editorial
The antitechnology Technology undoubtedly has caused many of our environrnental problems, but it’s also a key to their solution
Most Dangerous Product? runs the headline of an advertisement for a new book which damns, as so many books do these days, the excesses of modern technology. The fact is that the whole basis for a technological society is under heavy assault from a well-marshalled and increasingly vocal section of society. Opposing the technology haters is a sizable, but far less vocal, group that believes the only way out of the environmental mess is via technology. We must acknowledge immediately that ES&T is fairly and squarely aligned with the second group: our purpose, first defined way back in the misty past (1966, in fact) has been to aid those studying and maintaining the quality of our environment through the use of scientific principles and the application of technology. If we didn’t believe in technology, then we could justly be accused of rampant hypocrisy. Having made our declaration of faith in technology (suitable modifications to which we will add at a later date!), we should also say that the opponents of technology have at least a few good points t o make. However, since they have been made so often, and so loudly-most center around the indisputable fact that technology has in the past been harnessed without the slightest thought for the environmental consequenceswe won’t go into detail here. But some of the entreaties made by antitechnologists, appeals to ease up on the use of energy, for instance, are not as crazy as many would have us believe. What is so way out about suggestions that buildings be properly insulated so that it takes less energy to heat or cool them? Why shouldn’t incrementally extra units of electricity be more expensive, rather than cheaper? If fuel resources become scarce, why should the price be maintained at artificially low levels? No-what we really object to in the arguments of all too many “ecofreaks” is the strong implication that man does not have the capacity to learn from,
and to correct, his past mistakes. All the evidence points to the fact that he not only does have that capacity, but that he also is doing his level best to shape his institutions so that the mistakes don’t happen again. Progress in this corrective action is slow, to be sure, but it is happening. And technology-pollution control technology-is an indispensable part of that action. At the very heart of the battle lies the concept of economic growth, and its importance in determining whether the have-nots in society shall have the opportunity to be economically upgraded. Economists say that without growth there can be no such upgrading. If they are right-and we strongly suspect that they are -then there is much in the ecology movement that smacks of class repression, of the affluent denying the poor the benefits of progress. (Hard-core ecofreaks would of course say that the poor derive more disadvantages than advantages from technological progress, but this is in our opinion a highly debatable contention.) If the economists are wrong about the importance of continued economic growth, it will at the very least be interesting to see what happens to its standard of living in the unlikely event that some country of the world opts for a zero-growth society. The well-known management consultant Peter Drucker demolishes the arguments of antitechnologists much better than we could, in a most readable piece in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine. Says Drucker : “The growing pollution crisis does indeed raise fundamental questions about technology-its direction, uses, and future. But the relationship between technology and the environment is hardly as simple as much antitechnological rhetoric would have us believe . . , , The truth is that most environmental problems require technological solutions-and dozens of them.” Amen.
Volume 6, Number 7, July 1972 583
