Phil-Tech Meets Eco-Phil

Don Ihde examines the “congenital dystopianism” shared by environmentalists, environmental philosophers, and philosophers of technology. Each group employs a “rhetoric of alarm” that connects the use of technologies with environmental degradations. Ihde calls attention to how excessive rhetorical strategies have locked us into a false dichotomy: either technological-environmental utopianism or dystopianism. The problem is that we have not yet fully diagnosed either what our technologies can or should do, or what the environmental crises actually are. So long as we continue to accept either utopian or dystopian forecasts we are unlikely to bring either technologies or ecosystems into appropriate focus. Techno-environmental problems are complex, ambiguous, and interwoven; they rarely lend themselves either to an easy techno-fix or simple solution. The hardest problem of them all is how to turn major actors in the economy green: large scale development projects and multinational corporations. The challenge for a proactive philosopher is to get on the ground floor of technological research and development in order to help figure out how to green the economy itself.

Introduction

Environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology have a lot in common. Both fields explore the positive and negative aspects of human modifications of the world. Both question the limits of technology in relation to natural environments, animals, plants, and food. Both examine if human making and doing is compatible with nature or wholly different from it. And both examine the difference between what is considered to be natural and artificial. Technology and the environment further intersect in a number of issues, such as climate change, sustainability, geo-engineering, and agriculture. The reason for the overlap is fundamental: Environmental issues inevitably involve technology, and technologies inevitably have environmental impacts. Technology and the environment are like two sides of the same coin: Each is fully understood only in relation to the other. Yet, despite the ample overlap of questions concerning technology and the environment, the two philosophical fields have developed in relative isolation from each other. Even when philosophers in each field address themselves to similar concerns, the research tends to be parallel rather than intersecting, and the literatures remain foreign to one another. These divergent paths are unfortunate. Philosophers from each field have a lot to contribute to the other....

Design for Sustainability

Ibo van de Poel claims that there is substantial disagreement about the exact conception of sustainability even if there is general agreement on its desirability. We should see sustainability as a “compounded” value (not a mere technical issue) that consists of intergenerational justice, intragenerational justice, and care for nature. These values often conflict. The three most common ways of dealing with value conflicts are through life cycle analysis (which compares and aggregates multiple environmental impacts into one measure), respecification (which identifies higher-order and less controversial values to be specified into a design), or innovation (which develops new options that meet all design requirements). Usually value conflicts are can be handled by specifications of shared values or by new innovations. Van de Poel recommends a “values hierarchy” that organizes conflicting interpretations of a specific project in order to determine the available design options. He proposes “value dams” and “value flows” to manage conflicts among stakeholders, who might have different conceptions of sustainability. A value dam would prevent those design features that are strongly opposed by at least one or more stakeholders, and a value flow would promote design requirements that fit a number of different conceptions of sustainability.

Resistance to Risky Technology: When Are Our Environmental Fears Justified?

Paul B. Thompson argues that defenders and critics of novel technologies share the same fundamental assumption that technological innovation is the key source of greater efficiency in production. Although they question how social institutions incentivize innovation and distribute benefits, innovation as such is always seen as a good thing -- except when it comes to certain emerging technologies: agricultural biotechnologies, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology. Then public perception is skeptical, negative, even outraged. Thompson turns to risk assessment to figure out what makes some technologies more disturbing than others. He examines the “social amplification of risk,” the cognitive and social phenomena that distort perception and cause people to see a situation as more risky that it is, other times as less risky. Thompson identifies two different approaches to the risk amplification: purification and hybridization. The former excludes irrational social fears, outrage, and distrust from a risk assessment; the latter takes these motivating influences seriously and incorporates them into a risk assessment. Thompson warns that purification can engender the suspicion that powerful actors are indifferent to social perceptions, and suggests that hybridization can be an effective response to the perception of environmental harms.

Technology, Responsibility, and Meat

Wyatt Galusky examines the role of technology in producing meat for human consumption. He rehearses the litany of arguments against industrialized animal agriculture, as well as the arguments in defense of in-vitro (laboratory produced) meat. But Galusky complicates the idea that technology solves the problems of factory farming by considering meat as a technology, not just a product of it. He does this in order to understand meat as human creation that involves a network of relationships among technologies, humans, and the natural world. When we view meat as technology we highlight the worldviews, contexts, and agents that make it possible and that we are responsible for. For Galusky, these include the view of the natural world as “plastic,” the ultimate virtue of control over nature, and the diminished view of what an animal’s life as mere source of protein. Industrialized meat technologies raise the ethical question about what kind of nature, what kind of human, and what kind of animals we are designing. He reminds us that the more technologies we make, the more responsibilities we take on.

Do We Consume Too Much?

Marc Sagoff examines the relation between sustainability and the production and consumption of consumer products. He takes the optimistic view that economic production will never be seriously constrained by a lack of natural resources. None of the concerns that have occupied the environmental movement since the 1970s – global population, depletion of non-renewable resources, or food shortages – have materialized. He suggests that environmentalists embrace technological solutions instead of denying the power of technological progress or simply decrying consumerism as wasteful. Nevertheless, there are indeed good reasons to question consumerism. Although technology can overcome the physical limits nature sets on the amount we can produce and consume, there are moral, spiritual, and cultural limits to growth. Simply put, we consume too much – not because of the resources we use but because our market-driven consumerist culture undermines “the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place.” We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and “makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world.” Sagoff wishes to focus the debate on consumerism on the social lives we seek to preserve rather than the resources we may exhaust. That way we might stop vilifying technology and Romanticizing nature.

Ecodesign in the Era of Symbolic Consumption

Zhang Wei examines the role of design in environmentally sustainable products. Most models of sustainable design focus too much on the environmental impacts of products and too little on their interactions with users. The result can be paradoxical consequences in which undesired effects can offset any environmental impacts, for example, energy saving lights installed (and left on) in places there were no lights before, such as a garden or garage. Or the unintended effects of symbolic consumption, where perfectly functioning goods are discarded when their social use value ends. Current approaches to eco-design do not really help make sense of these unintended consequences because they focus on physical properties of thing at the expense of their psychological impacts. The key, according to Zhang, is to design not only sustainable products but also sustainable behaviors -- a “both/and approach” to eco-design. The goal of both/and eco-design is not just to create green products but also to design sustainable behaviors, particularly lasting attachments that can overcome the pull of symbolic consumption and waste. Successful eco-design creates relations between humans and products for the sake of the environment.

Early Geoengineering Governance: The Oxford Principles

Clare Heyward, and Steve Rayner, and Julian Savulescu examine the legitimacy and social control over the research, development and eventual deployment of geo-engineering to reduce human caused climate change. They believe that it is permissible in principle but all geo-engineering R&D should be subject to some sort of governance given its potential to affect everyone in the world. They defend the Oxford Principles of ethical-political decision-making principles. 1) Geo-engineering is in the public interest and should be regulated as a public good; 2) there should be public participation in geo-engineering decision-making; 3) geo-engineering research should be transparent and available to the public; 4) risk assessments should be conducted by independent bodies, and be directed toward both the environmental and socio-economic impacts of research and deployment; and 5) the legal, social, and ethical implications of geo-engineering should be addressed before a project is undertaken or technology deployed. The authors then compare the Oxford Principles favorably the three main alternative models that guide geoengineering development. They argue that it has a greater scope of application than the alternatives and better lend themselves to action-guiding recommendations and regulations, appropriate to different technologies -- while preserving longstanding environmental and political values.

Back to the Future: The Return of STS to Its “Historical Roots”

J. Baird Callicott questions the basic premise of Lynn White Jr.’s essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” where White attributes the environmental crisis to Genesis where God created man in his image, gave man dominion over the rest of creation, and commands him to subdue the Earth. Callicott examines White’s very epistemic assumption: that what we do depends on what we think. On this reckoning, we need to rethink the nature of nature, human nature, and the relationship between humans and nature in order to save the world from ecological disaster. But Callicott reminds us that the Lynn White Jr. of Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) also proposes a theory of technological determinism to explain the fate of the West. So which is it? Is the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton the product of Christian theology or mechanical technologies? Perhaps nature is more affected by things than ideas. If so, environmental philosophers have to give up the pretense that they alone can save the world from environmental destruction because they alone are expert at uncovering underlying conceptual presuppositions. Revolutionary developments in real material things are just as important as revolutionary ideas.

Sustainable Technologies for Sustainable Lifestyles

Philip Brey focuses on the role technologies play in the relationship between sustainable development and consumerism in light of ecological modernization, the development practice that aims at greening production and global economy in ways that leave existing economic and political institutions intact. He agrees with critics who claim that sustainable development is incompatible with modernization’s ideal of unlimited growth. A more fundamental reform of development must also transform patterns of consumption and challenge the values and beliefs that underlie consumerism and materialism. The development of sustainable consumer products should promote sustainable behaviors and lifestyles, as well as reduce or eliminate consumer products that are unsustainable. In addition to these ecologically designed green products are persuasive technologies designed to change the attitudes or behaviors of users. But Brey worries that the redesign of technologies will be not sufficient to engender sustainable systems of consumption. Technological reform will certainly be of great help in the move towards sustainable patterns of consumption but it should be seen as part of a comprehensive strategy that also includes social and economic incentives and public debates about values, lifestyles, and the very future of the planet.