Technology Futures

The speed of technological advance over the last 20 years has been dizzying, but the environmental and social performance of technology has not kept pace. For example, high-tech composites are impossible to recycle, and microchip manufacture releases toxic cocktails into the air and stores them in the bodies of workers.

In every area, new steps forward in technological performance are accompanied by significant steps backward in terms of sustainability. Space age technology is causing havoc on spaceship earth.

Part of the problem is because while most development goals are easy to visualise and measure -- faster, lighter, stronger, smarter -- environmental goals tend to be diffuse and piecemeal. 'Greener' means many things to many people, and is almost always about moving away from a problem -- less emissions, less energy, less noise -- rather than seeking a goal.

That goal of course has to be 100% ecological sustainability. It sounds simple, but even the mention of those words causes apoplexy in many environmentalists. The world is too complex, they say, we don't know what sustainability is, they moan.

But 100% is possible. There are even many different solutions. The most attractive is for industrial systems to both adopt the protocols of material flow used by nature, and, where possible, to integrate natural and manmade ecosystems.

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