Set in the Kalahari Desert, The Gods Must be Crazy opens with a band of Bushmen going about their everyday lives in their traditional encampment.  One day, from high above, a Coca-Cola bottle is tossed out of the cabin window of a plane by its careless bush-pilot.  The bottle falls out of the sky and into the lives of the Bushmen.  The Bushmen become greatly disturbed, thinking that the bottle fell from their “gods” in the sky.  Turmoil ensues among the band; they have never encountered an object like this before.  Lacking previous experience of glass bottles, the Bushmen can only muse about the object’s significance.  What does it represent? How did it come to be in their world?  Is it good or is it evil?  Does it have an inner power?  What did the gods intend by giving it to the Bushmen?  Were they being careless?  Everything has a purpose, but is it possible that their gods were actually being wasteful?

     Inevitably, squabbles break out among the clan over what to do with the bottle and who should hold it. After several disruptions to their way of life, the bottle’s presence ultimately forces the Bushmen to reconsider their basic beliefs about power and equality in their society and to question their cosmological beliefs.  Another society’s waste quickly becomes an agent of permanent change in the Bushmen’s way of living.  At first, the Bushmen reject the new object; they try throwing it back to the gods in the sky.  After this proves futile, the camp leader accepts the responsibility to carry it to the “end of earth,” and to throw it out of their lives forever.  In this way, they feel that they can banish the evil that accompanied the bottle; once the bottle is gone, they believe their life will return to normal.

     We can see in the Coke bottle an image of industrialized society which, as depicted in the movie, exists on the margins of the Bushmen’s realm.  The bottle demonstrates the contradictions in modern society and that society’s inability to recognize its influence on the rest of the world.  The bottle, of course, is a metaphor for technology; its introduction to the Bushmen’s life is a metaphor for technological change.

     In this module we look at technology and technological change in terms of how they affect societies and the natural environment. Technology and its changes are, of course, created by humans and affect them and the environment. This mutual relationship is important to understand as a driving force of global societal and environmental changes and as a means of mitigating some of the impacts of these changes. The module concentrates on the crucial roles of technology, industry, and technological change in the context of global environmental change. It highlights the conceptual frameworks of industrial ecology, which serve as a guide for thinking about the linkages between nature and society. Maybe it is safe to say that rather than the gods, “the people must be crazy,” if we don’t think about these linkages.
 

 

The Trends and Consequences of Technological Change

 
     Let’s begin by examining technology and technological change over time. Our industrial society and the technology that helped create it did not fall out of the sky like the coke bottle. Technological changes evolve over long periods of time and have always had significant consequences for humans and the environment.  By technology, we refer to the means by which people consciously modify the material nature of their world; technology mediates the interactions between people and their environment.  It is a resource like any other, except that unlike natural resources that exist whether humans recognize them or not, technology is intentionally created by humans to structure the life-chances of people in society, to manipulate social and political power, and to alter the environment according to their wishes.

     Over time, technological changes have lead to mechanization, industrialization, and many associated social changes.  Lewis Mumford (1934) divided modern history into a series of three technological complexes, representing the rise of civilizations and economies based on mechanical technologies. The first phase was characterized by the use of technical skills to harness water and wind power and by the use of wooden implements.  The second phase coincided with what we now call the Industrial Revolution and relied heavily on coal and iron resources.  The third and current phase is characterized by an increasing reliance on electricity and metal alloys.

     According to Headrick (1990), the most important technological achievements in modern times have had at least two major objectives. First, each innovation has been designed to solve a particular problem, e.g., irrigating a piece of land where water is scarce or immunizing people to prevent disease. Second, the whole package of innovations known as the Industrial Revolution was intended to raise people’s living standards and to enhance national power.

     The Industrial Revolution certainly brought about unprecedented changes in many people’s material and physical well-being. For example, technological changes helped increase agricultural yields, extend life expectancies, and improve transportation and communication. But these changes were not without costs; changes in agricultural technology also created water pollution, and changes in modes of transportation have resulted in increased CO₂ emissions into the earth’s atmosphere.  In addition, many of the changes in health and well-being have not been shared evenly within and across nations.  Whereas the current life expectancy at birth in the US is 76 years, in Nigeria, for example, it is just over 50 years (WRI 1996).

     Before the Industrial Revolution, the negative effects to the environment resulting from the productive and consumptive activities of subsistence-oriented people did not significantly alter the global environment. The impacts of technology were confined to small geographic scales.  The advent of the industrial age -- driven largely by population growth and the need and desire for economic expansion, lifestyle improvements, and military domination -- led to the mass consumption of materials like iron, steel, and petroleum.  Products became cheaper and more readily available allowing people to consume and discard them at relatively little immediate cost (the “throw away” society). In growing urban areas, more waste was produced than could be treated and more smoke emitted than could be dispersed by the wind.

     Initially, the environmental consequences associated with industrialization were concentrated locally. In addition, many of these effects were neither immediately obvious nor were many people particularly concerned about environmental impacts. As technologies became more widespread, the positive and negative consequences of industrialization became more obvious and geographically dispersed. By the nineteenth century, Britons were complaining about air pollution, sewage, and the spoilage of the countryside, and in the United States, air pollution from coal-burning industries filled the air with soot and fumes.  In the 1940s, the air in some industrial cities such as St. Louis and Pittsburgh became so thick with coal smoke that car drivers had to use their headlights at midday (Miller 1990). Waste and pollution were no longer limited aspects of the production and consumption processes; they had become a common social and environmental cost.

     The current transition from the industrial age to the information age will also have profound environmental and social consequences in terms of resource use, environmental degradation, economic development, social equity, and access to technology. While some changes may reduce social and environmental impacts, others may increase them.  For example, many of us regularly use a relatively new form of technology called a personal computer. We can now do our banking, talk with friends and family, shop, conduct research, take classes, and even meet other people without ever leaving home. While an increased reliance on computer technology may reduce our dependence on automobiles and gasoline, it may increase our reliance on electricity and the resources need to produce it.  In addition, the high cost of these new technologies may prevent some people, indeed some societies, from enjoying any of the positive benefits. Lastly, some social commentators worry that such technologies will create a cadre of “socially maladjusted” people who feel more comfortable with personal computers than interacting with each other face to face.  For some, this represents a shift from a modern to a postmodern society (Castells 1989; Harvey 1989; Cloke et al. 1991; Soja 1989).

     Technological changes also affect our relationship to the environment. Technology is the tool by which we preserve, conserve, and exploit natural resources (Evernden 1992; Jenseth and Lotto 1996; Cutter 1994). Increasingly sophisticated and powerful technology enables us to control or condition more and more aspects of the environment; it also allows us to protect and distance ourselves from nature.  Ultimately, the ways that we use technology for such purposes and its role as a driving force for environmental change are very much influenced by our individual and collective views of the environment.*

 

Technological Change and the Human Dimensions of Global Change

 

     The first known air pollution disaster in the US occurred in 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania when fog, laden with sulfur dioxide vapor and suspended particles, stagnated in the Monongahela Valley for five days.  Thousands of people became ill and about twenty died (Miller 1990).  The killer fog resulted from a combination of conditions including the mountainous terrain surrounding the valley, a stable weather pattern, and a spatial concentration of industries that emitted deadly pollutants. To prevent future disasters of this kind, many industrial facilities began to construct taller smokestacks to force harmful emissions out of the local environment.  While this technological mitigation resolved a local pollution problem, it created another. By the 1970s, emissions from industries like coal-burning power plants were producing acid rain (deposition) that damaged forests, lakes, and buildings thousands of miles away from the source. Today, 75 percent of the acid rain that falls in Canada originates from emissions in the US.  This example illustrates not only how one technological solution can produce another problem, but also how the environmental impacts of the technologies of the modern era have become regional or global rather than local in scale.

     Technological changes can have global impacts in two distinctly different ways. Some types of global changes are systemic in nature. Systemic change occurs when activities in one place directly affect a globally functioning system (Turner et al. 1990a). For example, industrial emissions of greenhouse gases like CO₂, methane, or chlorofluorocarbons directly alter the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere and may lead to changes in the global climate. A second type of global change is cumulative. Cumulative change results from local activities that are widely replicated in many places and together produce a change in the global environment (Turner et al. 1990a). For example, many industrial processes affect local water sources. As these industries are replicated globally, they can have a cumulative impact on the hydrosphere and/or biosphere.

     Global environmental change results from the cumulative and systemic effects of countless individual and collective actions at the local level. Local changes are often (but not always) immediately obvious -- they can be smelled, seen, or felt.  The factors causing these changes are reasonably well understood and the means to improve local environmental conditions and to prevent further environmental degradation are relatively well known.  But when there are no perceptible local effects, many individuals assume that they will have no global consequences. As the above discussion of systemic and cumulative global changes indicates, however, a time lag and geographic distance between cause and effect are rather common in an age of large technologies.

     Such transboundary and globally pervasive environmental problems create new challenges for policy makers and governments because they require international cooperation and negotiation.  For example, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 167 nations signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the risk of global warming.  Further, global environmental issues also involve a variety of complex issues such as equity and fairness, responsibility, and trust. Waste disposal (which has become a regional or global problem as regulations, rising costs, and public opposition have forced industries and government officials to search for more distant places to dispose of wastes) is just one example of an issue involving these complexities.  In some areas in the US, poorer communities often agree to accept wastes for disposal in their community (along with the associated health and environmental risks) because of the increased revenues it will produce. Likewise, the poorer countries of the world have become not only suppliers of raw materials to the rest of the world but also the recipients of wastes produced in wealthier countries.

 

Industrial Ecology and Global Change

 
     So where does focusing on the negative consequences of technological change leave us? Should we try to throw the “coke bottle” back to the Gods and reject technology as the Bushmen did? Or are we irrevocably committed to a world view that accepts technology despite the problems it has created? Is the only solution to our problems more technology? If so, how do we alter our “linear perspective” of technological development (which sees all new technology as promising progress) and begin to take a more complex, holistic, and global perspective?  The answers to these questions depend in part on the world view that each of us holds.

     Global changes are the ultimate consequence of a short-term perspective that focuses on solving local and immediate problems without consideration of the global and long-term consequences. In addition, the predominant paradigm in society is that technology can overcome environmental problems and continue to improve the lives of human beings as long as we take measures to mediate technology’s harmful effects.  Some people argue that every technology will have its unexpected consequences.  But “technological fixes” or “tailpipe” solutions to environmental problems are at best temporary expedients and often they create as many new problems as they solve (e.g., Lynn 1989).

     Throughout history, human productive activity has occurred in what can be called an open system.  People have taken natural materials, transformed them into products for use, and discarded worn-out products and left-over materials. This practice often forced early societies to change locations as the build-up of wastes and the depletion of locally available resources rendered existing settlements uninhabitable or production processes unprofitable. This was fairly reasonable behavior as long as uncontaminated places were easy to find. Today, however, the situation is entirely different. It is no longer possible to avoid the wastes that we create; their disposal is a burden and, as we’ve seen, can contribute to global changes.

     The current global situation suggests that our open industrial system cannot be sustained indefinitely. We consume too many natural resources to produce the things we want or need while generating too many by-products (toxic substances, emissions, solid waste etc.) that harm us and the environment. These changes threaten to upset the global environmental conditions we have adapted to and come to depend on, and they have the potential to threaten the survival of many species on earth (including humans). For these reasons, we need to reconceptualize and redesign the ways that industrial systems operate to place more control over the flow of materials. It is here that industrial ecology can contribute.

     The basic definition of the term “industrial ecology” connotes an industrial system that operates much like a natural ecosystem:

     In natural ecosystems, materials and energy circulate continuously in a complex web of interactions: Microorganisms turn animal wastes into food for plants: the plants, in turn, are either eaten by animals or enter the cycle through death and decay.  While ecosystems produce some actual wastes (by-products that are not recycled, such as fossil fuels), on the whole they are self-contained and self-sustaining. In a similar fashion, industrial ecology involves focusing less on the impacts of each industrial activity and more on the overall impact of all such activities (Frosch 1995b:19).

     Robert Frosch’s notion of industrial ecology offers a useful metaphor for reconceptualizing industrial systems while addressing issues of global change. Exactly how our current open industrial systems will be transformed into closed industrial ecology systems remains, however, an unanswered question; it also remains to be accomplished.

     In next unit, we will examine industrial ecology in more detail and will develop the systems approach that forms the basis of the concept. In Unit 3, we will examine the opportunities and constraints to industrial ecology and explore some of the analytical tools it provides for analysis.