. We have heard a lot recently about the supposed drawbacks of intensive agriculture. Like intensive power production, so intensive agriculture spares the landscape. There is no doubt that the green revolution helped us to produce vastly more food from every acre than we could have dreamed about two generations ago: hybrid seeds, inorganic fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation. They are responsible for the failure of Lester Brown's and Paul Ehrlich's neo-Malthusian predictions. They have fed the world with more and more food at less and less cost. As a result modern farming is less land-hungry than its predecessors. Hunter-gathering needs about 5,000 acres to support a human being in a temperate climate. Short fallow organic agriculture needs about ten acres. Intensive, conventional agriculture needs about one acre. Hydroponic, artificially- lit greenhouses can feed 1,000 people from an acre.

According to the economist Indur Goklany, had technology and yield been frozen at 1961 levels, then producing as much food as was actually produced in 1998 would have required increasing the acreage farmed from 12.2 billion acres to 26.3 billion acres or from 38% to 82% of global land area. That would have meant destroying forests, draining swamps, irrigating deserts and exterminating species on an unimaginable scale.

In those 37 years India, for example, doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, but increased its cultivated land acreage by only five per cent. Its area devoted to woodland expanded by more than 20%. The tiger survived - thanks entirely to the intensification of agriculture. As Goklany has put it: 'By reducing hunger, agricultural technology has not only improved human welfare and reduced habitat loss, but has made it easier to view the rest of nature as a source of wonder and not merely as one's next meal or the fire to cook it with. It also decreased the socio-economic cost of conservation'.

That is a point we can appreciate in this country. The very fact that we can have a vigorous debate about the future of the countryside is testament to the value of agricultural intensification. If food was still produced at low intensity by traditional methods, we would not have the luxury of choosing other uses of the land - hobby farming, say, or conservation. Commercial farming would outbid every other use as it did in the 1950s.

Using hydroponics, inorganic fertiliser, electric light and genetic modification we could in theory feed the entire world from a multi-storey farm the size of Wales. The rest could be returned to wildlife conservation. I don't think it will go that far. I think there will always be a market for local produce and for food produced in traditional ways. I hope there is, because I like that kind of food. But I have no illusions that my preference is good for the planet; it is the most selfish thing I could do. The people who deserve our accolades for saving the planet are not the hair-shirted ones wandering around saying 'Woe is us!', but the much maligned white-coated nerds of Monsanto who are steadily reducing the land we need for agriculture.

I suggest that by far the most powerful influence on how we treat our environment is not how much we care, nor how much we pass laws, but what technology we invent. You only have to remember the fuel protests of last year [2000] to see how hard it is going to be either to tax people out of their cars or to shame them out of their cars. However, it would be a doddle to tempt them out of their cars if we had better transport running on clean fuel. The innovation does not have to be driven by a green motive. Indeed, when it is, we will be faced with nonsenses like wind power.

I cannot emphasise this point too strongly. The environmental movement is perpetually chastising us for our profligacy and urging us to be more ascetic and to return to older ways. Given what we know about human nature, and given the lessons of ascetic movements in the past, this will not succeed. We'll throw a party on the eve of Armageddon. My point is that it is the wrong sermon anyway. Six billion people going back to nature would simply destroy nature. But as we become more affluent, more technologically dependent and more isolated from nature, so we can afford to look after nature. We can afford to spare the money, the time, the landscape and the energy. Six billion people could feed and fuel themselves comfortably and return most of the planet to wildlife. It may seem a deeply paradoxical idea to today's greens but it deserves a fair hearing.

Answer 2

Please see the film "Advertising and the End of the World". This film has a funny name, but it is the most crucial statement that I have seen so far about the impact of technology on society and the environment. If you haven't the time to view the film, please keyword search the title of the movie for overviews of the film's message.

Answer 3

can't you see what's going on around us, yes we create, design & make new idea's into reality, but it still constantly harms the enviroment!

Answer 4

comfortness