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The impact of technology on the environment and how environmental technology could save our planet

Courtesy of Edinburgh Sensors Ltd - TECHCOMP Group

This article takes a look at the paradoxical ideology that while the impact of technology on the environment has been highly negative, the concept of environmental technology could save our planet from the harm that has been done.  This idea is supported by WWF  1 , who have stated that although technology is a solution enabler it is also part of the problem.

The term ‘technology’ refers to the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes and the machinery and devices developed as a result. We are currently living in a period of rapid change, where technological developments are revolutionising the way we live, at the same time as leading us further into the depths of catastrophe in the form of climate change and resource scarcity.

This article will begin by discussing the negative impact of technology on the environment due to the causation of some of the world’s most severe environmental concerns, followed by the potential that it has to save the planet from those same problems. Finally it will explore the particular environmental technology of the gas sensor and discuss how it plays a part in the mitigation of negative environmental consequences.

The Impact of Technology on the Environment

The industrial revolution has brought about new technologies with immense power. This was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States, in the period from about 1760 to 1840. This has been succeeded by continued industrialisation and further technological advancements in developed countries around the world, and  the impact of this technology on the environment has included the misuse and damage of our natural earth.

These technologies have damaged our world in two main ways; pollution and the depletion of natural resources.

1. Air and water pollution

Air pollution occurs when harmful or excessive quantities of gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide and methane are introduced into the earth’s atmosphere. The main sources all relate to technologies which emerged following the industrial revolution such as the burning of fossil fuels, factories, power stations, mass agriculture and vehicles. The consequences of air pollution include negative health impacts for humans and animals and global warming, whereby the increased amount of greenhouse gases in the air trap thermal energy in the Earth’s atmosphere and cause the global temperature to rise.

Water pollution on the other hand is the contamination of water bodies such as lakes, rivers, oceans, and groundwater, usually due to human activities. Some of the most common water pollutants are domestic waste, industrial effluents and insecticides and pesticides. A specific example is the release of inadequately treated wastewater into natural water bodies, which can lead to degradation of aquatic ecosystems. Other detrimental effects include diseases such as typhoid and cholera, eutrophication and the destruction of ecosystems which negatively affects the food chain.

2. Depletion of natural resources

Resource depletion is another negative impact of technology on the environment. It refers to the consumption of a resource faster than it can be replenished. Natural resources consist of those that are in existence without humans having created them and they can be either renewable or non-renewable. There are several types of resource depletion, with the most severe being aquifer depletion, deforestation, mining for fossil fuels and minerals, contamination of resources, soil erosion and overconsumption of resources. These mainly occur as a result of agriculture, mining, water usage and consumption of fossil fuels, all of which have been enabled by advancements in technology.

Due to the increasing global population, levels of natural resource degradation are also increasing. This has resulted in the estimation of the world’s eco-footprint to be one and a half times the ability of the earth to sustainably provide each individual with enough resources that meet their consumption levels. Since the industrial revolution, large-scale mineral and oil exploration has been increasing, causing more and more natural oil and mineral depletion. Combined with advancements in technology, development and research, the exploitation of minerals has become easier and humans are therefore digging deeper to access more which has led to many resources entering into a production decline.

Moreover, the consequence of deforestation has never been more severe, with the World Bank reporting that the net loss of global forest between 1990 and 2015 was 1.3 million km 2 . This is primarily for agricultural reasons but also logging for fuel and making space for residential areas, encouraged by increasing population pressure. Not only does this result in a loss of trees which are important as they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but thousands of plants and animals lose their natural habitats and have become extinct.

Environmental Technology

Despite the negative impact of technology on environment, a recent rise in global concern for climate change has led to the development of new environmental technology aiming to help solve some of the biggest environmental concerns that we face as a society   through a shift towards a more sustainable, low-carbon economy. Environmental technology is also known as ‘green’ or ‘clean’ technology and refers to the development of new technologies which aim to conserve, monitor or reduce the negative impact of technology on the environment and the consumption of resources.

The Paris agreement, signed in 2016, has obliged almost every country in the world to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change by keeping the rise in the global average temperature at less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

This section will focus on the positive impact of technology on the environment as a result of the development of environmental technology such as renewable energy, ‘smart technology’, electric vehicles and carbon dioxide removal.

• Renewable energy

Renewable energy, also known as ‘clean energy’, is energy that is collected from renewable resources which are naturally replenished such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. Modern environmental technology has enabled us to capture this naturally occurring energy and convert it into electricity or useful heat through devices such as solar panels, wind and water turbines, which reflects a highly positive impact of technology on the environment.

Having overtaken coal in 2015 to become our second largest generator of electricity, renewable sources currently produce more than 20% of the UK’s electricity, and EU targets means that this is likely to increase to 30% by 2020. While many renewable energy projects are large-scale, renewable technologies are also suited to remote areas and developing countries, where energy is often crucial in human development.

The cost of renewable energy technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines are falling and government investment is on the rise. This has contributed towards the amount of rooftop solar installations in Australia growing from approximately 4,600 households to over 1.6 million between 2007 and 2017.

• Smart technology

Smart home technology uses devices such as linking sensors and other appliances connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) that can be remotely monitored and programmed in order to be as energy efficient as possible and to respond to the needs of the users.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of internet-connected objects able to collect and exchange data using embedded sensor technologies. This data allows devices in the network to autonomously ‘make decisions’ based on real-time information. For example, intelligent lighting systems only illuminate areas that require it and a smart thermostat keeps homes at certain temperatures during certain times of day, therefore reducing wastage.

This environmental technology has been enabled by increased connectivity to the internet as a result of the increase in availability of WiFi, Bluetooth and smart sensors in buildings and cities. Experts are predicting that cities of the future will be places where every car, phone, air conditioner, light and more are interconnected, bringing about the concept of energy efficient ‘smart cities’.

The technology of the internet further demonstrates a positive impact of technology on the environment due to the fact that social media can raise awareness of global issue and worldwide virtual laboratories can be created. Experts from different fields can remotely share their research, experience and ideas in order to come up with improved solutions. In addition, travel is reduced as meetings/communication between friends and families can be done virtually, which reduces pollution from transport emissions.

• Electric vehicles

The environmental technology of the electric vehicle is propelled by one or more electric motors, using energy stored in rechargeable batteries. Since 2008, there has been an increase in the manufacturing of electric vehicles due to the desire to reduce environmental concerns such as air pollution and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Electric vehicles demonstrate a positive impact of technology on the environment because they do not produce carbon emissions, which contribute towards the ‘greenhouse effect’ and leads to global warming. Furthermore, they do not contribute to air pollution, meaning they are cleaner and less harmful to human health, animals, plants, and water.

There have recently been several environmental technology government incentives encouraging plug-in vehicles, tax credits and subsidies to promote the introduction and adoption of electric vehicles. Electric vehicles could potentially be the way forward for a greener society because companies such as Bloomberg have predicted that they could become cheaper than petrol cars by 2024 and according to Nissan, there are now in fact more electric vehicle charging stations in the UK than fuel stations 3 .

• ‘Direct Air Capture’ (DAC) – Environmental Technology removing Carbon from the atmosphere

For a slightly more ambitious technology to conclude with, the idea of pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere has been circulating climate change mitigation research for years, however it has only recently been implemented and is still in the early stages of development.

The environmental technology is known as ‘Direct Air Capture’ (DAC) and is the process of capturing carbon dioxide directly from the ambient air and generating a concentrated stream of CO2 for sequestration or utilisation. The air is then pushed through a filter by many large fans, where CO2 is removed. It is thought that this technology can be used to manage emissions from distributed sources, such as exhaust fumes from cars. Full-scale DAC operations are able to absorb the equivalent amount of carbon to the annual emissions of 250,000 average cars.

Many argue that DAC is essential for climate change mitigation and that it can help reach the Paris Climate Agreement goals, as carbon dioxide in the air has been the main cause of the problem after all. However, the high cost of DAC currently means that it is not an option on a large scale and some believe that reliance on this technology would pose a risk as it may reduce emission reduction as people may be under the pretense that all of their emissions will simply be removed.

Although we cannot reverse the negative impact of technology on the environment caused by industrialisation, many believe that new environmental technology, such as renewable energy combined with smart logistics and electric transport, has the potential to bring about the rapid decarbonisation of our economy and the mitigation of further detrimental harm.

How can the environmental technology of Edinburgh Sensors’ Gas Sensor contribute?

Sensors play a huge part in the positive impact of technology on the environment as they often play a vital role in the monitoring and reduction of harmful activities. At Edinburgh Sensors, we produce bespoke gas sensing technology which can be used across a wide range of applications, many of which can be used to mitigate environmental concerns. This article presents just three of these applications; the monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions, the monitoring of methane using an infrared sensor and the detection of gases using a UAV drone.

1. Monitoring of Greenhouse Gas emissions:   https://edinburghsensors.com/news-and-events/measuring-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

Edinburgh Sensors Gascard NG provides high quality, accurate and reliable measurements of CO, CO2 and CH4. To find out how we can assist you with the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions, simply contact us.

2. Using an Infrared Sensor for reliable Methane monitoring:   https://edinburghsensors.com/news-and-events/infrared-sensor-gas-monitoring/

Edinburgh Sensors’ Gascard NG is used for methane detection in a range of research, industrial, and environmental applications including pollution monitoring, agricultural research, chemical processes and many more.

3. Using a UAV drone attached to a gas sensor to measure harmful gases:   https://edinburghsensors.com/news-and-events/uav-drone-methane-monitoring/

From monitoring global warming to tracking the spread of pollution, there are many reasons to use a drone in order to monitor carbon dioxide, methane and other hydrocarbon gas concentrations in remote or dangerous locations.

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Article contents

Ecotechnology.

• Astrid Schwarz Astrid Schwarz Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.134
• Published online: 19 October 2022

Ecotechnology is both broad and widespread, yet it has never been given a universally shared definition; this remains the case even in the early 21st century. Given that it is used in the natural, engineering, and social sciences, as well as in design studies, in the philosophy and history of technology and in science policy, perhaps this is not surprising. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous definition for ecotechnology: It should be understood rather as an umbrella term that facilitates connections among different scientific fields and science policy and, in so doing, offers a robust trading zone of ideas and concepts. The term is part of a cultural and sociopolitical framework and, as such, wields explanatory power. Ecotechnology approaches argue for the design of ensembles that embed human action within an ecologically functional environment and mediating this relationship by technological means. Related terms, such as ecotechnics, ecotechniques, ecotechnologies, and eco-technology, are used similarly.

In the 1970s, “ecotechnology,” along with other terms, gave a voice to an unease and a concern with sociotechnical transformations. This eventually gave rise to the first global environmental movement expressing a comprehensive eco-cultural critique of society-environment relations. Ecotechnology was part of the language used by activists, as well as by social theorists and natural scientists working in the transdisciplinary field of applied ecology. The concept of ecotechnology helped to both establish and “smooth over” environmental matters of concern in the worlds of economics, science, and policymaking. The process of deliberation about a green modernity is still ongoing and characterizes the search for a constructive intermediation between artificial and natural systems following environmentally benign design principles.

During the 1980s, disciplinary endeavors flourished in the global academic world, lending ecotechnology more and more visibility. Some of these endeavors, such as restoration ecology and ecological engineering, were rooted in the engineering sciences, but mobilized quite different traditions, namely population biology and systems biology. To date, ecotechnology has been replaced by and large by other terms in applied ecology. Another strand of work resulted in the discipline of social ecology, which developed different focal points, most notably critical political economy and a concern with nature-culture issues in the context of cultural ecology. Finally, more recently, ecotechnology has been discussed in several branches of philosophy that offer different narratives about the epistemic and ontological transformations triggered by an “ecologization” of societies and a theoretical turn toward relationality.

• environmental management
• ecological engineering
• restoration ecology
• sociotechnical transformation
• ecosystem theory
• social ecology
• ecological design
• philosophy of technology
• environmental ethics

Drawing “Eco” and “Techno” Together

Ecotechnology can be considered as a cipher to the vision of adapting human activities more skillfully to ecosystem functions. This encompasses various issues ranging from the production of ecological knowledge, through modalities of technical relations, to sociopolitical settings including different policy styles. Ecotechnology also draws together two terms frequently regarded as existing in opposite camps. The prefix “eco” comes from the Greek “ οίκος ‎” ( oikos ), meaning house, household, or dwelling place and in a wider sense family ( Schwarz & Jax, 2011 , p. 145). The word technology derives from the Greek “ τέχνη ‎” ( technè ), roughly translatable as having skills in craftsmanship and technology but also as artistic ability and dexterity. It has behind the Indo-European tekhn -, assumedly meaning woodwork or carpentry, and can be found in similar stem formations in many other languages ( Mitcham, 1994 , p. 117). It has been pointed out that technè already was an ambiguous term in Greek philosophy ( Mersch, 2018 , p. 5) because it can be identified with the famous figure of Prometheus, who, full of confidence in the practice and championing of technical skills, inevitably drags along his less capable brother Epimetheus, who only causes harm when dappling in technical practices—a reference, in other words, to the side effects of technology including “ecological ills” ( Odum, 1972 , p. 164) and environmental disasters. Bringing together “eco” and “techno,” then, seems to force being a marriage of principles that are in opposition in various ways, the first of these being the intrinsic “fraternal tension” embodied in problem-oriented technological solutions and their often-unexpected consequences; the field of ecological design is not an exception ( Gross, 2010 ). Second, there is the tension between the natural order as it is represented in ecosystem research, with its neatly settled routines and “balanced budgets,” and the innovative force of Promethean agency.

In the following, historical snapshots are offered as a means to carve out the principal paths of this rather overloaded and overdetermined term, the intention being to shed some light on the conceptual formation of ecotechnology and its emergence from antecedent scientific and policy contexts. The present article assesses the uses …

In all the diversity described a generic vision can be identified that is a call for an appropriate conceptualization of the human habitat that is seen as an entanglement of natural, social, and technical relations and objects. Ecotechnology stands for a sociopolitically informed ideal of relating knowledge about social, material, and energy relations by following ecological principles to integrate ecosystem functions on a material basis in the environment. In this sense, one might say that a conceptual scheme of ecotechnology implicitly also lies underneath discussions about functional relationships in sustainable technologies and ecosystem services, or even urban planning, while as a concept it is mainly elaborated in disciplinary fields like ecological engineering, ecological restauration, and ecological design.

Environmental Management and Ecotechnology

The field of environmental management, including the international regulatory system, substantially changed in the 1970s. In this setting, some of the discursive and institutional activities around ecotechnology ultimately resulted in the establishment of engineering disciplines, such as environmental and ecological engineering, industrial and restoration ecology. This process of institutionalization happened in the academic sector all over the world as well as in governmental institutions and nongovernmental organizations. Ecosystem research, systems theory, and engineering issues merged with the demands of science policy and the need to resolve environmental problems caused by industrial excesses. The names of localities such as Santa Barbara (oil spill 1969 ), Seveso (release of dioxin 1976 ), Bophal (gas leak 1984 ), Chernobyl (radioactive plume 1986 ) are just a few examples of a steadily growing number of global environmental disasters caused by technological dysfunction, most of them resulting in substantial ruptures in international environmental policy and legislation (see Seveso directives in EU legislation) as well as in the initiation of national programs for research and technology development in the ecological sciences. At the same time these catastrophic events advanced transformations toward greater environmental literacy in science and society ( Scholz, 2011 ). An increasingly successful implementation of ecotechnological practices picked up pace, while powerful instruments were developed to restore and ameliorate degraded plots of land and, eventually, to create “new natures” ( Blok & Gremmen, 2016 Hughes, 2004 ; McHarg, 1971 ). Even as the field of applied ecology blossomed, however, the concept ecotechnology itself was successively replaced during the 1990s by other concepts formed around design principles (e.g., ecological design, Bergen et al., 2001 ; Ross et al., 2015 ) and ecological restoration ( Berger, 1990 ), or else it became a synonym of ecological engineering ( Mitsch & Jørgensen, 1989 ) and of biomanipulation ( Kasprzak et al., 1993 ). A similar development can be observed in the field of science policy and political economy: Here, the word “ecotechnology” disappeared even before it had exerted any significant impact as a concept. Some of the central issues associated with ecotechnology during the 1970s and 1980s were included in the concept of sustainable development ( Brundtland, 1987 ) and sustainability science, which emerged subsequently. An exception is perhaps the derivative term “ecotechnie,” which was stabilized in policymaking in the field of environment and development to the extent that it was established as an eponymous program, a joint effort between UNESCO Man and Biosphere and the Cousteau Society ( UCEP ), launched in 1994 . Thus, in the ecological sciences the term ecotechnology began to fade away when the “undeniable successes of ecological modernisation strategies” gained a foothold ( Blühdorn & Welsh, 2007 , p. 194). This is at least the case for the Western scientific topology, in the Asian context ecotechnology took a different way.

The overall development of the concept can be described as a piece of transgressive boundary work that stretches over antipodal fields such as technology versus nature, artificial versus natural, and also applied versus basic research. The development of and reflection on ecotechnological principles and techniques cuts through these categories and was from the very beginning an object of interest not only for engineers and natural scientists but also for philosophers, sociologists, and, beyond the academic field, environmental activists. This is not terribly surprising, given that the word “ecology” and later also “sustainability” underwent a similar process through different scientific and sociopolitical fields. All these notions can be identified with the attempt to express an unease with the highly ambivalent process of modernization ( Beck, 2010 ), one of the reactions was a proposal of a framework for a “politics of unsustainability” in a postecologist European era to recast well-established conditions and constellations ( Blühdorn & Welsh, 2007 , p. 196). An enormous body of scientific literature extending across the sciences and the humanities has been produced to express the discomfort, to say the least, with this gargantuan elephant in the room, beginning from the postwar period in the 1950s. This will be discussed later in more detail in the section about social/political ecology with its focus on the disciplinary transversal conjunctions that were rendered possible by conceptualizations of ecotechnology during a historical interim phase of about 20 years starting in the 1970s. This work intends to fill a research gap, identified around the turn of the millennium, that “the origins of the new uses of ‘green’ and ‘eco-’ in regard to technology have not been adequately addressed” ( Jørgensen, 2001 , p. 6393), a deficit that was pointed out in “Greening of Technology and Ecotechnology” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences .

In the following, three approaches will be pursued to provide a more detailed epistemological picture and historically profound understanding of the term “ecotechnology,” the research practices associated with it, and the management policies embraced by it. To begin, the history of the concept is presented, its different conceptual uses, the main lines of demarcation from other concepts, and the orienting narratives involved. These are discussed by focusing on its development in the ecological sciences. In the section “Sociopolitical Imagineries and Agency in International Networking”, the sociopolitical and socioeconomic issues are unpacked and scrutinized in the context of the disciplinary formation of social ecology in the 1980s, which developed in parallel in different national contexts: Some of these impacts include the continued articulation of ecotechnological visions to this day. In the third section “Another Semantic Turn of Ecotechnology/Ecotechnics”, different theoretical approaches are discussed, mainly in the context of more recent philosophical uses of ecotechnics and ecotechnology, offering a number of considerations regarding the meaning and understandings of the technicity of relations between humans toward their oikos.

Buzzword, Umbrella Term, or Proper Definition?

In the 1970s, the term “ecotechnology” was in the air, emerging simultaneously in public print media and in futuristic literature in the United States. In the scientific arena ecotechnology first arose in a Japanese (Aida, 1971 , cited in Aida, 1995 ) and in an American context ( Bookchin, 1977 ), before spreading further in different national and disciplinary spheres. The proclamation of “ecological engineering” as a discipline in 1962 by Howard T. Odum ( Odum 1962 ) certainly also prepared the ground for “the design of sustainable ecosystems that integrate human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both” ( Mitsch, 2012 , p. 6). A consolidation of the conceptual work took place with the first textbook Ecological Engineering: An Introduction to Ecotechnology in 1989 and the founding of the journal Ecological Engineering in 1993 . A quantitative analysis of the use of the term has confirmed that its attractivity increased during the 1980s and peaked around the turn of the last millennium ( Haddaway et al., 2018 ). Another bibliographical analysis has shown that ecotechnology was much less in use compared to ecological engineering or ecological services ( Barot et al., 2012 ). The attractivity of the term seemed also limited by the fact that ecotechnology had been identified as a buzzword. To clearly delineate its deployment as a “useful concept unifying and gathering efforts around a common vision” ( Haddaway et al., 2018 , p. 247) a study was conducted on bibliographic databases, from which all those articles were filtered that offered explicit definitions on ecotechnology or its derivates. As a result, an evidence-based terminological toolbox was proposed, and the authors set about constructing a conceptual consensus model for their own project and suggested the following definition: “Ecotechnologies are human interventions in social-ecological systems in the form of practices and/or biological, physical and chemical processes designed to minimize harm in the environment and provide services of value to society” ( Haddaway et al., 2018 , p. 260). Unfortunately, the authors provide no clue in their article as to what they mean by “services of value” or what exactly is meant to be “harm in the environment.” The definition might include the building blocks identified, but the question remains what it offers beyond a balanced combination of separate elements. The conceptual context that explains the terms and their semantic environment, thus making the definition work, remains empty. It seems that the strategy to exempt definitions of ecotechnology from their suspected status of buzzword is difficult to be performed properly.

The more promising approach might be to analyze “ecotechnology” as an umbrella term because this makes clear from the beginning that it is the context that needs to be semantically taken into consideration. This ultimately helps us better understand the movements, trends, and discursive tactics of a complex term that not only represents but also gathers up meaning, wields explanatory power, and presents a dynamic and innovative potential. A term becomes an umbrella term when it has great potential to link and translate different discourses and conceptual practices. “Umbrella terms start out as a fragile proposal by means of which a variety of research areas and directions can be linked up with one other” ( Rip & Voß, 2013 , p. 40) and with certain societal concerns and policy issues. Accordingly, an umbrella term mediates between different arenas such as scientific research, society, and policy, each of which follows a different logic. As a mediator the umbrella term not only travels between already existing fields of science, technology, and policy but also might elicit and finally become constitutive of new epistemic and institutional formations. “Sustainability” is a good example of an umbrella term that came into being to reconcile matters of concern about the global environment and critical issues about economic growth and to overcome the array of antagonistic voices in society and also in science. The term “sustainability” became one of the most successful outcomes of the Brundtland (1987) report, which states that the “sustainability of ecosystems on which the global economy depends must be guaranteed” (p. 32) and that “sustainable development requires the unification of economics and ecology in international relations” (p. 74). This promise has become a successful commodity not only in the policy world but also in a nascent scientific arena increasingly concerned to conceptualize sustainable development and terms like “resilience” to become, finally, in the first decade of the new millennium, established as “sustainability science.” Its epistemic program became the study of the interrelatedness of social and ecological systems, their dynamics, and how to govern these. Interesting enough, ecotechnology does not appear in the Brundtland report—technology and ecology are never linked directly. Instead they are imagined as being mediated by economics. Most industries rely essentially on natural resources even while they seriously pollute the environment. These changes have locked economy and ecology together, mainly on a global scale.

To conclude, umbrella terms are not necessarily a drawback. On the contrary, they gain their persuasive power as normatively oriented concepts by being radically inclusive and thus providing a conceptual framework that indicates, among other things, when science policy and research have hitched up together successfully. For a while they are highly innovative in their impacts, and this has also been the case for ecotechnology, as will be discussed in the following.

Conceptualizing Ecotechnology—The Main Path and Some Sidelines

“Ecotechnology” has been an ambiguous term from the very beginning and was never a purely technical term in the scientific world. It occurs across different semantic, disciplinary, and sociopolitical settings, referring to a plenitude of environmental problems and research practices. Further, “ecotechnology” is quite often substituted by other similar terms such as “eco-technology” ( Aida, 1983 ; Leff, 1986 ; Oesterreich, 2001 ), Eco Technology ( Aida, 1986 ), or “ecotechnics” ( Grönlund et al., 2014 , Miller, 2012 ; Nancy, 1991 ), and it also appears in compound terms such as “ecological technologies” or “living technologies” ( Todd & Josephon, 1996 ), “environmental technologies” ( Banham, 1965 ), or “ecotechnic future” ( Greer, 2009 ). In other languages ecotechnology becomes (to give just the most obvious terms in the debate) “Eko tekunorojī“ (Japanese), “écotechnique” (French), “ekoteknik” (Swedish), “Ökotechnologie” and “Ökotechnik” (German), “eco-tecnologia” (Spanish), or “milieutechnologie” (Danish). These different formulations should not only be understood as a linguistic task of translation to cope with but also must be considered in terms of deliberate semantic differentiation and conceptual delimitation in a geopolitical and a disciplinary context. The same applies to the spelling of the term “ecotechnology.” For instance, “eco-technology” is mainly used to date in Japan in a context of ecological design. A more detailed discussion of “national ecotechnologies” is offered in sections “ Ecotechnology in an Asian Context (Japan, China, Taiwan) ” and “ An Ecotechnological Rationality for Latin America .”

Ecotechnology in the Ecosciences

A conceptual ambiguity is also admitted by the scientific community of ecologists. In his article “Ecotechnology as a New Means for Environmental Management” and after about a decade of conceptual work, modeler Milan Straškraba (1993 , p. 311) states that there never was a “common terminology with respect to ecological engineering, ecotechniques and ecotechnology.” This is mirrored in the struggle of the ecological community to define a more authoritative system of principles and rules to enhance the practicability and engagement of methods and tools, and thus establish a standard for linking ecosystem theory and engineering practices. Straškraba proposes a theory of ecosystems, consisting of seven principles that correspond to a theory of ecotechnology and spelling out 17 rules for a “sound management of the environment” (p. 317). Other authors suggested eight ( Mitsch, 1992 ) or 12 principles ( Jørgensen & Nielsen, 1996 ), while other numbers and categories were also proposed ( Bergen et al., 2001 ), indicating that the field was still in a phase of competing classificatory systems and less in a hypothesis-driven phase. Recently, a redefinition of ecological engineering was suggested in the sense of a holistic approach for problem-solving, ecotechnology was just included in a literature search but not conceptualized ( Schönborn & Junge, 2021 ). Here, too, seven ecological principles are proposed to which a good engineering practice should commit ( Schönborn & Junge, 2021 , p. 388).

The system suggested by Straškraba is distinct insofar as he places scientific ecology and ecotechnology on an equal footing with respect to the potential of theory building. Mathematical and computer models cannot just be applied, he argues, they must be calculated and matched to the specific situation, an instance that needs theoretical input. He recommends using “decision support systems” and an individual selection of what he calls ecotechniques such as “river restoration” or “changed agricultural practices” ( Straškraba, 1993 , p. 327). Thus, modeling for him is the means to integrate science and engineering and therefore also theoretical and applied ecology. Straškraba was able to rely on a fundamental consensus in the growing community that only those ecotechniques should be used where the costs of the intervention and “their harm to the global environment are minimized” (p. 311). He underlines this commonality, also of the global vision, by referring to one of the first articles to use the term “ecotechnology” explicitly to name a new engineering discipline based on knowledge about biological structures and processes ( Uhlmann, 1983 , p. 109). Dietrich Uhlmann, head of the water science department at Technical University Dresden, referred explicitly to Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Though in 1983 the German Democratic Republic had exclaimed the Marx year, the motive for citing a longer Marx passage is equally justified by offering reflections about the necessity to “include environmental requirements in the development of societal needs” ( Uhlmann, 1983 , transl. AS) and the call for the reconciliation of anthropogenic impacts with the laws of development and active principles in nature. This alludes to Marx’s phrase that a society is not only the owner and beneficiary of earth but also has “to bequeath earth as boni patres familias to the following generations improved” ( Marx, 1964 , p. 748), which is the passage cited in the article. Thus inspired, Uhlmann suggests the following program for ecotechnology: “Ecological standards must be created and enforced in the technosphere to ensure environmental conditions that promote human health and well-being. This means that a technology must be created that is integrated into the natural material cycles” ( Uhlmann, 1983 , p. 109, transl. AS).

This in some way anticipates what became the central paradigm of ecological engineering as formulated by William J. Mitsch and Sven Erik Jørgensen (1989) , in the very first textbook that established the field ecological engineering, written mainly by the editors. They stated: “We define ecological engineering and ecotechnology as the design of human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both,” and they continued, “it is a technology with the primary tool being self-designing ecosystems. The components are all of the biological species of the world” ( Mitsch & Jørgensen, 1989 , p. 4). The shift from Uhlmann’s definition lies in the emphasis on who has to adapt to whom: The latter says that societies need to adapt to the natural material cycles, whereas Mitsch and Jørgensen tend to put the environment into the service of human society.

In their preface the authors asserted that their approach was intended to bring about a “cooperation between humans and nature” ( Mitsch & Jørgensen, 1989 , p. ix) and “will encourage a symbiotic relationship between humans and their natural environment” (p. x), a “partnership with nature” (p. 11). They also refer to Straškraba and Uhlmann, by repeating the minimally invasive strategy already established in the growing community of applied ecology. No conceptual distinction is made between ecological engineering and ecotechnology: The terms are virtually interchangeable. In an article published three years later the word ecotechnology appears only on the first page after reeling off the goals in mantra-like fashion ( Mitsch, 1992 , p. 28). As has been suggested, Mitsch et al. had identified ecotechnology with the development of ecological solutions to environmental engineering problems particularly in waste management ( Bergen et al., 2001 , p. 202), whereas Straškraba formed a conceptual tool of ecotechnology in environmental management. Mitsch abandons the term ecotechnology completely and thus fails to define its conceptual contours, an omission not tackled either in later publications by the author collective Mitsch and Jørgensen.

Is Ecotechnology Less Invasive Than Technology?

A closer look at the “collection of principles and case studies” in Mitsch and Jørgensen (1989 , p. 11) illustrates that ecotechnological methods and tools must be just as invasive, at least initially, as the industries and mining or agrotechnologies that brought forth the environmental problems. The examples given are coal mine reclamation, the restoration of lakes, or the recycling of wetlands. These illustrate vividly that constructing the desired ecosystems and gaining the desired control over the material and energy flows—and thus to recycling industrial waste and residues—is an elaborate, technology-intensive enterprise. It involves the use of heavy machines, a massive amount of earth forming, chemical interventions on the ground, the introduction of biological species, and high-tech inputs, including, from the very start of a project, the digital-modeling tools needed to manage it. Ultimately, it seems that the difference between ordinary technological and ecotechnological engineering comes down to insisting that “ecosystems are used for the benefit of humankind without destroying the ecological balance, that is, utilization of the ecosystem on an ecologically sound basis” ( Mitsch & Jørgensen, 1989 , p. 15). The key question then becomes one of where and how to fix the ecological balance to enable natural ecosystems to be used both as resources for commodities and as amenities. It is acknowledged that there is a rising demand for “ecological services” that can be attributed to “the lack of markets for what are the essentially free services supplied by natural ecosystems” ( Maxwell & Costanza, 1989 , p. 58). This view displays a clear commitment to environmental design in the service of economic factors that “determine how natural ecosystems are manipulated by humans” ( Maxwell & Costanza, 1989 , p. 61). Even though the authors assure the reader that there is also a feedback loop that affects the “attributes of ecosystems that are valued by individuals, both demand and production (supply) relationships must be considered” (p. 61). However, the “benefit for both” and the cooperative aspects of the human-nature relationship (the central claim of ecotechnology as well as ecological engineering) ring rather hollow in the face of a clear commitment to the laws of the market that treat nature as a mere resource. The following description of an incidental observation provides a dramatic insight into this rather fraught partnership with nature in an ecotechnological context:

Along State Highway 100 between Palatka and Bunnell, Florida, is a business in which old cars are dumped into wetlands, and parts removed for sale. The used car dump is mostly hidden by the wetland trees. From what we know about wetlands absorbing and holding heavy metals ( Odum et al., 2000a , b ), this may not be a bad arrangement, a kind of ecological engineering ( Odum & Odum, 2003 , p. 352).

It would take a very sympathetic reader to find any irony here. Moreover, a prior statement made by the same author that “ecological engineering reduces costs by fostering nature’s inputs” ( Odum, 1989 , p. 81) does leave a rather bad taste in the mouth.

Thus, when Odum’s idea of a “partnership with nature” is referred to in the current debate on an appropriate design of ecological engineering ( Schönborn & Junge, 2021 , p. 384), the question arises whether a conceptualization is actually provided here that can convince with the attribution of intrinsic values to nature and a holistic method.

Ecotechnology and the Self-Design of Nature

Howard T. Odum was one of the leading figures in the field, the idea of a “self-design” of ecosystems being one of his most important contributions to ecological engineering. As far back as the 1960s, he suggested that ecological engineering may be a viable opportunity to manipulate systems in which “the main energy drives are still coming from natural sources” (cited in Mitsch & Jörgensen, 1989 , p. 4). The idea was that such systems can be converted into self-organized systems by applying a new ecosystem design that uses “the work contributions of the environment” ( Odum, 1989 , p. 81). This top-down perspective, of reducing parts of nature into resource packages driven by energy input and output and transforming them into the service of human society, goes back to general systems theory, which in turn was inspired by cybernetic thinking. However, this is not the whole story: Behind the idea of reducing the environment to a working unit lurks a capitalist strategy. “‘ The economy’ and ‘ the environment’ are not independent of each other. Capitalism is not an economic system; it is a way of organizing nature ” ( Moore, 2015 , p. 2). “Capitalism—or of one prefers, modernity or industrial civilization—emerged out of Nature. It drew wealth from Nature. It disrupted, degraded, or defiled Nature ” ( Moore, 2015 , p. 5).

Howard T. Odum and Eugene Odum were both influential in establishing these ideas about self-organized and engineered ecosystems. Eugene Odum founded the independent Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia in 1967 (referred to as the Odum School), and he was the author of Fundamentals of Ecology ( 1953 ), an influential textbook in ecology to which his brother Howard T. Odum contributed the sections on energy flow and biogeochemistry ( Hagen, 2021 ). In the 1980s Eugene Odum commented “the possibility that ecosystems do function as general systems with self-organizing properties is to me a very exciting, unifying theory” ( Odum, 1984 , p. 559). This focus on energy flow diagrams inspired by systems theory as the only basic process in natural and human systems has been debunked by numerous authors as being a reductionist approach. Landscape ecologist Zev Naveh called the strategy of reducing everything to countable units a “real danger”; he noted that the Odum’s ecosystem approach provides only simplistic “ecological” explanations for human systems that could be interpreted as a “new kind of neo-materialistic ‘energy marxism’” ( Naveh, 1982 , p. 199). Ecology theorist Ludwig Trepl classified the Odum program as the technocratic branch of ecology that seeks perfection in dominating nature, commenting bitingly that “this was the latest attempt so far to grasp that which eludes predictability” ( Trepl, 1987 , p. 22).

It was precisely his unifying theory that Howard T. Odum had in mind when he developed experimental microcosm systems to apply the findings of self-organizational principles to larger ecosystems. Here, “self-organization” refers to the manipulation and monitoring of a succession observed in an experimental microcosm, consisting in the interaction of a limited number of species inside a vessel of a limited size. Odum had also offered this mesocosm concept to NASA in the 1970s as an experimental system designed to find out more about self-supporting life-support systems ( Odum & Odum, 2003 , p. 147). Although the concept was rejected, Odum continued to explore the possibility of domesticating ecosystems that can thus be “enclosed in concrete boxes to become the mainstays of environmental engineering” (p. 148).

Whereas in the 21st century , mesocosm studies are successfully used to monitor the impact of climate change ( Cavicchioli et al., 2019 ), still in the 1980 not much was known about upscaling processes and their effects. Odum had to admit that “most self-organization has been happenstance, often in spite of management efforts in some other direction” ( 1989 , p. 85). Based on rather weak experimental evidence, this statement reveals that his “self-organization” is more of a descriptive term derived from observing succession processes in very limited settings ( Kangas & Adey, 1996 ) and that the dynamics involved in upscaling processes were virtually unknown. Accordingly, one might be inclined to conclude that this concept of self-organization is driven primarily by an economy of promise and is fueled by Promethean visions of governing “new ecosystems” using systems theory and a set of engineering design tools.

With “Living Machines”—simultaneously a concept and a technical artifact—an idea of symbiotic, self-organized systems was carried forward in industrial ecology ( Zelov et al., 2001 ). However, the “ecology cells” created by the “New Alchemy Institute” were intended from the beginning to be applied in the limited context of wastewater treatment facilities or even individual households ( Todd & Josephon, 1996 ). This more modest approach was also confirmed by theoretical reflections on industrial ecology that concluded it is not possible to define specific measures and practical actions for achieving an overarching vision of sustainability in industrial society by relying on the general ecosystem theory. Rather, a focus on “local, situational and case specific” practices and models was emphasized, in other words, an approach that conceptually refuses a universal or global application ( Korhonen, 2005 , p. 37). An influential author ( Allenby, 2006 ) in the field has echoed this view, arguing that industrial ecology was perhaps one of the first fields not only to be aware of the “complex relationship between the normative and the objective” but also to contribute theoretically to a concept of mixed ontology, as it would be called from a philosophical perspective, “even without considering social science” ( Allenby, 2006 , p. 31), as he candidly admits.

Eventually, even as Odum capitalized on the ecotechnological impetus in environmental management fueled by the idea of a partnership with nature, at the same time he also contributed to the demise of the concept: “Ecotechnology may not be a good synonym for ecological engineering because it seems to omit the ecosystem part,” meaning “self-regulating processes of nature that make ecological self-designs low energy, sustainable, inexpensive, and different” ( Odum & Odum, 2003 , p. 240). Again, there is no conceptual demarcation here between self-organization and self-design ( Mitsch, 1992 ; Odum, 1989 ; Odum & Odum, 2003 ), just as ecotechnology and ecological engineering are used interchangeably ( Mitsch, 1992 ; Mitsch & Jörgensen, 1989 ). This could also be an indication that the epistemological status of technology in science and engineering is never clarified, leading to a constant confusion of values and categories: Instrumental schemes based on physical descriptions (such as self-organization and black boxing) are thus turned into prescriptive rules for pieces of nature without considering the constructive technicity either of the ecosystem scheme or of the imagined ecosystem in nature.

Other concepts of self-design refer more explicitly to ecotechnology and are intended as a basis for constructing a concise framework of principles, although the authors also explicitly acknowledge that they are using them in a “combination of axioms, heuristics and suggestions” ( Bergen et al., 2001 , p. 204). The heuristics of these ecological engineering design principles plays out clearly when the authors go back and forth in their arguments between design and ecosystem discourses, being quite explicit about the ambivalence of engineers designing ecosystems as one of their primary activities and the importance of including a value framework. It is in this context that the claim about an environment capable of being domesticated and made to serve human needs is turned into the more modest question: “What will nature help us to do?” This is explored by offering a discussion about the upstream and downstream effects of design decisions and about stakeholder participation, including the need for a strategy to deal with uncertainty and ignorance. It is argued, for instance, that “diversity provides insurance against uncertainty in addition to contributing to ecological resilience” ( Bergen et al., 2001 , p. 208). This links back to the concept of self-design. The fundamental ecotechnological claim of working for the benefit of society and nature is firmly attached here to an ethical framework that includes a commitment to risk management and reflecting about values during decision-making processes; such considerations encompass, for example, an equitable distribution of risk, intergenerational equity, and a concern for nonhuman species in particular. It might be an interesting follow-up question to ask whether a concept of self-design as deriving from systems theory still makes sense in a discourse that addresses design questions in a framework of adaptive management. Ross et al. argue, for example, “that any ecosystem design is likely to require adjustments over its lifespan, and indeed the most effective ecosystem designs are likely to be those that explicitly acknowledge the lack of any definite endpoint in time” ( 2015 , p. 435).

In conclusion, one might speculate about what might emerge if a conceptual framework for ecotechnological ecosystem design—beyond elaborate ecological knowledge about species and sites—also included (a) consideration of ethical issues from the very start; (b) an acknowledgment that we are living in an anthropocentric world; (c) that design is a goal-oriented practice, meaning that ecosystem functions must be prioritized; and (d) that the existence of ecosystems and species and their historical conditions are considered not only as scientific but also as philosophical issues (including the value of embodied time), as well as a lifeworld issue (such as the pleasure of interrelationships and caring). It is likely that consideration of these criteria offers a viable way to address the urgent need for the localized modulation or assimilation of humans into their limited world. Understood as basic tools for ecotechnological practices, they could serve as a guide for making ecological design and restoration ecology, industrial ecology, and ecological engineering more credible, socially resonant, and robust.

Ecotechnology in an Asian context (Japan, China, Taiwan)

Among the first scientists to use the term “eco-technology” was Shuhei Aida, an academic working in the field of systems engineering at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. He suggested the term in the early 1970s ( 1971 , cited in Aida, 1995 ; 1973 cited in Aida, 1983 ). Unfortunately, these early writings could not be found in international literature source systems. Interestingly, the references circulate rather phantom-like as a first mention of ecotechnology in scientific literature. Aida himself regularly referred to this earlier work. For example, an article published in 1995 presents a definition of ecotechnology using a box-like text format:

Professor S. Aida proposed the following definition for Ecotechnology in 1971 . Ecotechnology is the use of technology for ecosystem management. Ecotechnology is based upon a deep ecological understanding of mutual symbiosis in natural relationships. Ecotechnology is a mechanism for minimizing entropy production and the damage done to society and the environment by the products of entropy. The minimum entropy production concept attempts to optimize efficiency and effectiveness in society. Efficiency and effectiveness describe the various interactions which define our relationships with society and the environment. Ecotechnology is technology oriented towards ecology. ( Aida, 1995 , p. 1456)

The first universally verifiable source for the term “eco-technology” is the book The Humane Use of Human Ideas , edited by Aida and published in 1983 by Pergamon Press on behalf of the Honda Foundation. In the chapter “Fundamental Concepts of Eco-technology,” most of the terms used in the 1971 definition, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and entropy, do not appear. An exception to this is the term “symbiosis,” which is used in a dual sense: First, to characterize a “symbiosis of nature and artificials,” realized by means of “eco-mechanisms” and “construction of nature”—both are to characterize the eco-technology of the future ( Adia, 1983 , Figure 16.8, p. 301). Second, “symbiosis” is used to refer to the “symbiosis of man and society,” this being considered a “holistic function of culture” that eventually culminates in a “synthesis of culture with technology that is Eco-technology” ( Aida, 1983 , p. 308). This metaphor of symbiosis, in both senses, is also used in other national and disciplinary ecotechnological contexts, indicating an attempt to conceptualize the entanglement of different materials and energy as well as cultural artifacts. For instance, in industrial ecology there is a reference to “industrial symbiotic systems” ( Graedel & Allenby, 2010 , p. 232) and in ecological engineering to the symbiotic relationship between humans and their natural environment ( Mitsch & Jörgensen, 1989 ). In the Chinese context, the principle of symbiosis is asserted in ecological engineering, in industrial ecology as well as in emerging technologies ( Li, 2018 ; Ma, 1988 ; Yu & Zhang, 2021 ; Zhang et al., 1998 ).

Eco-Technology and Ecotechnology

Aida’s (1995) article promotes the application of ecotechnology in the AIES project (adaptive intelligent energy systems) and suggests that it can function as a blueprint for a symbiotic technology based on artificial intelligence. This ecotechnology is expected to enable the development of “sustainable, adaptable energy systems for the future,” mainly the construction of power facilities ( 1995 , p. 1458). The development and application of an “adaptive intelligence” is crucial for this project: The principle of ecological symbiosis is linked to the law of entropy and eventually results in a symbiotic self-organization process that enables environmentally benign design in many areas of society, technology, or the economy. It is interesting to note that, at about the same time, the concept of the “eco-thermodynamics” of natural resource depletion gained a certain momentum. It was pointed out that it is not the “finiteness of resource stocks, but the fragility of self-organized natural cycles that we have to fear. Unfortunately, the services provided by these cycles are part of the global commons. They are priceless, yet ‘free’” ( Ayres, 1996 , p. 11). Symbiotic processes of self-organization were expected to reinforce a mimetic ecotechnology that, so it was claimed, would initiate a third industrial revolution. Accordingly, it is not surprising that this technoscientific vision rests on a triple helix model, namely, a consortium consisting of Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, the Japanese International Foundation for Artificial Intelligence (IFAI) and, finally, TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Ecotechnology in this context becomes a program conceived as “ecological optimization in nature” ( Aida, 1995 , p. 1458) and thus a mode of technological design with nature, in which the human-built world, including industrial production, affords a better kind of nature than nature itself could ever build.

In the 1980s, Aida (1983) used the term “eco-technology” to express his unease with the “arrogance found in today’s technology” (p. 286), which he identified particularly with a supposedly inevitable interlocking of economics and technology, as indeed was presented shortly after this in the Brundtland report. Aida aligns himself instead with the Club of Rome report, explicitly seeking a “humanised approach” (p. 286) that should be based on a “productive collaboration between technology and ecology” (p. 286, emphasis in original) “to establish a new technological philosophy, based on ecological concepts and involving every aspect of scientific technology” (p. 288). For Aida, the key function of the “eco-technology” concept is to provide a “new ‘all-sided and multi-layered’ philosophy of science” (p. 286), offered within a holistic framework. This reference to a holistic view of ecotechnology has become a common currency in many Asian countries and is still visibly present. References can be found, for example, to concepts such as “holism, coordination, recycle and regeneration” in ecotechnology and ecological engineering, while its methods and practices should be based on principles of holistic planning and design ( Zhang et al., 1998 , p. 18). In Taiwan, ecotechnological methods and practices are promoted by the government based on a holistic view of problem-solving ( Chou et al., 2007 , p. 270). Additionally, the message contained in the very first preface of the Chinese journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology could be summed up by the key sentence that human civilization and nature are intertwined—“as inseparable as mind and body” ( Qu, 2020 , p. 1).

However, this holistic framing is not new to scientific ecology, to Western science and philosophy in general, or to international science policy. What is new, however, is to suggest that technology is a means of enabling humans to become adapted to—almost molded into—their environment, which is ecologically limited. This clearly goes beyond the idea of technology as mediating between abstract ideas and material forms, while simultaneously referring to the concept of technè in Greek philosophy. Aida’s work poses a powerful reminder of the 1970s debate on the limits to growth, and his plea to give up the “‘confrontational aspect’ of science and technology” ( Aida, 1983 , p. 283) leads him to the proposal that ecology should be understood as an all-embracing science because “all modern scientific technology, in the biological world around us, must be in harmony with, and a component of, nature” (p. 282). In Aida’s historical reconstruction of science and technology, it is the predominance of physical science that has resulted in science going down the wrong route and thus bringing about a “mistaken evolution of technological methodologies,” both moves being due to the “Western approach of confrontation and conquest of nature” (p. 283). Thus, the current global crisis of humanity’s oikos must necessarily be identified as being largely a consequence of the hubris of Western-style technology.

To address this drawback, Aida suggests that we turn to traditional Oriental, especially Chinese, philosophies that emphasize instead “the need for mankind to unite and cooperate with nature, so that both may continue in harmonious coexistence” ( Aida, 1983 , p. 283). Confucian concepts, he argues, could help us to (re-)introduce “the spirit” in a world of technology that is largely imagined and managed in its materialistic dimension. Aida believes that an ecotechnological philosophy, meaning an “all-round ecological approach to the future,” could bring about this turnaround and close the gap between the material and the ethical, the materialistic and the spiritual in science and technology ( Aida, 1983 , p. 290). Environmental pollution and excessive industrial production could only take hold to such an extent, he argues, because ethical and spiritual issues have been pushed firmly into the background behind material and economic growth in the development of scientific technology.

Aida offers some thoughts on how an ecotechnological philosophy might work to nurture the role of a nonmaterial dimension in science and technology and to combat “Western-made” problems. He suggests that we distinguish between “hard pollution,” the contamination of the physical environment, and “mental pollution,” the latter being the more critical pollution, particularly since it is more difficult to perceive and control. In a visual representation reminiscent of the cybernetics-inspired ecosystem figures of the Odum brothers, “eco-technology” is portrayed as the means of connecting society, energy, and natural resources so that it becomes a means to short-circuit the “problem of human mind,” “future society,” and “technical control” ( Aida, 1983 , p. 291). The resulting eco-technological system then covers the totality of individuals, minds, ambitions, and actions bound together in a society in which the spheres of matter, energy, and information are closely interconnected. Such a modern society, Aida argues in conclusion, is organized by the work of men and machines, “involving many different kinds of interaction between technology, nature and art” (p. 298). In this societal model, ecological science can “offer essential knowledge from nature to form an environmentally harmonious system” (p. 300). Correspondingly, it is eco-technology, the “adjustment technique,” that is expected to synthetize culture and technology, both conceptually and functionally (p. 308). As far as the problem with so-called mental pollution in this eco-technological system is concerned—how it might be characterized, detected, and handled—nothing further is mentioned, and thus the dilemma of an eco-tech-culture persists. In any case, the all-embracing understanding of eco-technology as a technique of adjustment in a world framed in terms of cybernetics acquires something of the uncanny.

Technology and Nature in Harmony?

“Eco-technology” continues to be used more recently in the Asian context, on the one hand in general reflections about sustainable science, and on the other hand, in the sense of establishing ecotechnological practices. Some elements of the narrative discussed above have disappeared, such as the concept of hard versus mental pollution, or the entropy models that conflate the spheres of matter and energy, animate and inanimate, society and nature. Others have persisted, however, such as Western philosophy still being criticized for building “a human empire enslaving nature” and foregrounding an anthropocentric worldview that “does not allow for any restraint in relation to nature, and thus led to the creation of severe environmental constraints” ( Ishida & Furukawa, 2013 , p. 135). A new kind of technology is expected to unfold based on Japanese Buddhist philosophies referring to the core idea that “all living things–mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, and all the land, are imbued with the Buddhist spirit,” and therefore all “living things including humans are seen to be part of the same cycle of life” ( Ishida & Furukawa, 2013 , p. 142). Rethinking the relationship between human beings and nature in the light of environmental constraints thus also means creating a new form of technology that “helps people live wholesome, spiritually fulfilling lives” ( Ishida & Furukawa, 2013 , p. 143) and developing new lifestyles in this limited world. The notion of adjustment as a technique resonates in these ideas, with the individual never dissolving fully into general categories or physical quantities, as is the case in the more technocratic ecotechnological philosophy of Shuhei Aida. Instead, technological potential is seen in the cultivation of a playful and skillful appropriation of things and ways of acting in society. It is this technology incorporated into culture that balances the spiritual and the material sphere, eventually resulting in an industrial revolution which embraces a more relational view of nature. The authors propose a philosophical approach they call “Nature Technology” that revolves around the following four claims: (a) Technology “realizes high function/ultra-low environmental impact with nature as a point of departure,” (b) “is simple and easy to understand,” (c) “encourages communication and community,” and (d) “inspires attachment and affection” ( Ishida & Furukawa, 2013 , p. 153). Each of these elements additionally provides interesting linkages to approaches developed in social and political ecology in Europe, Latin America, and North America (see section “Social/Political Ecology”), as well as to new materialism and posthuman theories (see section “ Another Semantic Turn of Ecotechnology/Ecotechnics ”).

Sustainability and Ecotechnological Agency

The term “eco-technology” appears on the scene when it comes to the socio-technical implementation of sustainable products and to behavior in everyday life, particularly in the world of consumption. Japan is considered as having a diversified and an economically impressive market in highly advanced eco-technologies. At the same time it is said that Japanese citizens have the highest environmental awareness compared to other industrialized countries so that one might “rightly expect a synergy between the launch of eco-products and high citizen awareness” ( Ishida & Furukawa, 2013 , p. 12) and an improved situation in general. However, it has been shown that the “eco-dilemma”—the steady degradation of the global environment—cannot be solved with eco-technologies because increasing consumption is cancelling out the positive effects of green technology, particularly when greenwashing takes over. This has been identified as a kind of rebound effect and has led to a call to change the precondition of eco-technologies that is allied with the socioeconomic formula “people’s desires = convenience and comfort = a prosperous life” (p. 17). Accordingly, it is argued that partially optimized eco-technologies are not sufficient, particularly if they only involve replicating the technological fix of conventional manufacturing, with a layer of green camouflage added on. Technology that truly acknowledges the existence of environmental constraints, then, should be understood as a socio-technical contribution to innovative lifestyles in which new forms of prosperity must be developed and where values and virtues such as responsibility and self-restraint are incorporated into the creation of products and lifestyles alike. However, this would require going beyond recent eco-technologies. Thus, in the Japanese context too, it seems that eco-technology has lost its heuristic persuasiveness as well as its socio-technical power. By contrast, in the Chinese and the Taiwanese context ecotechnology is gaining momentum: It is being incorporated into governmental road maps and is becoming more and more visible in institutional settings. Scientific journals, research centers, and businesses have been established that have the term “ecotechnology” in their name, and most of them see themselves in the tradition of ecological engineering or restoration ecology.

Sociopolitical Imagineries and Agency in International Networking

The ground was well prepared for the emergence of ecotechnology in the 1970s in terms of the sociopolitical imaginaries being linked to ecological thinking. From the beginning, issues about humankind and its habitat were seen in their international dimension, not least as a result of the science policymaking organized by various scientific, industrial, or philanthropic foundations or in the context of activities initiated by the United Nations. Still under the impression of World War II, the volume Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth was published in 1956 , the voluminous outcome of an interdisciplinary conference funded by the American Wenner-Gren foundation for Anthropological Research and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The wording of ecotechnology did not appear, but “man as an agent of change” that should “strive toward a condition of equilibrium with its environment” ( Sears, 1956 , p. 473) was the dominant leitmotif. The concern put forward by American public intellectual Lewis Mumford captured the zeitgeist when he called for a self-transformation of the conditions of the Anthropos, that is humankind, itself, pointing out that

what will happen to this earth depends very largely upon man’s capacities as a dramatist and creative artist, and that in turn depends in no slight measure upon the estimate he forms of himself. What he proposes to do to the earth, utilizing its soils, its mineral resources, its water, its flows of energies, depends largely upon his knowledge of his own historic nature and his plans for his own further self-transformations. ( Mumford, 1956 , p. 1146)

In the context of ethics, the idea of nature and technology being in a cooperative ( Allianztechnologie ) rather than a confrontational relationship was—and still is—popular, as is expressed in Ernst Bloch’s often-quoted analogy about the present technology standing in nature like an occupying army in enemy territory and knowing nothing of the interior ( Bloch, 1985 ). In a further ethical twist, the debate was also linked with the holism debate present in the ontological strand of ecology from the beginning ( Bergandi, 2011 , p. 36). An ecological ethic of using technology to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature was appealing and was often linked to values such as the integrity of the biosphere or the use of nature in an ecologically sound manner. At the same time, it was very common to criticize the Promethean quest of using technology to dominate nature (e.g., Bookchin, 1977 ). Accordingly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the call to action grew louder as the widely exploitative and destructive character of humankind came to be sensed by many people to be both menacing and dehumanizing; in this context, the global environmental movement gained momentum. This was by no means a uniform phenomenon. Instead, there were different “policy styles” that evolved out of different national contexts, spawned by the interactions among stakeholders in government administrations, the economy, academia, and civil society ( Jamison, 2001 , p. 102). In the U.S. environmental movement, political philosopher and environmental activist Murray Bookchin was a creative “dramatist” and multiplier at the same time. He fleshed out the concept of “ecotechnology” on the occasion of his preparation for the UN Conference on Human Settlements in 1974 and issued the following statement: “If the word ‘ecotechnology’ is to have more than a strictly technical meaning, it must be seen as the very ensemble itself functionally integrated with human communities as part of a shared biosphere of people and non-human life forms” ( Bookchin, 1977 , p. 79). In parallel to the conceptualization of ecotechnology, interdisciplinary collaboration and the trading of concepts and theories were stimulated during an interim phase of about 20 years, starting in the 1970s.

When the first report commissioned by the Club of Rome was published, it almost coincided with the date of the first environmental summit of the United Nations in Stockholm in 1972 , in a sense the birth of environmental diplomacy. The summary of the general debate notes—not without a hint of drama—that “the Conference was launching a new liberation movement to free men from the threat of their thraldom to environmental perils of their own making” ( UN Conference on the Human Environment, 1973 , p. 45). Shortly after the conference the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) was founded and became the coordinating body for the United Nations’ environmental activities. One of the dominant topics became the limits to growth and economic development, particularly in less developed countries. The term “eco-development” was introduced by the incumbent secretary-general, Maurice Strong, as an alternative form of economic development to the globally occurring pattern of economic expansion; the term seeped rapidly into debates about social and political theories. It appeared repeatedly in various bodies belonging to international organizations and was also adopted by research centers affiliated with these. The debates about models of economic growth and limited resources were dominant for a while, eventually leading in the 1980s to a debate about environmental pollution ( Moll, 1991 ; Radkau, 2014 ). Perhaps ironically, this issue had already been “forecast” in The Limits to Growth , a book that, perhaps apart from the Bible, had become one of the most hotly disputed and successful books ever published.

‘Unlimited’ resources thus do not appear to be the key to sustaining growth in the world system. Apparently, the economic impetus such resource availability provides must be accompanied by curbs on pollution if a collapse of the world system is to be avoided ( Meadows et al., 1972 , p. 133).

Less extreme categories emerged subsequently to combine environmental care and economic growth: The time for the term “sustainability” had come. In 1983 , the United Nations established the World Commission on Environment and Development. It was headed by the Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in 1987 presented the report “Our Common Future” and made “sustainability” the pivotal point of the report. Eco-development and ecotechnology did not appear here explicitly. Instead, key issues associated with ecotechnology were included in the concept of sustainable development.

Social/Political Ecology

In the 1970s ecologically oriented debates, political economy, and social theories came together in various frameworks, and ecotechnology became a key concept in different settings. Authors involved in these debates referred to either social ecology or political ecology, but the differences were determined less by content or a particular set of theories than by institutional settings. Similarly, in historical reconstructions of social ecology ( Luke, 1987 ) or political ecology ( Escobar, 2010 ), the same authors (such as Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Amory Lovins, and Murray Bookchin) might be claimed as important scholars. It has also been pointed out that utopian political thought comes from the tradition of social philosophy with its historical roots in the 18th century , in the political ideas of Henri Rousseau, for example, and can also be located in the utopian literature of the 19th century , such as in William Morris, Peter Kropotkin, or Henry David Thoreau.

There are several possible narrative strands available to tell the story of the conjuncture of ecotechnology and social ecology. One important nexus is certainly an experimental project in the 1970s, the “Vermont Installation,” which served to combine ecotechnology with ecocommunity. It was launched by Murray Bookchin, an American political philosopher, social theorist, and activist, who called for new forms of knowledge with respect to the use of technology. Most likely, he was also the first to explicitly link the idea of an ecologically informed technology with the project of “social ecology.” He considered his project an ensemble that “has the distinct goal of not only meeting human needs in an ecologically sound manner—one which favors diversity within an ecosystem—but of consciously promoting the integrity of the biosphere” ( Bookchin, 1977 , p. 79). He, too, just like many of his contemporaries, criticized the Promethean attitude that sees technology as a means of dominating and colonizing nature, ultimately leading to energy-, pollutant-, and capital-intensive growth. What is required instead, he argued, is an ecological ethic to tame technological excess in order ultimately to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature:

Ecotechnology would use the inexhaustible energy capacities of nature—the sun and wind, the tides and waterways, the temperature differentials of the earth and the abundance of hydrogen around us as fuels—to provide the ecocommunity with non-polluting materials or wastes that could be easily recycled ( Bookchin, 1980 , p. 69).

Bookchin advocated a transformation of both capitalism and socialism toward a radical social ecology, the utopia of a “post-scarcity anarchism” ( 1986 ) that would ultimately create a more humane and balanced society capable of caring properly for its organic and inorganic environment. He considered two agents of change as being particularly promising in the quest to generate ecotechnology as a liberatory technology: First, the implementation of the principle “small is beautiful” ( Schumacher, 1973 ) in technological devices and machines, and, second, the integration of ecotechnologies into local environments and everyday practices. He argued that self-management, community empowerment, and household production are crucial for compliance with the ecological constraints of every bioregion ( Bookchin, 1980 , p. 27). Small-scale agriculture and scaling down industry to the needs of a community would not only mimic ecosystems/nature but also become a self-sustaining ecosystem, a basic communal unit of social life. This ecocommunity would be guided by a permanent critically verifying and reifying process of the “making” of a liberated self “capable of turning time into life, space into community, and human relationships into the marvelous” ( Bookchin, 1986 , p. 66).

Bookchin was not alone in seeking new forms of social organization and technological practices and a revival of personal moral responsibility and democratic citizenship in the practices of everyday life. Other social ecologists—even if they did not use the term explicitly—also advocated ecotechnology in the sense of a less destructive technological approach toward nature and a transformation of the prevailing economic order. However, the range of positions was remarkably broad and varied and included fairly radical, direct-action programs such as Bookchin’s, the quest to awaken a moral consciousness that views nature as a moral force ( Schumacher, 1973 ) and the call for a simplification of everyday life ( Illich, 1975/2014 ). More moderate ideas included environmental policy reform—including calls for a new class of experts, or “ecomanagers” (Amory B. Lovins or Hazel Henderson)—and Marxist positions dealing with nature more efficiently and at the same time preventing the overproduction of commodities (André Gorz). All these positions entailed enlisting different agents of change willing to work toward an ecological future with their different motivations. Timothy W. Luke suggests that this rather complex situation can be divided into two strands of political strategy. The first of these places its hope in the educational impact of political actions and writings that would ultimately enable agents of change to tackle the ecological crisis. This so-called soft path is characterized mainly by an appeal to individual decision-making, moral insight, and bottom-up processes of social change. The hard path, by contrast, considers the state to be a key agent of social change, one that uses “bureaucratic coercion, material incentives, and scientific persuasion” ( Luke, 1987 , p. 305) from its operational toolbox to solve the environmental and technological problems identified. Luke is not very optimistic that the full potential of social ecology will be realized in practice, yet he does see some potential in the European Green Parties “to provide a practical model for the effective politicization of social ecology” (p. 314). A more recent critique has pointed out that the declarations that emerged from progressive oppositional politics in the 1970s and 1980s to explain environmental degradation made reference “solely to human-to-human hierarchies and oppressions” and not to a broader network of actors, and that this “can look like an evasion of the need to accord to the nonhuman a disconcerting agency of its own” ( Clark, 2012 , p. 152).

“Soziale Naturwissenschaft” (Social Natural Science)—Another Ecotechnology?

Another closely related narrative strand can be identified in the German-speaking context, even though it did not directly address the connection between ecotechnology and the story of social ecology—in fact, the word ecotechnology was even not used. However, the concept of social [natural] science acquired a certain momentum in the 1980s and established a connection to the more general discourse in philosophy and sociology about the transformation of science, technology, the economy, societal institutions, and personal lifestyles. Other authors were rather skeptical about these suggestions for “ways of expanding ecology” ( Böhme & Grebe, 1985 ) or claiming it as a so-called key science ( Leitwissenschaft ). Historian and philosopher of ecology Ludwig Trepl pointed out that the history of ecology itself

shows most clearly that there is nothing one could unproblematically ‘latch onto’ theoretically: neither the traditional natural history route nor even the strand modernized by systems theory and cybernetics displays the characteristics of an ‘alternative, non-dominating etc. relation to nature’ ( Trepl, 1987 , p. 227; emphasis in original).

The working group “Soziale Naturwissenschaft” at the Technical University in Darmstadt was actively involved in case studies looking at water management projects in Egypt and Germany that were highly problematic in technological and ethical terms. In the course of addressing these concerns, they formulated the need for a new type of knowledge that they dubbed “basic research for applied science” ( Anwendungsgrundlagen ) ( Böhme & Grebe, 1985 , p. 38). They argued that pressing environmental problems cannot be solved by scientific communities organized along traditional disciplinary lines but that new epistemic forms and practices need to be established that are oriented toward problem-solving and include a normative element of theoretical reflexivity. This idea of a “nature policy for the whole society” ( gesamtgesellschaftliche Naturpolitik ) ( Böhme & Grebe, 1985 , p. 38) ultimately set in motion a reorientation and a reassessment of interdisciplinary and later transdisciplinary research that addressed this issue in different research programs. These dealt with questions regarding human-nature metabolism, and most of them shared the assumptions that, first, humans exert a significant impact on nature (as Marx had noted), second, this relation emerged historically—that is, nature itself has a history—and, third, accordingly, the human-nature relation is produced and not just given, necessitating a normative framework. Recent work on socio-ecological transformation takes these ideas, substantiates them, and implements them in design principles relating to society and biodiversity, such as “focusing on relationships between society and nature,” “enabling coexistence,” “strengthening resilience,” as well as in the pursuit of a critically constructive and democratic participatory development of technology ( Jahn et al., 2020 ). Accordingly, the concept of socio-ecological design in the Anthropocene clearly stands in more than a merely analogous or metaphorical relationship to the concept “ecotechnology” as discussed in social ecology by, among others, Bookchin. The same goes for other important research programs dealing with issues of society-nature metabolism. In addition to the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research (ISOE) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (ISOE), where the research discussed above was conducted, there are other institutions, such as the research platform for socio-ecological transformations at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna, Austria, or the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, United States. If one had to name a common denominator among all the actors working in the field of socio-ecological transformation, it may be the commitment to transformation in the present (rather than in the future) and to enabling the political implementation of principles for socio-technical design and decision-making.

Social Ecology Interwoven With Industrial Ecology

Another narrative strand of social ecology is that of ecotechnics ( Ökotechnik ), which clearly signals the notion of technological innovation as ecological modernization. The concept of ecotechnics was first developed out of industrial ecology, and its proponents claim that it arose not “from ideological preference, but from the geo- and biospheric reality of societal metabolism” ( Huber, 1986 , p. 283). Ecotechnics and ecological sustainability are two sides of the same coin, the former providing the ecologically informed technology that serves the official government credo in industrialized countries regarding the ecological modernization of society. With ecotechnics, the greening of technology and science goes hand in hand with both a mechanization and a monetarization of ecological contexts. In an ecotechnic context, a naturally balanced system is disrupted by technological means and replaced by the technological production of an artificial eco-equilibrium. Proponents of ecotechnics are aware that this constitutes a far-reaching manipulation of the metabolism of materials and energy that, ultimately, would transform planetary water cycles and also the earth’s climate ( Huber, 1986 , p. 86). This idea of transforming the metabolism of natural systems in favor of industrial production fits perfectly into the strategy—criticized as being a capitalist strategy—of reducing the environment to a matter of managing labor and resources and, ultimately, of reorganizing nature.

It is openly asserted that ecotechnics has the character of a breakthrough technology (similar to biotechnology); accordingly, its aim is not to adapt industrial processes, structures, or products to eco-cycles that have hitherto been given by nature (an idea attributed to conservative parts of the ecology movement). Instead, ecotechnics “breaks up natural materials and their interrelationships, breaks them down, breaks through them and tries to reconstruct them according to its own will” ( Huber, 1986 , p. 86). This rather “bellicose” description is generally countered immediately by the comment that it is a constitutive part of human activity to intervene in nature and thereby change both nature and itself to some extent as a result. This echoes the philosophical idea that humans have never encountered a pristine nature but rather are always dealing with an environment that is nature already transformed and that they appropriate through work.

Clearing, burning, hunting, digging furrows, diverting water, rummaging through the earth for mineral resources, producing garbage, thus consuming, changing and substituting natural resources, man appropriated nature from the beginning, made it his environment. His culture always already created a nature-culture, in the good like in the bad ( Mittelstraß, 1992 , p. 21).

This anthropological determination reinforces the bellicose tone and leaves little room for hope or for any credibility of the claim that ecotechnics can also mean development in an “intelligent and cultivated way” ( Huber, 1986 , p. 86). With this ecotechnics, ecological modernization is positioned in the tradition of progressive technology development that is open-ended, the key being new technologies such as renewable clean energy, new materials, and new modes of production and practices. This resembles the widespread picture of a technological development that comes up against ecological limits to growth while at the same time discovering ways to shift these limits and to permanently “increase the ecological carrying capacity of the geosphere and biosphere for humans” ( Huber, 1986 , p. 279). This ecotechnics fits quite well with the strategy of the Brundtland report, which was published just one year later: In an anthropocentric world structured by hierarchies and colonialisms, nature is dealt with accordingly.

Ecotechnics as Problem-Based Learning

The study program Ecotechnics/Ecoteknik was launched at the university college of Östersund, Sweden, in 1983 and became a pioneering model in combining theoretical knowledge with practical action. What eventually emerged was a problem-based learning method. After the turn of the millennium the program was renamed “Ecotechnology,” thus promoting a concept of sustainable development intended to link ecological, economic, and technological elements in a cooperative and productive way with an entrepreneurial focus. The program specialized in environmental science and environmental engineering, and courses were also offered on socioeconomic issues and on national and international environmental policy structures. Key topics included a number of important instruments for the sustainable use of bioresources in society, such as life cycle and environmental impact assessments, as well as the international environmental management system (EMAS, ISO, etc.) and environmental law ( Grönlund et al., 2014 ). Later, the program was split into three strands: First, ecoengineering, an interdisciplinary course with an engineering focus; second, ecoentrepreneurship, designed to impart special skills in social entrepreneurship and green production; and, third, ecotechnology, which somehow mediated between the two other strands. The participants attending Ecotechnics ’95, the International Symposium on Ecological Engineering in Östersund, agreed that “ecotechnics is defined as the method of designing future societies within ecological frames” ( Thofelt & Englund, 1995 , p. xvi).

One of the core values of the study program is that knowledge must be turned into practical action. Students are taught how biological and ecological systems work and at the same time how to handle complex systems and the sustainable use of local resources. Another important value is the development of the concept of resilience, not only to understand theoretically resilient socio-ecological systems but also to develop self-management skills. Resilience is understood here in the sense of a general theory of adaptive systems. The concept, developed for the modeling of ecological systems ( Holling, 1973 ), was transformed, extended, and applied to the teaching formats in the ecotechnics program. Resilient systems are considered to exhibit similar patterns when they accumulate resources, increase connectedness, or decrease resilience, and they are able to compensate for periods of crisis and transformation. Accordingly, resilience can be understood as an approach to adapting to changing environments, including coping with daily practical life by developing “ego resilience” ( Cohn et al., 2009 , p. 362). Finally, resilience is considered a way of thinking that could be used to analyze social-ecological systems and be applied to social, management, and individual systems. One of the important experiences afforded by the study program is that learning skills takes more time than learning facts, so that more time must be allowed for this—even if it comes at the expense of theoretical knowledge. Students who applied to study for this degree had a reputation for not knowing much but for being good problem-solvers, which was considered an advantage in terms of interdisciplinary project work and problem-solving capacity ( Grönlund et al., 2014 ). “During the period when the Ecotechnics/Ecotechnology was a 2-year education program one employer even said: ‘These Ecotechnics students, they don‘t know much, but they always solve the problem you give them!” ( Grönlund et al., 2014 , p. 18). Meanwhile, the popularity of problem-based learning has increased enormously and has become an established method in academic teaching not only in Sweden. To conclude, it is interesting to note that one of the discursive strands of ecotechnics led to the development of a successful teaching method in general based on combining ecology-inspired theories (mainly resilience) and consideration of the wisdom of everyday practices.

An Ecotechnological Rationality for Latin America

Latin American social ecology has been embedded from the start in a discourse about the decolonization of scientific knowledge and about eco-development, as put forward at the first UN conference in 1972 in Stockholm on the human environment. It was clearly seen that the models and concepts developed in fully industrialized countries were not an appropriate fit for Latin American contexts. Accordingly, the publication of “Limits to Growth,” which elaborated a so-called world model, was matched by the publication in 1976 of a Latin American world model entitled “Catastrophe or New Society?,” written by a group of scholars coordinated by Argentinian geologist Amílcar Herrera. Environmental deterioration and poverty were identified as the main factors of environmental degradation, underlining the need to design and apply proposals based on eco-development. In the years following this, Latin America became an important player on the global international scene. For example, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was founded, which brought together an interdisciplinary group of ecologists, economists, and scholars from other disciplines to study the particular environmental problems of the different regions. A Latin American group for the Analysis of Ecological Systems was set up in 1980 and published “The Ecological Future of a Continent: A Prospective Vision of Latin America,” which in some ways foreshadowed the Brundtland report of 1987 . A couple of years later, the Brundtland publication “Our Common Future” was similarly matched by a Latin American study “Our Own Agenda” ( 2005 ), which received support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Inter-American Development Bank.

It is important to note that Latin American social ecology has always been a search for an epistemological concept of environment. The concern behind such a concept is to help deconstruct the nonsustainable rationality of modernity and instead construct “alternative sustainable worlds guided by an environmental rationality” ( Leff, 2010 , p. 10). For many actors working within international organizations, Latin America seemed to be a useful real-world laboratory in which to apply and explore the ideas contained in eco-development. One of the main proponents was political economist Ignacy Sachs, who successfully disseminated the concept in Latin America and promoted eco-development in different institutions such as universities, municipalities, and government agencies. The creation of the Center for Eco-development in Mexico was one of the outcomes of this networking campaign, the aim being to foster a generation of policies for development “in harmony with ecosystem conditions in Mexico” ( Leff, 2010 , p. 6). Following this, the environmental issue was debated in many Latin American countries, including the problem of how to produce forms of knowledge suited to tackle environmental management issues. Accordingly, identifying socio-environmental problems always meant combining economic, political, and social analysis with specific case studies on deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil and nutrient erosion, and, later on, climate change.

Enrique Leff, a Mexican economist and environmental sociologist, pointed out that a simple transfer of technostructures from temperate industrialized regions to tropical underdeveloped countries poses particular problems on social, economic, and biological levels. He noted critically that “the social productive forces created through the technological harnessing of nature’s laws become a force destructive of the material processes that are their source of wealth and development” ( Leff, 1986 , p. 686). This constitutes an argument against a productive process dominated by extraction, exploitation, and a general technological transformation of natural resources that goes far beyond the capacity of ecological conditions to maintain resilience. The term “technostructure” already implies the work of adaption and integration into the productivity of a particular ecological system. It denotes a technological system defined—and constrained—by the ecological conditions of natural productivity and by the productivity of individuals and collectives in a social entity in their quest to appropriate the technological means of production. It is important to note that this is imagined as a two-way process of adaptation that follows a repertoire of heuristics, affords new skills and new knowledge, and is accompanied by the development of monitoring instruments that eventually enable self-management.

The conceptualization of an ecotechnological ( Leff, 1986 ) or environmental ( Leff, 2010 ) rationality receives support from the idea of an ecological rationality as suggested by the ABC Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, both located in Munich, dedicated to studying adaptive cognition and behavior ( Todd et al., 2012 ). Their main thesis is that ecological rationality is lead in part by using simple heuristics and in part by the structure of the environment: “In what environment does a given heuristic perform better than a complex strategy, and when is the opposite true? This is the question of the ecological rationality of a heuristic” ( Todd et al., 2012 , p. 5). Ecotechnological and ecological rationality both assume that it is only rational to rely on the local environment and a proven pattern of thinking, and that adaptive behavior emerges from a dynamic interaction between mind and world.

In an ecotechnological process designed this way, cultural values are embedded in workflows and in the design of technological artifacts, while, conversely, a transformation of values takes place during the process of resource exploitation as imposed by external political and market forces (government, international economic conditions, etc.). In this way, a system of carefully interrelated natural and technological resources is generated that is attuned to the order of cultural values provided by the local political and economic conditions ( Leff, 1994 , p. 6). This adjustment process is based on an eco-technological rationality that relies on the idea of integrative ecotechnological principles; that is, productive potential is based on an ecosystemic organization of resources and new socioeconomic formations ( Leff, 1994 , p. 3). This ultimately generates technological innovation, accompanied by a reorganization and relocation of industrial production, including societal action and innovative products. Eco-technological rationality thus emerges from a historical, cultural, and political process that provides orientation for a form of ecotechnological production rooted in social values and lifestyles, produces socio-technical innovation, and affords an institutional transformation. In this sense eco-technological rationality is the precondition for potential eco-development.

Leff’s suggestion of an “ecotechnological paradigm” became an important working concept with which to explore the new field of knowledge around a prudent and sustainable development of socioeconomic formations, cultural knowledge, and ecological resources. The conceptual basis for implementing this comprehensive program was constituted by three independent spheres of productivity, namely, the cultural, the ecological, and the technological ( Leff, 1986 , p. 691). The skill required in the planning process is to discover, define, and evaluate the relevant technostructure that has already internalized the necessary ecosystem services. This technostructure then takes shape and acquires a specific technical materialization. It is then presented to the community in such a way that people can accept and assimilate the new knowledge and are empowered to participate in the management processes of their own productive resources.

An Epistemology of Ecotechnology?

Founded in 1976 , the Mexican Association of Epistemology held its first conference on the topic of ecodevelopment models. Unsurprisingly, the conference issued the statement that the environmental crisis is a consequence of the established hegemonic economic and epistemic orders. A need was identified to seek out “environmental rationalities through a dialogue of knowledges with the critical Western thinking now underway in science, philosophy and ethics” ( Leff, 2010 , p. 2). As a consequence, a new culture of epistemological practices emerged that transformed European theories and concepts while at the same time creating a specific concept of knowledge that emphasized the “ecological potentials and the cultural diversity of our continent” ( Leff, 2010 , p. 9). Leff points in particular to the productive engagement with French philosophy, in particular with authors such as Bachelard, Canguilhem, or Derrida, which ultimately led to an understanding of environment as otherness. This allowed an empirical–functional concept of environment to emerge in contrast to more holistic–systemic ones. From the very beginning, investigation of the environment of a certain population (its milieu) included economic and social issues and was not reduced to a mere natural science perspective, one associated with a seemingly value-free collection of data. This is what Leff addressed as being beyond “the logocentrism of science, as the ‘other’ of established scientific theories” ( Leff, 2010 , p. 8). In this framework, nature is still seen as a distinct ontological domain, but it is now acknowledged that it has become inextricably hybridized with culture and technology and that it is also produced by knowledge systems.

All this opened up new fields of political ecology in Latin America, which began working with concepts such as “environment as potential” and “environmental complexity,” the latter understood in terms of self-organization, emergence, nonhierarchy, and nonlinear dynamic processes. Philosopher Arturo Escobar identifies in Leff’s works a “neo-realism derived from complexity” that might allow for a “different reading of the cultural dimension of nature–culture regimes” ( Escobar, 2010 , p. 97). This, he points out, could afford a political ecology in which knowledge is considered a product of lived experience and is co-produced in an environment that is characterized first and foremost by an indifferent relational potentiality toward the cultural and the natural world without immediately drawing an epistemological line between the two. However, as Escobar admits, it is still difficult to maneuver between the interpretive frameworks of constructivists and essentialists, and the move toward a better understanding of relationality, incorporating multiple modes of knowing, is not yet clearly spelled out. Further elaboration of the concept of ecotechnology could indeed be a worthwhile path to pursue.

Another Semantic Turn of Ecotechnology/Ecotechnics

That humans encounter an environment that is already nature transformed and that is subject to progressive technological development is a narrative expounded with differing points of emphasis. Whereas philosopher Mittelstraß (1992) argues that nature has never been part of the living world of humans—because they transform nature into their environment through work—historian Bill McKibben, in his well-known book The End of Nature , brings in a temporal dimension: “We have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—its separation from human society” ( McKibben, 1990 , p. 80). Another point of view is put forward by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that if we regard nature as that which fulfills its purpose by itself, “then we must also regard technology as a purpose of nature, because from it comes the animal that is capable of technology–or needs it”—that is, the human being ( Nancy, 2011 , p. 55). Accordingly, he suggests locating technology at the center of nature rather than constructing it as its opposite or as other. Technology has its own developmental dynamic and finds its own order in that it responds to demands and needs. The breeding of plants and animals, new chemical elements, and the construction of technical infrastructures are examples of this momentum, which may or may not be triggered by humans and cannot be controlled by them. All this is summed up in the term “ Ökotechnie ” denoting the technological becoming of the world ( Nancy, 1991 , p. 38). It is a technoscientific world of possibilities, unstable and plastic, consisting of highly interwoven and nested assemblages in which “ends and means incessantly exchange their roles” ( Nancy, 2011 , p. 56), and the idea of a greater order has been abandoned: There is no longer any intelligent design. Instead, the world has become a technosphere and is compounded of innumerous bits and pieces, all of them somehow related to or sprouting from the well-known technologically armored animal that has itself become part of a network of intelligence ( Hörl, 2011 , p. 17). This dynamic structure with a common though not constructed origin in Homo faber is what Nancy calls an “ecosystem, which is an ecotechnology” ( Nancy, 2011 , p. 66) endowed with the potential to permanently renew and revitalize itself. The concept is not developed further here, but in his earlier writings Nancy had put forward a critique of instrumentalized nature:

So-called ‘natural life,’ from its production to its conservation, its needs, and its representations, whether human, animal, vegetal, or viral, is henceforth inseparable from a set of conditions that are referred to as ‘technological,’ and which constitute what must rather be named ecotechnology ( Nancy, 2007 , p. 94).

The only nature that exists is thus the one already de-structured and recombined by ecotechnologies. When one speaks of “nature,” one refers to a representation of nature that is already remodeled by ecotechnology. Accordingly, ecotechnology is a thoroughgoing technological manipulation, and humans are the subject of an ecotechnological creation. Humans’ ecotechnological activities establish the conditions for any appearance or dynamics of nature, outside or inside the laboratory, for humans and for humans’ milieu, mediated or not through a particular medium. Even when one engages physically with nature outside, this is already ecotechnologized nature, be it a historical cultural landscape, a nature reserve, or the ever more visible heralds of climate change. This conceptualization stands in stark contrast to the alliance technology discussed above and to ecotechnology for the benefit of humans and nature, whatever that may mean in detail and however manipulative it may be in ecological engineering or restoration.

Another technological layer is added when humans engage with visual representations of this ecotechnologized nature outside. Weather, for instance, has—at least for a large part of urban populations—become a phenomenon that takes place mainly on a computer or television screen. The same goes for experiences of nature, for encounters with nondomesticated animals, and, of course, for the greenhouse effect and the hole in the ozone. Media technologies can be considered naturalized in that they offer simulations of nature and may become the only points of reference for experiences and knowledge of nature. In this way, many interactions with the biosphere—including measurements as well as representations—not only become part of an ecotechnologically mediated global information turnover but also crucially raise the problem of how nature is perceived and narrated at all.

The latter has also become an issue in educational programs at international and national levels, where ignorance of the sorely needed shift from the usual nature-culture separation toward ecotechnology in Nancy’s terms has been criticized for distorting reality. To counteract this conceptual habit, education scholars Anette Gough and Noel Gough suggest that “we need to attend much more closely to the micro-politics of subjective life. . . to participate more fully, self-critically, and reflexively in the cultural narratives within which identity, agency, knowledges and ecotechnologies are discursively produced” ( 2014 , p. 6). They conclude that environmental education should move away from expounding common but misleading ideas about nature. Instead, they argue, there should be a focus on narrating environmental issues through the ecotechnological framework, as this provides a more compelling way of preparing people for sustainable development, which depends on the interconnectedness of cultural, economic, and environmental issues and on practices of the self and its milieu.

Complementing Ecotechnology With Ecoscience

The juxtaposition of two umbrella terms, ecotechnology and ecoscience, has been suggested as a way to map the variegated scientific “eco” world from a philosophy of ecology perspective ( Schwarz, 2014 , p. 141). Ecotechnology is regarded as an instance of use-inspired basic research. Good examples of this include restoration ecology, ecological engineering, industrial ecology, and sustainability science. It can be understood as a technoscience that principally develops local theories and practices. In contrast, ecoscience is suggested as an instance of pure basic research, that is, the search for basic understanding with no interest in application ( Stokes, 1998 ). It is characterized by the development of general concepts and theories, something that is done in theoretical ecology, for instance, which has generated the competitive exclusion principle as well as models depicting predator-prey relationships and ecosystem theories. Ecoscience also includes systematic work on biotopes and plant/animal communities, on ecophysiology, and on parts of hydrology and geology, for example, studies of ion exchange in soil and the dynamics of turbulences in running water. One might say that ecoscience seeks to overcome the dimension of singularity and instead to describe rules of connectedness using more general concepts, models, and sometimes even laws. This can be seen in distinct contrast to ecotechnology, which is about developing tailored solutions and site-specific practices.

In another philosophical approach, ecotechnology is proposed as a third cornerstone of ecology along with applied science and basic science ( Mahner & Bunge, 2000 , p. 190). The boundary is drawn, it seems, at the threshold to the laboratory: Inquiring into the ecological connectedness of an aphid is basic science, looking into the control of the aphid population in the laboratory is applied science, and going outside to combat the aphid in the cabbage plot is ecotechnology. In this model, scientists know about the possibilities of things, and technologists bring them into the world by placing them in a context of action, that is, society at large; accordingly, doctors, lawyers, biotechnologists, and planners are all technologists. This conceptualization relies on top-down knowledge transfer as a one-way street, yet this is not adequate for dealing with the variegated landscape of knowledge forms (and never was, in fact). The planning, production, operation, maintenance, and monitoring of things or processes are also part of scientific work and are themselves epistemic practices.

The program of technosciences, and therefore also ecotechnology, is to improve the conditions of human life through innovation. It is this permanent process of reforming ways of knowing and manufacturing that Hannah Arendt refers to when she places such great emphasis on “fabricating experiments,” as she calls them; at issue, for her, is the making of an artifact, of a “work” and, more generally, a shift from asking “what” and “why” toward asking “how” ( Arendt, 1994 , p. 288). Arendt points out that it is the success of technology and science, and, particularly, of their alliance that bears witness to the fact that the act of producing or manufacturing is inherent in the experiment: It makes available the phenomena one wishes to observe. However, it is not Homo faber , but rather Arendt’s Homo laborans who inhabits the ecotechnological world, a world in which an exuberance of energy and materials and the relentless production and consumption of goods is the driving force. All these largely industrially produced artifacts (cars, domestic appliances, hardware, etc.) must be consumed and used up as quickly as possible lest they go to waste, just as natural things decay unused unless they are integrated into the endless cycle of the human metabolic exchange with nature. “It is as though we have torn down the protective walls by which, throughout all the ages past, the world—the edifice made by human hand—has shielded us against nature” ( Arendt, 1994 , p. 115). Here Arendt offers a pessimistic vision of the human-environment relationship and sounds an ecotechnological warning. The “specifically human homeland” is endangered, she cautions, mainly because we erroneously think we have mastered nature by virtue of sheer human force, which is not only part of nature but “perhaps the most powerful natural force” ( Arendt, 1994 , p. 115). She thus anticipates a constituent component of the Anthropocene and ecotechnology as the technological becoming of the world in the 21st century , as discussed above.

However, technological and social innovation seems to be needed more than ever because the relationship between humans and their material environment—artificial or not—is not yet sufficiently developed. Ecotechnology thus means enabling an adaptive design that is compatible with social and political values and norms as well as with the nonhuman requirements of a particular site. Historian Thomas Hughes points out that “we” (humanity) have failed to take responsibility “for creating and maintaining aesthetically pleasing and ecologically sustainable environments” and that humans should, at long last, accept responsibility to design a more “ecotechnological environment, which consists of intersecting and overlapping natural and human-built environments” ( Hughes, 2004 , p. 153). This appeal is addressed mainly to engineers, architects, and environmental scientists whom Hughes considers the experts suited to design and construct the ecotechnological environment.

Around the turn of the millennium an issue of the Trialog Journal (for planning and building in the third world) was dedicated to “eco-technology.” It highlighted the importance of traditional cultures and their wisdom when it comes to dealing with the uncertainty resulting from upheavals. Eco-technology is proposed as a means to support ecologically compatible and culturally acceptable development, including a conscious process of self-development toward sustainability, supported by democratic consensus-building ( Oesterreich, 2001 ). Meanwhile, research on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has become established in many places and regions around the world, ecotechnology being a part of its conceptual framework. TEK is considered a body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs that has evolved by adaptive processes over longer time periods and thus is somehow empirically saturated. It is also about relationships among living beings, including humans, both with one another and with their environment ( Martin et al., 2010 ). The cultural transmission of practices, of material and immaterial heritage, is an important issue and includes the investigation of wisdom as an epistemic category ( Ingold, 2000 ).

It can be noted that space and place as an oikos in the mode of experimentation is the recurrent theme that links recent debates on climate change, green lifestyles, restoration ecology and industrial ecology, as well as historically more distant issues such as blue sky campaigns (against air pollution in industrialized countries), efforts to combat water pollution in the 19th century and well into the 20th century , the management of dying forests, and space ecology. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that the space-oikos theme developed mainly in the context of sustainability discourse, without always being explicitly spelled out.

Ecotechnology Diplomacy

The term “ecotechnology” may be used (a) in the sense of a heuristic strategy in the natural and engineering sciences or in international policymaking, (b) as an umbrella term that travels between already existing fields of science, technology, and policy, (c) to label a disciplinary and institutional enterprise, such as ecotechnics or ecological engineering or ecotechnology, or (d) to refer to an epistemic program that has been spelled out in philosophy, in the educational sciences, and in political anthropology. Accordingly, there is no simple answer to the question, “What is ecotechnology?” Rather, the question to be asked is how ecotechnology is conceptualized in each case and in what way this umbrella term then organizes an epistemic, institutional, or sociopolitical field. The diplomatic aspect of ecotechnology comes in when it is used to foster international relations in scientific cooperation, that is, when science is used for diplomacy, as in the context of UN programs, for example. Ecotechnology as a science is used for diplomatic purposes when international and technical cooperation is fostered between countries, which was the case in the 1990s when ecotechnology became a cipher for sustainable and computerized production. Finally, ecotechnology performs diplomacy when ecotechnologically justified findings, processes, or objects are used to support foreign policy objectives.

As a technoscience operating at the intersection of science and technology, ecotechnology was prolific for some time during the 1980s and 1990s but then gradually lost its heuristic power and was absorbed into the up-and-coming sustainability sciences. An institutional settling never happened in the United States or Japan, where the term was coined and some conceptual work took place. However, the issues, theories, and practices of ecotechnology migrated into other disciplinary fields such as ecological engineering or industrial ecology. In the 21st century it is mainly in China and some other Asian countries where “ecotechnology” appears explicitly in the names of institutions and their research programs.

The association of ecotechnology with a holistic approach or a partnership with nature is a claim that is frequently encountered, particularly in the engineering sciences, although it is barely operationalized in the sense of particular tools or practices. The most convincing ecotechnological principles are those embodied in specific machines or objects and are based on ideas of a circular economy or the cradle-to-cradle design principle. The conceptual opposition between technology and nature is generally upheld in these approaches. More recent ideas in philosophy about an ecotechnics involving the use of technology in nature might contribute to solving the problems of incoherent conceptualization if they were to provide a foundation for a philosophy of science and technology in practice.

In the field of political anthropology a conceptual framework has been developed around ecotechnology, particularly in the French and the Latin American context, and an ecotechnological rationality has been used to argue against the widespread colonialist and exploitative rationale. This discourse mainly argues against a capitalist productive process that is dominated by the technological transformation of natural resources and operates far beyond the resilience capacity of the given ecological conditions. It calls instead for adaptation and integration into the productivity of a particular ecological system. Technostructures should be defined by the ecological conditions of natural productivity and the productivity of the individuals and collectives of a social entity in order to appropriate the technological means of production. This adaptive and integrative process adheres to a repertoire of heuristics, affords new skills and new knowledge, and is accompanied by the development of monitoring instruments that eventually enable self-management. This concept of ecotechnology is seen as a viable path (albeit one that is not yet completely spelled out) for moving toward a better understanding of relationality and incorporating multiple modes of knowing about human beings in their environment.

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• Technology /

Career in Ecotechnology

• Updated on  
• May 3, 2021

Humanity has reached a stage where we are crossing all bounds of life and creating such innovative tools that can actually do wonders. One would be flabbergasted by the progress we have been making and the milestones we are yet to achieve. If we take the example of Julian Melchiori from the Royal College of Art, she has created the first man-made biologically functional leaf. This leaf imitates that process of photosynthesis and carries it out with the help of chloroplasts put in it artificially. Man has created an artificial way to produce oxygen crucial for our survival which is just one of the landmarks on our way to develop technologies that are eco-friendly or is created for the ecosystem. So, if you feel riveted by this usage of technology to save the environment, then, Ecotechnology is one of the emerging fields. You can pursue a course in this subject and through this blog, we will explore the career prospects pertaining to the field of Ecotechnology, Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development . 

This Blog Includes:

What is ecotechnology, principles of ecotechnology, environmental science and ecotechnology, about ecotechnology courses, courses in ecotechnology , popular universities, scope of ecotechnology.

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Ecotechnology can simply refer to the application of technology to manage ecosystems efficiently by understanding the essential workings of natural ecological systems and ensuring minimal costs and harm to the environment based on these principles. Ecotechnology is vastly used for the watershed, lake/reservoir and regional management and ecotechniques are applied with the help of mathematical optimization concepts and models. A key area of research and development in the course is examining the usage of natural resources, problems linked with the overutilization and the repercussions of our harmful practices towards the environment.

Examples of Ecotechnology

• Waste Management and Disposal Systems
• Advanced Sewer Treatment Plants
• Energy-efficient Buildings (Residential & Industrial)
• Waste-to-Energy Solutions
• Electric Vehicles
• Vertical Farms

Ecotechnology mainly facilitates ecosystem management through efficient technologies and innovation in order to protect, conserve and sustain the environment. Here are the key principles of ecotechnology:

• To develop efficient and effective technologies to ensure environmental conservation.
• To curate cleaner processes for waste management and industrial production.
• To bring forward environmental management systems for the industrial sector
• To find better ways to control the hazardous impact of pollution on the ecosystem
• To bring awareness about environmental protection and conservation

There is a significant relationship between environmental science and ecotechnology as ecotechnology has become the innovative means for ecosystem and environmental management. Green technologies possess the power of optimal utilisation of resources and cause minimal harm to our environment. Here is how environmental science and ecotechnology work together to bring greener earth and restore our environment:

• Ecotechnology helps in facilitating better environmental management by designing efficient technologies and equipment that cause less harm to the environment.
• Ecotechnology also saves energy through efficient sources of energy like solar energy, energy efficient tools, waste-to-energy systems etc.
• Ecotechnology minimises the waste production in the environment by utilising the waste for recycling, reusing or even harnessing energy.
• Environmental Science and Ecotechnology can work hand-in-hand to save our planet earth, provide greener and efficient solutions as well as saving our natural resource for future generations.

A course in Ecotechnology blends the knowledge pertaining to natural science, social science and engineering with the objective to prevent and avoid environmental issues. Through the coursework, one will explore the problems related to the environment from a global perspective and narrow it down to the grass-root level. Regardless of the level of course, here are some subjects that you will study in this program – Sustainable Development and its Instruments, Environment and Natural Resources, Environment and Mankind, Ecosystem Services, Environment Engineering, Environmental Innovation, and Society and Technology.

Hence, through a problem-oriented teaching methodology channelised through thematic curriculum, the program is taught through a balance between knowledge of the theory and its practice. The program includes papers pertaining to environmental science and environmental technology that is focused in the direction of developing technical systems to solve sustainability issues. 

Feeling intrigued by the possibility of the scope in the field of environmental science and the interesting ways in which we can employ technology to help save the environment? Then, under the domain of Ecotechnology, there is a huge array of courses that you can suit your profile. So, glance through the diverse courses mentioned below to understand the right fit for you. 

Choosing the right university for you will help you take the benefit of the immense technical exposure and knowledge that the field offers. Hence, to take admission in the esteemed institutions of this field, glance through the top-notch universities enlisted below:

• University of Glasgow
• University of Bristol
• University of Sussex
• University of Toronto
• Aalto University
• Ecole Polytechnique
• University of Pennsylvania
• The University of British Columbia
• University of Southampton
• Mid Sweden University 
• Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
• The University of Newcastle
• McGill University

After completing a program in this field, one can choose from a plethora of career options available as per their interest and specialization. Hence, you can look for a job in the following portfolios: 

• Environmental Consultant 
• Landscape Architect 
• Sustainability Consultant 
• Nature Conservation Officer
• Horticulture Therapist 
• Water Quality Scientist  
• Waste Management Officer 
• Recycling Officer 

Apart from these, you may also look for jobs in the following sectors:

• Environmental Accounting
• Research and Development 
• Environmental Health Practitioner 
• Transport Planning 
• Environmental Law
• Waste Recycling Plant 
• Town Planning 
• Landscape Development 
• Sustainable Tourism

We hope that this blog helped you to explore the career options in the field of Ecotechnology and environmental sciences and sustainable development. If you want to explore other courses that may suit your career aspirations, then, get in touch with our team of experts at Leverage Edu to find the course and university that is the right fit for you.

Team Leverage Edu

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• Open access
• Published: 22 June 2020

The green economy transition: the challenges of technological change for sustainability

• Patrik Söderholm   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2264-7043 1  

Sustainable Earth volume  3 , Article number:  6 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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The Green Economy is an alternative vision for growth and development; one that can generate economic development and improvements in people’s lives in ways consistent with advancing also environmental and social well-being. One significant component of a green economy strategy is to promote the development and adoption of sustainable technologies. The overall objective of this article is to discuss a number of challenges encountered when pursuing sustainable technological change, and that need to be properly understood by policy makers and professionals at different levels in society. We also identify some avenues for future research. The discussions center on five challenges: (a) dealing with diffuse – and ever more global – environmental risks; (b) achieving radical and not just incremental sustainable technological change; (c) green capitalism and the uncertain business-as-usual scenario; (d) the role of the state and designing appropriate policy mixes; and (e) dealing with distributional concerns and impacts. The article argues that sustainable technological change will require a re-assessment of the roles of the private industry and the state, respectively, and that future research should increasingly address the challenges of identifying and implementing novel policy instrument combinations in various institutional contexts.

The green economy transition and sustainable technological change

Over the last decade, a frequent claim has been that the traditional economic models need to be reformed in order to address climate change, biodiversity losses, water scarcity, etc., while at the same time addressing key social and economic challenges. The global financial crisis in 2008–2009 spurred this debate [ 4 ], and these concerns have been translated into the vision of a ‘green economy’ (e.g., [ 31 , 33 , 48 , 54 , 55 ]). Furthermore, in 2015, countries world-wide adopted the so-called 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These goals recognize that ending world poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth but also address a range of various social needs including education, health, social protection, and job creation, while at the same time tackling environmental pollution and climate change. The sustainable development goals thus also establish a real link between the ecological system and the economic system. They also reinforce the need for a transition to a green economy, i.e., a fundamental transformation towards more sustainable modes of production and consumption.

In this article, we focus on a particularly important component of such a transition, namely the development of sustainable technological change, i.e., production and consumption patterns implying profoundly less negative impacts on the natural environment, including the global climate. Specifically, the article addresses a number of key challenges in supporting – and overcoming barriers to – sustainable technological change. These challenges are presented with the ambition to communicate important lessons from academic research to policy makers and professionals as well as the general public.

Addressing climate and environmental challenges, clearly requires natural scientific knowledge as well as engineering expertise concerning the various technical solutions that can be adopted to mitigate the negative impacts (e.g., carbon-free energy technologies). However, pursuing sustainable technological change is also a societal, organizational, political, and economic endeavor that involves several non-technical challenges. For instance, the so-called transitions literature recognizes that many sectors, such as energy generation, water supply etc., can be conceptualized as socio-technical systems and/or innovation systems [ 24 , 40 ]. These systems consist of networks of actors (individuals, private firms, research institutes, government authorities, etc.), the knowledge that these actors possess as well as the relevant institutions (legal rules, codes of conduct, etc.). In other words, the development of, for instance, new carbon-free technologies may often require the establishment of new value chains hosting actors that have not necessarily interacted in the past; this necessitates a relatively long process that can alter society in several ways, e.g., through legal amendments, changed consumer behavior, distributional effects, infrastructure development and novel business models.

In other words, beyond technological progress, economic and societal adjustment is necessary to achieve sustainable technological change. In fact, history is full of examples that illustrate the need to address the organizational and institutional challenges associated with technological change and innovation. In hindsight, the societal impacts of electricity in terms of productivity gains were tremendous during the twentieth century. Still, while electrical energy was discovered in the late 1870s, in the year 1900, less than 5% of mechanical power in American factories was supplied by electric motors and it took yet another 20 years before their productivity soared [ 14 ]. An important reason for the slow diffusion of electric power was that in order to take full advantage of the new technology, existing factories had to change the entire systems of operation, i.e., the production process, the architecture, the logistics as well as the ways in which workers were recruited, trained and paid. Footnote 1 A similar story emerges when considering the impact of computers on total productivity during the second half of the twentieth century. For long, many companies invested in computers for little or no reward. Also in this case, however, the new technology required systemic changes in order for companies to be able to take advantage of the computer. This meant, for instance, decentralizing, outsourcing, and streamlining supply chains as well as offering more choices to consumers [ 9 ].

This key argument that the adoption of new technology has to be accompanied by systemic changes, applies both to the company as well as the societal level. Any novel solutions being developed must take into account the complexity of the interdependencies between different types of actors with various backgrounds, overall market dynamics, as well as the need for knowledge development and institutional reforms. In fact, the need for systemic changes may be particularly relevant in the case of green technologies, such as zero-carbon processes in the energy-intensive industries (see further below).

Against this background, the issue of how to promote sustainable technological change has received increasing attention in the policy arena and in academic research. The main objective of this article is therefore to discuss some of the most significant societal challenges in pursuing such change, and outline key insights for policy makers as well as important avenues for future research. In doing this, we draw on several strands of the academic literature. The article centers on the following five overall challenges:

Dealing with diffuse – and ever more global – environmental risks

Achieving radical – and not just incremental – sustainable technological change;

The advent of green capitalism: the uncertain business-as-usual scenario

The role of the state: designing appropriate policy mixes, dealing with distributional concerns and impacts.

The first two challenges address the various types of structural tasks that are required to pursue sustainable technological change, and the barriers that have to be overcome when pursuing these tasks. The remaining points concern the role and the responsibility of different key actors in the transition process, not least private firms and government authorities. Each of these five challenges in turn involves more specific challenges, and these are identified and elaborated under each heading. We also provide hints about how to address and manage these challenges, but specific solutions will likely differ depending on the national or regional contexts. The paper concludes by briefly outlining some key avenues for future research, and with an emphasis on research that can assist a green socio-technical transition. Footnote 2

With the advent of modern environmental policy in the 1960s, stringent regulations were imposed on emissions into air and water. However, the focus was more or less exclusively on stationary pollution sources (i.e., industrial plants), which were relatively easy to monitor and regulate, e.g., through plant-specific emission standards. In addition, during this early era there was a strong emphasis on local environmental impacts, e.g., emissions into nearby river basins causing negative effects on other industries and/or on households in the same community.

Over the years, though, the environmental challenges have increasingly been about targeting various types of diffuse emissions. These stem from scattered sources such as road transport, shipping, aviation, and agriculture. Pollution from diffuse sources takes place over large areas and individually they may not be of concern, but in combination with other diffuse sources they can cause serious overall impacts. The growing importance of global environmental challenges such as climate change in combination with globalization and more international trade in consumer products, adds to this challenge. Managing these issues often requires international negotiations and burden-sharing, which in itself have proved difficult [ 12 ]. The difficulties in reaching a stringent-enough global climate agreement illustrate this difficulty.

Diffuse emissions are typically difficult to monitor and therefore also to regulate. For instance, environmental authorities may wish to penalize improper disposal of a waste product since this would help reduce various chemical risks, but such behavior is typically clandestine and difficult to detect. Plastic waste is an apt example; it stems from millions of consumer products, is carried around the world by the currents and winds, and builds up microplastics, particularly in the sea. Many dangerous substances, including chemicals such as solvents and phthalates, are embedded in consumer products, out of which many are imported. Monitoring the potential spread of these substances to humans and the natural environment remains difficult as well. Technological innovation that permits better tracing and tracking of materials should therefore be a priority (see also [ 21 ]).

In order to address these diffuse environmental impacts, society has to find alternative – yet more indirect – ways of monitoring and regulating them. This could translate into attempts to close material cycles and promote a circular economy, i.e., an economy in which the value of products, materials and resources are maintained as long as possible [ 19 ]. In practice, this implies an increased focus on reduction, recycling and re-use of virgin materials [ 30 ], material and energy efficiency, as well as sharing of resources (often with the help of various digital platforms such as Uber and Airbnb). In other words, rather than regulating emissions as close to damage done as possible, the authorities may instead support specific activities (e.g., material recycling) and/or technologies (e.g., low-carbon production processes) that can be assumed to correlate with reduced environmental load.

Addressing diffuse emissions in such indirect ways, though, is not straightforward. In several countries, national waste management strategies adhere to the so-called waste hierarchy (see also the EU Waste Framework Directive). This sets priorities for which types of action should be taken, and postulates that waste prevention should be given the highest priority followed by re-use of waste, material recycling, recovery of waste and landfill (in that order). Even though research has shown that this hierarchy is a reasonable rule of thumb from an environmental point of view [ 42 ], it is only a rule of thumb! Deviations from the hierarchy can be motivated in several cases and must therefore be considered (e.g., [ 58 ]). Footnote 3

One important way of encouraging recycling and reuse of products is to support product designs that factor in the reparability and reusability of products. Improved recyclability can also benefit from a modular product structure (e.g., [ 20 ]). However, this also comes with challenges. Often companies manufacture products in such ways that increase the costs of recycling for downstream processors, but for institutional reasons, there may be no means by which the waste recovery facility can provide the manufacturer with any incentives to change the product design [ 11 , 46 ]. One example is the use of multi-layer plastics for food packaging, which could often be incompatible with mechanical recycling.

While the promotion of material and energy efficiency measures also can be used to address the problem of diffuse environmental impacts, it may be a mixed blessing. Such measures imply that the economy can produce the same amount of goods and services but with less material and energy inputs, but they also lead to a so-called rebound effect [ 27 ]. Along with productivity improvements, resources are freed and can be used to increase the production and consumption of other goods. In other words, the efficiency gains may at least partially be cancelled out by increased consumption elsewhere in the economy. For instance, if consumers choose to buy fuel-efficient cars, they are able to travel more or spend the money saved by lower fuel use on other products, which in turn will exploit resources and lead to emissions.

Finally, an increased focus on circular economy solutions will imply that the different sectors of the economy need to become more interdependent. This interdependency is indeed what makes the sought-after efficiency gains possible in the first place. This in turn requires new forms of collaborative models among companies, including novel business models. In some cases, though, this may be difficult to achieve. One example is the use of excess heat from various process industries; it can be employed for supplying energy to residential heating or greenhouses. Such bilateral energy cooperation is already quite common (e.g., in Sweden), but pushing this even further may be hard and/or too costly. Investments in such cooperation are relation-specific [ 60 ], i.e., their returns will depend on the continuation of the relationships. The involved companies may be too heterogeneous in terms of goals, business practices, planning horizons etc., therefore making long-term commitment difficult. Moreover, the excess heat is in an economic sense a byproduct, implying that its supply will be constrained by the production of the main product. Of course, this is valid for many other types of waste products as well, e.g., manure digested to generate biogas, secondary aluminum from scrapped cars.

In brief, the growing importance of addressing diffuse emissions into the natural environment implies that environmental protection has to build on indirect pollution abatement strategies. Pursuing each of these strategies (e.g., promoting recycling and material efficiency), though, imply challenges; they may face important barriers (e.g., for product design, and byproduct use) and could have negative side-effects (e.g., rebound effects). Moreover, a focus on recycling and resource efficiency must not distract from the need to improve the tracing and tracking of hazardous substances and materials as well as provide stronger incentives for product design. Both technological and organizational innovations are needed.

Achieving radical – and not just incremental – sustainable technological change

Incremental innovations, e.g., increased material and energy efficiency in existing production processes, are key elements for the transition to a green economy. However, more profound – and even radical – technological innovation is also needed. For instance, replacing fossil fuels in the transport sector as well as in iron and steel production requires fundamental technological shifts and not just incremental efficiency improvements (e.g., [ 1 ]). There are, however, a number of factors that will make radical innovation inherently difficult. Below, we highlight three important obstacles.

First , one obstacle is the risk facing firms that invest in technological development (e.g., basic R&D, pilot tests etc.) in combination with the limited ability of the capital market to handle the issue of long-term risk-taking. These markets may fail to provide risk management instruments for immature technology due to a lack of historical data to assess risks. There are also concerns that the deregulation of the global financial markets has implied that private financial investors take a more short-term view [ 44 ]. In fact, research also suggests that due to agency problems within private firms, their decision-making may be biased towards short-term payoffs, thus resulting in myopic behavior also in the presence of fully efficient capital markets [ 53 ].

Second , private investors may often have weak incentives to pursue investments in long-term technological development. The economics literature has noted the risks for the under-provision of public goods such as the knowledge generated from R&D efforts and learning-by-doing (e.g., [ 38 ]). Thus, private companies will be able to appropriate only a fraction of the total rate-of-return on such investment, this since large benefits will also accrue to other companies (e.g., through reverse engineering). Due to the presence of such knowledge spillovers, investments in long-term technological development will become inefficient and too modest.

Third , new green technologies often face unfair competition with incumbent technologies. The incumbents, which may be close substitutes to their greener competitors, will be at a relative competitive advantage since they have been allowed to expand during periods of less stringent environmental policies as well as more or less tailor-made institutions and infrastructures. This creates path-dependencies, i.e. where the economy tends to be locked-in to certain technological pathways [ 2 ]. In general, companies typically employ accumulated technology-specific knowledge when developing new products and processes, and technology choices tend to be particularly self-reinforcing if the investments are characterized by high upfront costs and increasing returns from adoption (such as scale, learning and network economies). Existing institutions, e.g., laws, codes of conduct, etc., could also contribute to path dependence since these often favor the incumbent (e.g., fossil-fuel based) technologies [ 57 ].

The above three factors tend to inhibit all sorts of long-run technological development in the private sector, but there is reason to believe that they could be particularly troublesome in the case of green technologies. First, empirical research suggests that green technologies (e.g., in energy and transport) generate large knowledge spillovers than the dirtier technologies they replace [ 15 , 49 ]. Moreover, while the protection of property rights represents one way to limit such spillovers, the patenting system is subject to limitations. For instance, Neuhoff [ 43 ] remarks that many sustainable technologies:

“consist of a large set of components and require the expertise of several firms to improve the system. A consortium will face difficulties in sharing the costs of ‘learning investment’, as it is difficult to negotiate and fix the allocation of future profits,” (p. 98).

These are generally not favorable conditions for effective patenting. Process innovations, e.g., in industry, are particularly important for sustainable technology development, but firms are often more likely to employ patents to protect new products rather than new processes [ 39 ]. Footnote 4

Furthermore, one of the key socio-technical systems in the green economy transition, the energy system, is still today dominated by incumbent technologies such as nuclear energy and fossil-fueled power, and exhibits several characteristics that will lead to path dependent behavior. Investments are often large-scale and exhibit increasing returns. Path dependencies are also aggravated by the fact that the outputs from different energy sources – and regardless of environmental performance – are more or less perfect substitutes. In other words, the emerging and carbon-free technologies can only compete on price with the incumbents, and they therefore offer little scope for product differentiation. In addition, the energy sectors are typically highly regulated, thus implying that existing technological patterns are embedded in and enforced by a complex set of institutions as well as infrastructure.

In brief, technological change for sustainability requires more radical technological shifts, and such shifts are characterized by long and risky development periods during which new systemic structures – i.e., actor networks, value chains, knowledge, and institutions – need to be put in place and aligned with the emerging technologies. Overall, the private sector cannot alone be expected to generate these structures, and for this reason, some kind of policy support is needed. Nevertheless, in order for any policy instrument or policy mix to be efficient, it has to build on a proper understanding of the underlying obstacles for long-run technological development. As different technologies tend to face context-specific learning processes, patenting prospects, risk profiles etc., technology-specific support may be needed (see also below).

At least since the advent of the modern environmental debate during the 1960s, economic and environmental goals have been perceived to be in conflict with each other. Business decisions, it has been argued, build on pursuing profit-maximization; attempts to address environmental concerns simultaneously will therefore imply lower profits and reduced productivity. However, along with increased concerns about the environmental footprints of the global economy and the growth of organic products and labels, material waste recycling, climate compensation schemes etc., sustainability issues have begun to move into the mainstream business activities. In fact, many large companies often no longer distinguish between environmental innovation and innovation in general; the environmental footprints of the business operations are almost always taken into consideration during the innovation process (e.g., [ 47 ]).

Some even puts this in Schumpeterian terms, and argues that sustainable technological change implies a “new wave of creative destruction with the potential to change fundamentally the competitive dynamics in many markets and industries,” ([ 37 ], p. 315). The literature has recognized the potentially important roles that so-called sustainability entrepreneurs can play in bringing about a shift to a green economy; these types of entrepreneurs seek to combine traditional business practices with sustainable development initiatives (e.g., [ 25 ]). They could disrupt established business models, cultures and consumer preferences, as well as help reshape existing institutions. Just as conventional entrepreneurs, they are agents of change and offer lessons for policy makers. However, the research in this field has also been criticized for providing a too strong focus on individual success stories, while, for instance, the institutional and political factors that are deemed to also shape the priorities made by these individuals tend to be neglected (e.g., [ 13 ]).

Ultimately, it remains very difficult to anticipate how far voluntary, market-driven initiatives will take us along the long and winding road to the green economy. In addition to a range of incremental developments, such as increased energy and material efficiency following the adoption of increased digitalization, industrial firms and sustainability entrepreneurs are likely to help develop new and/or refined business models (e.g., to allow for increased sharing and recycling of resources) as well as adopt innovations commercially. In the future, businesses are also likely to devote greater attention to avoiding future environmental liabilities, such as the potential costs of contaminated land clean-up or flood risks following climate change. Far from surprising, large insurance companies were among the first to view climate change as a risk to their viability. One response was the development of new financial instruments such as ‘weather derivatives’ and ‘catastrophe bonds’ [ 35 ].

In other words, there is an increasing demand for businesses that work across two logics that in the past have been perceived as incompatible: the commercial and the environmental. There are however huge uncertainties about the scope and the depth of green capitalism in this respect. Moreover, the answer to the question of how far the market-driven sustainability transition will take us, will probably vary depending on business sector and on factors such as the availability of funding in these sectors. Footnote 5

As indicated above, there are reasons to assume that in the absence of direct policy support, businesses will not be well-equipped to invest in long-term green technology development. Green product innovations may often be easier to develop and nurture since firms then may charge price premiums to consumers. In fact, many high-profile sustainability entrepreneurs in the world (e.g., Anita Roddick of The Body Shop) have been product innovators. In contrast, green process innovation is more difficult to pursue. It is hard to get consumers to pay premiums for such innovations. For instance, major efforts are needed to develop a carbon-free blast furnace process in modern iron and steel plants (e.g., [ 1 ]). And even if this is achieved, it remains unclear whether the consumers will be willing to pay a price premium on their car purchases purely based on the knowledge that the underlying production process is less carbon-intense than it used to be. Moreover, taking results from basic R&D, which appear promising on the laboratory scale, through “the valley of death” into commercial application is a long and risky journey. Process innovations typically require gradual up-scaling and optimization of the production technologies (e.g., [ 29 ]). For small- and medium-sized firms in particular, this may be a major hurdle.

In brief, the above suggests that it is difficult to anticipate what a baseline scenario of the global economy – i.e., a scenario involving no new policies – would look like from a sustainability perspective. Still, overall it is likely that green capitalism and sustainability entrepreneurship alone may have problems delivering the green economy transition in (at least) two respects. First, due to the presence of knowledge spillovers and the need for long-term risk-taking, the baseline scenario may involve too few radical technology shifts (e.g., in process industries). Second, the baseline scenario is very likely to involve plenty of digitalization and automation, in turn considerably increasing the potential for material and energy efficiency increases. Nevertheless, due to rebound effects, the efficiency gains resulting from new technologies alone may likely not be enough to address the sustainability challenge. This therefore also opens up the field for additional policy support, and – potentially – a rethinking of the role of the state in promoting sustainable technological change.

An important task for government policy is to set the appropriate “framework conditions” for the economy. This refers primarily to the legal framework, e.g., immaterial rights, licensing procedures, as well as contract law, which need to be predictable and transparent. Traditional environmental policy that regulates emissions either through taxes or performance standards will remain important, as will the removal of environmentally harmful subsidies (where such exist). The role of such policies is to make sure that the external costs of environmental pollution are internalized in firms’ and households’ decision-making (e.g., [ 7 ]). Still, in the light of the challenges discussed above – i.e., controlling diffuse emissions, the need for more fundamental sustainable technological change, as well as the private sector’s inability to adequately tackle these two challenges – the role of the state must often go beyond providing such framework conditions. In fact, there are several arguments for implementing a broader mix of policy instruments in the green economy.

In the waste management field, policy mixes may be needed for several reasons. For instance, previous research shows that in cases where diffuse emissions cannot be directly controlled and monitored, a combined output tax and recycling subsidy (equivalent to a deposit-refund system) can be an efficient second-best policy instrument mix (e.g., [ 59 ]). This would reduce the amount of materials entering the waste stream, while the subsidy encourages substitution of recycled materials for virgin materials. Footnote 6 An extended waste management policy mix could also be motivated by the limited incentives for manufacturers of products to consider product design and recyclability, which would decrease the costs of downstream recycling by other firms. This is, though, an issue that often cannot be addressed by traditional policies such as taxes and standards; it should benefit from technological and organizational innovation. Finally, the establishment of efficient markets for recycled materials can also be hampered by different types of information-related obstacles, including byers’ inability to assess the quality of mixed waste streams. In such a case, information-based policies based on, for instance, screening requirements at the waste sites could be implemented (e.g., [ 46 ]).

At a general level, fostering green technological development, not least radical innovation, must also build on a mix of policies. The literature has proposed an innovation policy mix based on three broad categories of instruments (see also [ 36 , 51 , 52 ]):

Technology-push instruments that support the provision of basic and applied knowledge inputs, e.g., through R&D grants, patent protection, tax breaks etc.

Demand-pull instruments that encourage the formation of new markets, e.g., through deployment policies such as public procurement, feed-in tariffs, quotas, etc.

Systemic instruments that support various functions operating at the innovation system level, such as providing infrastructure, facilitating alignment among stakeholders, and stimulating the development of goals and various organizational solutions.

A key role for a green innovation policy is to support the development of generic technologies that entrepreneurial firms can build upon [ 50 ]. Public R&D support and co-funding of pilot and demonstration plants help create variation and permit new inventions to be verified, optimized and up-scaled. As noted above, there is empirical support for public R&D funding of green technology development, as underinvestment due to knowledge spillovers might be particularly high for these technologies.

As the technology matures, though, it must be tested in a (niche) market with real customers, and the state will often have to create the conditions for private firms to raise long-term funding in areas where established financial organizations are not yet willing to provide sufficient funds. For instance, in the renewable energy field, this has been achieved by introducing feed-in tariffs or quota schemes for, for instance, wind power and solar PV technology (e.g., [ 16 ]). Finally, well-designed systemic instruments will have positive impacts on the functioning of the other instruments in the policy mix; while technology-push and demand-pull instruments are the engines of the innovation policy mix, the systemic instruments will help that engine run faster and more efficiently.

The implementation of the above policy mixes will be associated with several challenges, such as gaining political acceptability, identifying the specific designs of the policy instruments, and determining how these instruments can be evaluated. All these issues deserve attention in future research. Still, here we highlight in particular the need for policies that are technology-specific; i.e., in contrast to, for instance, pollution taxes or generic R&D subsidies they promote selected technological fields and/or sectors. Based on the above discussions one can point out two motives for relying on technology-specific instruments in promoting sustainable technological change: (a) the regulations of diffuse emissions can often not target diffuse emissions directly – at least not without incurring excessively high monitoring costs; and (b) the need to promote more radical environmental innovations.

The innovation systems surrounding green energy technology tend to be technology-specific. Different technologies are exposed to unique and multi-dimensional growth processes, e.g., in terms of bottlenecks, learning processes, and the dynamics of the capital goods industries [ 34 ]. The nature of the knowledge spillovers and the long-term risks will also differ as will the likelihood that green technologies suffer from technological lock-in associated with incumbent technology (e.g., [ 38 ]). For instance, the technological development process for wind power has been driven by turbine manufacturers and strong home markets, while equipment suppliers and manufacturers that own their own equipment have dominated solar PV development [ 32 ].

Clearly, technology-specific policies are difficult to design and implement; regulators typically face significant information constraints and their decisions may also be influenced by politico-economic considerations such as bureaucratic motives, and lobby group interests. Moreover, the prospects for efficient green technology-specific policies may likely also differ across jurisdictions; some countries will be more likely to be able to implement policies that can live up to key governing principles such as accountability, discipline and building on arms-length interactions with the private sector. As noted by Rodrik [ 50 ], “government agencies need to be embedded in, but not in bed with, business,” (p. 485).

The above begs the question whether the governance processes at the national and the supra-national levels (e.g., the EU) are in place to live up to a more proactive and transformative role for the state. Newell and Paterson [ 45 ] argue that such a state needs to balance two principles that have for long been seen as opposed to one another. These are, one the one hand, the empowerment of the state to actively determine priorities and, on the other, “providing citizens with more extensive opportunities to have a voice, to get more involved in decision-making processes, and to take on a more active role in politics,” (p. 209). The latter issue is further addressed also in the next section.

In brief, the climate and environmental challenges facing society today require a mix of policy instruments, not least because the barriers facing new sustainable technology are multi-faceted and often heterogeneous across technologies. Supporting green innovation should build on the use of technology-specific policies as complements to traditional environmental policies. This in itself poses a challenge to policy-making, and requires in-depth understanding of how various policy instruments interact as well as increased knowledge about the institutional contexts in which these instruments are implemented.

The transition to a green economy, including technological change, affects the whole of society. It is therefore necessary to not only optimize the performance of the new technologies and identify efficient policies; the most significant distributional impacts of technological change must also be understood and addressed. All societal changes involve winners and losers, and unless this is recognized and dealt with, the sought-after green transition may lack in legitimacy across various key groups in society. Bek et al. [ 6 ] provide an example of a green economy initiative in South Africa – the so-called Working for Water (WfW) program – that has failed to fully recognize the social aspects of the program goals.

This challenge concerns different dimensions of distributional impacts. One such dimension is how households with different income levels are affected. Economics research has shown that environmental policies in developed countries, not least taxes on pollution and energy use, tend to have regressive effects [ 22 ], thus implying that the lowest-income households are generally most negatively affected in relative terms. Such outcomes may in fact prevail also in the presence of policies that build on direct support to certain technological pathways. For instance, high-income households are likely to benefit the most from subsidies to solar cells and electric cars, this since these households are more likely to own their own house as well as to be more frequent car buyers. Of course, technological change (e.g., digitalization, automation etc.), including that taking place in green technology, may also have profound distributional impacts in more indirect ways, not the least through its impacts on the labor market (e.g., wages. Work conditions) (e.g., [ 3 ]).

The regional dimension of sustainable development is also important (e.g., [ 26 ]). One challenge in this case is that people increasingly expect that any green investments taking place in their own community (e.g., in wind power) should promote regional growth, employment and various social goals. The increased emphasis on the distributional effects at the regional level can also be attributed to the growing assertion of the rights of people (e.g., indigenous rights), and increased demands for direct participation in the relevant decision-making processes. However, new green technology may fail to generate substantial positive income and employment impacts at the local and regional level. For instance, one factor altering the renewable energy sector’s relationship with the economy has been technological change. A combination of scale economies and increased capital intensity has profoundly increased the investment capital requirements of facilities such as wind mill parks and biofuel production facilities. The inputs into modern green energy projects increasingly also have to satisfy high standards in terms of know-how, and these can therefore not always be supplied by local firms (e.g., [ 18 ]). Indeed, with the implementation of digital technology, the monitoring of, say, entire wind farms can today be done by skilled labor residing in other parts of the country (or even abroad).

Ignoring the distributional effects of sustainable technological change creates social tensions, thereby increasing the business risks for companies and sustainability entrepreneurs. Such risks may come in many forms. For instance, reliability in supply has become increasingly important, and customers will generally not be very forgiving in the presence of disruptions following the emergence of tense community relations. Furthermore, customers, fund managers, banks and prospective employees do not only care about the industry’s output, but increasingly also about how the products have been produced.

In fact, while the economies of the world are becoming more integrated, political trends are pointing towards a stronger focus on the nation state and even on regional independence. If anything, this will further complicate the green economy transition. Specifically, it will need to recognize the difficult trade-offs between efficiency, which typically do require international coordination (e.g., in terms of policy design, and R&D cooperation), and a fair distribution of benefits and costs, which instead tends to demand a stronger regional and local perspective.

In brief, the various distributional effects of sustainable technological change deserve increased attention in both scholarly research and the policy domain in order to ensure that this change emerges in ways that can help reduce poverty and ensure equity. These effects may call for an even broader palette of policies (e.g., benefit-sharing instruments, such as regional or local natural resource funds, compensation schemes, or earmarked tax revenues), but they also call for difficult compromises between efficiency and fairness.

Conclusions and avenues for future research

The scope and the nature the societal challenges that arise as a consequence of the climate and environmental hazards are complex and multi-faceted, and in this article we have focused on five important challenges to sustainable technological change. These challenges are generic, and should be a concern for most countries and regions, even though the specific solutions may differ depending on context. In this final section, we conclude by briefly discussing a number of implications and avenues for future research endeavors. Footnote 7 These knowledge gaps may provide important insights for both the research community as well as for policy makers and officials.

It should be clear that understanding the nature of – as well as managing – socio-technical transitions represents a multi-disciplinary research undertaking. Collaborations between natural scientists and engineers on the one hand and social scientists on the other are of course needed to translate environmental and technical challenges into societal challenges and action. In such collaborative efforts, however, it needs to be recognized that technological change is not a linear process; it entails phases such as concept development, pilot and demonstration projects, market formation and diffusion of technology, but also with important iterations (i.e., feedback loops) among all of these phases. It should be considered how bridges between different technical and social science disciplines can be built, this in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of how technology-specific engineering inventions can be commercialized in various institutional contexts. Transition studies, innovation and environmental economics, as well the innovation system and the innovation management literatures, among others, could help provide such bridges. Other types of systems studies, e.g., energy system optimization modeling, will also be important.

In addition to the above, there should also be an expanded role for cross-fertilization among different social sciences, e.g., between the economics, management and political science fields and between the research on sustainability entrepreneurs and transition studies (see also [ 26 ]). This could help improve the micro-foundations of, for instance, innovation system studies, i.e., better understanding of companies’ incentives, drivers etc., but also stress the need for considering socio-technical systems in the management research. For instance, the focus on individual heroes that pervades much of the entrepreneurship literature may lead to a neglect of the multiple factors at work and the role of framework conditions such as institutions (e.g., legal rules, norms) and infrastructure at the national and local scales. Better integration of various conceptual perspectives on green business and innovation could generate less uncertain business-as-usual scenarios.

The discussions in this article also suggest that green innovation in the public sector should be devoted more attention in future research. This could, of course, focus on various institutional and organizational innovations in the form of new and/or revised policy instrument design. The challenges involved in designing and implementing technology-specific sustainability policies, typically referred to as green industrial policies [ 50 ], tend to require such innovation (e.g., to increase transparency, and avoid regulatory capture). These policies are essentially processes of discovery, both by the state and the industry, rather than a list of specific policy instruments. This implies learning continuously about where the constraints and opportunities lie, and then responding to these.

The risk associated with regulatory capture is one issue that deserves increased attention in future research, including how to overcome such risks. Comparisons of green industrial policies across countries and technological fields – as well as historical comparative studies – could prove useful (e.g., [ 8 ]). How different policies interact as well as what the appropriate level of decision-making power is, are also important questions to be addressed. Of course, given the context-specificity of these types of policies, such research must also address the issue of how transferable innovation and sustainable practices are from one socio-technical and political context to another.

Moreover, the growing importance of diffuse emissions also requires green innovation in the public sector. Specifically, implementing environmental regulations that are close to damages demand specific monitoring technologies that can measure pollution levels. The development of new technologies – which, for instance, facilitates cheap monitoring of emissions – ought to be promoted, but it is quite unclear who has the incentive to promote and undertake such R&D activities. Similar concerns can be raised about the innovations that permit consumers to better assess the environmental footprints of different products and services (e.g., [ 21 ]). Private firms cannot be expected to pursue these types of green innovations intensively. Nevertheless, governments often spend substantial amounts on funding R&D on pollution abatement technology, but less frequently we view government programs funding research on technologies that can facilitate policy enforcement and environmental monitoring.

Finally, the green economy transition should also benefit from research that involves various impact evaluations, including methodological innovation in evaluation studies. This concerns evaluations of the impacts of important baseline trends, e.g., digitalization and automation, globalization versus nationalization, etc., on environmental and distributional outcomes but also on the prospects for green innovation collaborations and various circular economy-inspired business models. Such evaluations could be particularly relevant for understanding possible future pathways for the greening – and de-carbonization – of key process industries. Clearly, there is also need for improved evaluations of policy instruments and combinations of policies. With an increased emphasis on the role of technology-specific policies, such evaluations are far from straightforward. They must consider the different policies’ roles in the innovation systems, and address important interaction effects; any evaluation must also acknowledge the policy learning taking place over time.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

For instance, in the new system, workers had more autonomy and flexibility (e.g., [ 28 ]).

Clearly, given the focus on sustainable technological change, this article does not address all dimensions of the transition to a green economy. Heshmati [ 31 ] provides a recent review of the green economy concept, its theoretical foundations, political background and developmental strategies towards sustainable development. See also Megwai et al. [ 41 ] for an account of various green economy initiatives with a specific focus on developing countries, and Bartelmus [ 5 ] for a critical discussion of the link between the green economy and sustainable development.

For instance, it is typically less negative for the environment to landfill a substantial share of mining waste such as hard rock compared to recycling. Hard rock typically causes little environmental damage, except aesthetically, unless such waste interacts with surface or ground water [ 17 ].

In fact, patents protecting intellectual property rights could even slow down the diffusion of green technologies offering deep emission reductions by creating a bias towards development of close-to-commercial technologies. For instance, Budish et al. [ 10 ] shows that while patents award innovating companies a certain period of market exclusivity, the effective time period may be much shorter since some companies choose to file patents at the time of discovery rather than at first sale. One consequence of this is that the patent system may provide weak incentives for companies to engage in knowledge generation and learning about technologies that face a long time between invention and commercialization.

The UNFCCC [ 56 ] reports substantial increases in climate-related global finance flows, but these flows are still relatively small in the context of wider trends in global investment. They are even judged to be insufficient to meet the additional financing needs required for adaptation to the climate change that cannot be avoided.

If the tax is assessed per pound of intermediate material produced, it will also give producers the incentive to supply lighter-weight products.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support from Nordforsk (the NOWAGG project) is gratefully acknowledged, as are valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript from Åsa Ericson, Johan Frishammar, Jamil Khan, Annica Kronsell, one anonymous reviewer and the Editor. Any remaining errors, however, reside solely with the author.

Financial support from Nordforsk and the NOWAGG project on Nordic green growth strategies is gratefully acknowledged. Open access funding provided by Lulea University of Technology.

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Ecotechnology: For the Present and the Future

Climate change is one of the biggest environmental concerns that humanity is going through at present. And it’s only going to get worse, say reports and experts.

Today, we’ve started taking climate change and issues related to the ecosystem more seriously, as the impact of this has reached our doorsteps, and it is said to be unmeasurable. So, if you are someone who is concerned about the ecosystem and feel the need to protect and preserve it for now and for future generations to come, then you should definitely know about the emerging field of study known as ecotechnology.

Ecotechnology: here's what we're looking at today

What does a degree in ecotechnology offer.

• Top ten universities to study environmental science and ecotechnology
• Career roles in the sector

The future of ecotechnology

First, what is ecotechnology.

Materials and energy have been at the epicenter of science and technology since the time of the industrial revolution. The world has been less considerate towards environmental problems, and it took a while for us to realize and acknowledge the fact that human existence is only possible when things go hand in hand with the natural environment.

So, when we think of turning things back to normal and how it was years back the only solution in front of us is ecotechnology, it is the magical wizard that we have, the one that can do wonders by finding a solution for all the environmental problems that we are going through at present.

Ecotechnology is the branch of applied science that helps in fulfilling all human needs by causing very little or minimal damage to the ecology. This can also be called a technological means for ecosystem management. Ecotechnology integrates multiple thoughts of studies from natural science to social science and engineering to reduce environmental issues. Ecotechnology is also considered the basic principle for all sustainable engineering that works towards reducing the damage to the ecosystem.

Few areas in which ecotechnology plays an important role

• Waste to energy solutions
• Vertical farms
• Reservoir management
• Watershed, regional managements
• Waste management
• Lake management
• Eco-marketing
• Effects of adverse environment practices
• Advanced sewer treatment plants
• Energy-efficient buildings

Now let's look at few fundamental principles of ecotechnology

• Tackle issues related to overuse
• Bring awareness about environmental protection and conservation of resources.
• Develop new technology for environmental conservation
• Help in waste management
• To minimise the impact of pollution and come up with better ways to tackle the effect of pollution.
• Save energy through practical methods.
• Work towards to goal of making the earth a greener place

A course on ecotechnology mainly consists of subjects from two disciplines: natural science and social science. It’s a blend of theoretical knowledge and its practices. This course will also include topics related to environmental science and environmental technologies, which will focus mainly on addressing the issues that the ecosystem and the environment are facing currently and the solution for it. The Ecotechnology course will address all the environmental concerns from a global perspective to the grassroots level and find a solution.

Essential topics covered under the ecotechnology umbrella are as follows:

• Environment and natural resources
• Environmental audit and environmental economics
• Relationship between environment and humankind
• Environmental innovation and society
• Environment management systems and life cycle assessment
• Water and wastewater pollution control
• Disaster management and risk assessment
• Technological advancements
• Sustainable development
• Ecosystem services
• Organ toxicity
• Toxicants in the environment
• Sustainability issues
• Environmental engineering
• Instruments for sustainable development
• Industrial work environment

Top ten universities to study environmental science

Let us now look at the top 10 universities globally to study environmental sciences listed in the QS World Ranking.

Following are few universities which offer courses in ecotechnology

• Mondragon University
• Mid Sweden University
• Ecole Polytechnique
• University Of Glasgow
• University Of Toronto
• Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
• The University Of Newcastle
• Mcgill University
• University Of Sussex
• University Of Bristol
• University Of Pennsylvania
• Aalto University
• University of British Columbia

Further study

After graduating in ecotechnology, if you aim to master the subject, there are immense opportunities to do a master’s or other postgraduate qualification in topics such as sustainable water environment, sustainable construction, environmental policy law, ecotechnology, and sustainable development, eco-technologies for sustainability, and environment management, environmental change, and global sustainability, energy policy and environmental science – climate change impact assessment.

After completing their master’s degree in ecotechnology or related fields, a large number of students take up research as their next step as there is a wide range of research opportunities in this relatively new field. Many universities offer Ph.D. programmes in ecotechnology and related areas like atmospheric and oceanic sciences, environmental science, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

As many regions of ecotechnology are significantly less explored, this field has the potential to create path-breaking research.

Career roles in ecotechnology

With the day-to-day increase in environmental issues and the importance given by the governments to tackle them, careers related to ecotechnology have become more critical.

Here are a few career opportunities that an ecotechnology graduate can apply for.

• Environmental scientist
• Energy analyst – commercial focus
• Environmental consultant
• Waste management officer
• Inside sales and outreach representative – commercial energy efficiency focus
• Home energy specialist
• Landscape development
• Conservation hydrologist
• Oceanographer
• Research and development in the field of ecotechnology
• Sustainability consultant
• Town planner
• Environmental lawyer
• Environmental science manager
• Field services department lead
• Business applications manager
• Horticulture therapist
• Research officer
• Assistant professor
• Environmental engineer
• Environmental health practitioner
• Landscape architect
• Environmental conservation officer
• Recycling officer
• entomologist
• Environment photographer
• Environmental  accounting
• Business recycling specialist
• Speciality sales and merchandising specialist

Technological innovations have been part of eco-technology for quite some time. Like in every other field, even in the area of ecotechnology, there will be unpredictable changes and innovations taking place in the future. From making artificial photosynthesis to building smart roads now, there are many environmentally friendly alternatives for all our needs.

Scientists have created artificial leaves which can take in the sunlight to produce oxygen. Then, to decrease the carbon footprint, scientists have come up with an innovative creation known as a supertree, which is a single phylogenetic tree assembled from a combination of smaller phylogenetic trees. Cloning Endangered Species is also considered one of the best innovations in the field of ecotechnology as this will result in bringing back the endangered species.

Every day, we are moving in the direction of an irreversible change in our ecosystem, and the world is looking for alternatives that will harm our ecosystem less considered to how it is right now. This has resulted in creating multiple job opportunities and also demand for skilled professionals in this field of study.

If you are someone who really cares for the ecosystem that we are part of and you feel the need to protect it, then ecotechnology is the field worth considering. The work that you will be doing today is not just for the present but also for the future generations to come.

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• Terms of Service

Privileged and confidential

Terms of Use | August 24 2021

THE CHOPRAS GLOBAL HOLDINGS PTE LTD ("TC GLOBAL") END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT AND TERMS OF USE

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE SERVICES OFFERED BY TC GLOBAL. THESE TERMS OF USE SET FORTH THE LEGALLY BINDING TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE AT https://tcglobal.com ("THE "SITE") AND THE SERVICES, FEATURES, CONTENT, APPLICATIONS OR WIDGETS OFFERED BY TC GLOBAL ("SERVICE") .

For the purposes of these Terms of Use, "TC Global" shall be deemed to include The Chopras Global Holdings Pte Ltd and/or its affiliates.

Acceptance of Terms

By registering for and/or using the Service in any manner, including but not limited to visiting or browsing the Site, you agree to all of the terms and conditions contained herein ("Terms of Use") and all other operating rules, policies and procedures that may be published from time to time on the Site by TC Global, each of which is incorporated by reference and each of which may be updated by TC Global from time to time without notice to you in accordance with the terms set out under the "Modification of Terms of Use" section below. In addition, some services offered through the Service may be subject to additional terms and conditions specified by TC Global from time to time; your use of such services is subject to those additional terms and conditions, which are incorporated into these Terms of Use by this reference. These Terms of Use apply to all users of the Service, including, without limitation, users who are contributors of content, information, and other materials or services on the Site, individual users of the Service, venues that access the Service, and users that have a page on the Service.

Subject to these Terms of Use, TC Global may offer to provide the Services, as described more fully on the Site, and which are selected by you, solely for your own use, and not for the use or benefit of any third party. Services shall include, but not be limited to, any services TC Global performs for you, any applications or widgets offered by TC Global that you download from the Site or, subject to the terms set out under the "Third party Sites and Services" section below, from third party application stores (eg. App Store, Play Store or Google Apps Marketplace) authorized by TC Global, as well as the offering of any materials displayed or performed on or through the Services (including Content (as defined below)).

Registration and Eligibility

You are required to register with TC Global to browse the Site, view Content and access the Services only and represent, warrant and covenant that you provide TC Global with accurate and complete registration information (including, but not limited to a user name ("User Name") , e-mail address and/or mobile telephone number and a password you will use to access the Service) and to keep your registration information accurate and up-to-date. Failure to do so shall constitute a breach of these Terms of Use, which may result in immediate termination of your TC Global account. We recommend, but do not require, that you use your own name as your User Name so your contacts can recognize you more easily. You shall not:

• Create any account for anyone other than yourself without such person's permission.
• Use a username that is the name of another person with the intent to impersonate that person.
• Use a username or TC Global account that is subject to any rights of a person other than you without appropriate authorization.
• Use a username that is a name that is otherwise offensive, vulgar or obscene or otherwise unlawful.

TC Global reserves the right to refuse registration of, or cancel a User Name at its sole discretion. You are solely responsible and liable for activity that occurs on your account and shall be responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your TC Global password. You shall never use another user's account without such other user's prior express permission. You will immediately notify TC Global in writing of any unauthorized use of your account, or other account related security breach of which you are aware.

You represent and warrant that if you are an individual, you are of legal age to form a binding contract, or that if you are registering on behalf of an entity or a minor, that you are lawfully authorized to enter into, and bind the entity or yourself (as the legal guardian of the minor) to, these Terms of Use and register for the Service. The Service is not available to individuals who are younger than 10 years old. TC Global may, in its sole discretion, refuse to offer the Service to any person or entity and change its eligibility criteria at any time.

You are solely responsible for ensuring that these Terms of Use are in compliance with all laws, rules and regulations applicable to you and the right to access the Service is revoked where these Terms of Use or use of the Service is prohibited and, in such circumstances, you agree not to use or access the Site or Services in any way.

If you use a mobile device, please be aware that your carrier's normal rates and fees, such as text messaging and data charges, will still apply. In the event you change or deactivate your mobile telephone number, you agree that you will update your account information on the Services within 48 hours to ensure that your messages are not sent to the person who acquires your old number.

All Content, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content. TC Global cannot guarantee the authenticity of any Content or data which users may provide about themselves. You acknowledge that all Content accessed by you using the Service is at your own risk and you will be solely responsible and liable for any damage or loss to you or any other party resulting therefrom. For purposes of these Terms of Use, the term "Content" includes, without limitation, any location information, video clips, audio clips, responses, information, data, text, photographs, software, scripts, graphics, and interactive features generated, provided, or otherwise made accessible by TC Global on or through the Service. Content added, created, uploaded, submitted, distributed, posted or otherwise obtained through the Service by users, including Content that is added to the Service in connection with users linking their accounts to third party websites and services, is collectively referred to as, "User Submissions" .

TC Global Content

The Service contains Content specifically provided by TC Global or its partners and such Content is protected by copyrights, trademarks, service marks, patents, trade secrets or other proprietary rights and laws, as applicable. You shall abide by and maintain all copyright notices, information, and restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Service.

Subject to these Terms of Use, TC Global grants each user of the Site and/or Service a worldwide, non-exclusive, non-sub licensable and non-transferable license to use, modify and reproduce the Content, solely for personal, non-commercial use. Use, reproduction, modification, distribution or storage of any Content for other than personal, non-commercial use is expressly prohibited without prior written permission from TC Global, or from the copyright holder identified in such Content's copyright notice, as applicable. You shall not sell, license, rent, or otherwise use or exploit any Content for commercial (whether or not for profit) use or in any way that violates any third party right.

User Submissions

We may use your User Submissions in a number of different ways in connection with the Site, Service and TC Global's business as TC Global may determine in its sole discretion, including but not limited to, publicly displaying it, reformatting it, incorporating it into marketing materials, advertisements and other works, creating derivative works from it, promoting it, distributing it, and allowing other users to do the same in connection with their own websites, media platforms, and applications ("Third Party Media") . By submitting User Submissions on the Site or otherwise through the Service, you hereby do and shall grant TC Global a worldwide, non- exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, sub licensable and transferable license to use, copy, edit, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Submissions in connection with the Site, the Service and TC Global's (and its successors and assigns') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Site (and derivative works thereof) or the Service in any media formats and through any media channels (including, without limitation, third party websites and feeds). You also hereby do and shall grant each user of the Site and/or the Service, including Third Party Media, a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Site and the Service, and to use, edit, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions in connection with their use of the Site, Service and Third Party Media. For clarity, the foregoing license grant to TC Global does not affect your other ownership or license rights in your User Submission(s), including the right to grant additional licenses to the material in your User Submission(s), unless otherwise agreed in writing with TC Global.

You represent and warrant that you have all rights to grant such license to us without infringement or violation of any third party rights, including without limitation, any privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights, or any other intellectual property or proprietary rights.

You understand that all information publicly posted or privately transmitted through the Site is the sole responsibility of the person from whom such Content originated; that TC Global will not be liable for any errors or omissions in any Content; and that TC Global cannot guarantee the identity of any other users with whom you may interact in the course of using the Service.

You should be aware that the opinions expressed in the Content in User Submissions are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of TC Global. TC Global is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied in User Submissions or in relation to any comments that are posted.

You should bear in mind that circumstances change and that information that may have been accurate at the time of posting will not necessarily remain so.

When you delete your User Submissions, they will be removed from the Service. However, you understand that any removed User Submissions may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but following removal will not be shared with others) or may remain with users who have previously accessed or downloaded your User Submissions.

Rules and Conduct

As a condition of use, you promise not to use the Service for any purpose that is prohibited by these Terms of Use. You are responsible for all of your activity in connection with the Service.

Additionally, you shall abide by all applicable local, state, national and international laws and regulations and, if you represent a business, any advertising, marketing, privacy, or other self-regulatory code(s) applicable to your industry.

By way of example, and not as a limitation, you shall not (and shall not permit any third party to) either (a)take any action or (b)upload, download, post, submit or otherwise distribute or facilitate distribution of any Content on or through the Service, including without limitation any User Submission, that:

• belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right;
• is defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophilic, invasive of another's privacy, including bodily privacy, insulting or harassing on the basis of gender, libelous, racially or ethnically objectionable, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise inconsistent with or contrary to the laws in force;
• is harmful to a minor;
• infringes any patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary rights;
• violates any law for the time being in force;
• deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of the message or knowingly and intentionally communicates any information which is patently false or misleading in nature but may reasonably be perceived as a fact;
• impersonates another person;
• threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence or prevents investigation of any offence or is insulting other nation;
• contains software virus or any other computer code, file or program designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer resource;
• is patently false and untrue, and is written or published in any form, with the intent to mislead or harass a person, entity or agency for financial gain or to cause any injury to any person.

Additionally, you agree not to:

• contact anyone who has asked not to be contacted, or makes unsolicited contact with anyone for any commercial purpose, specifically, contact any user to post an advertisement on a third party website or post any advertisement on behalf of such user; or to "stalk" or otherwise harass anyone;
• make any libelous or defamatory comments or postings to or against anyone;
• collect personal data about other users or entities for commercial or unlawful purposes;
• use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download or scrape data from the Site, except for internet search engines (eg. Google) and non-commercial public archives (e.g. archive.org) that comply with our robots.txt file;
• post Content that is outside the local area or not relevant to the local area, repeatedly post the same or similar Content, or otherwise impose unreasonable or disproportionately large loads on our servers and other infrastructure;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to computer systems owned or controlled by TC Global or engage in any activity that disrupts, diminishes the quality of, interferes with the performance of, or impairs the functionality of, the Service or the Site.
• use any automated device or software that enables the submission of automatic postings on TC Global without human intervention or authorship (an "automated posting device" ), including without limitation, the use of any such automated posting device in connection with bulk postings, or for automatic submission of postings at certain times or intervals; or
• Any Content uploaded by you shall be subject to relevant laws and may disabled, or and may be subject to investigation under appropriate laws. Furthermore, if you are found to be in non-compliance with the laws and regulations, these terms, or the privacy policy of the Site, we may terminate your account/block your access to the Site and we reserve the right to remove any non-compliant Content uploaded by you.

TC Global does not guarantee that any Content or User Submissions (as defined above) will be made available on the Site or through the Service. TC Global has no obligation to monitor the Site, Service, Content, or User Submissions. However, TC Global reserves the right to (i) remove, suspend, edit or modify any Content in its sole discretion, including without limitation any User Submissions at any time, without notice to you and for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content or if TC Global is concerned that you may have violated these Terms of Use), or for no reason at all and (ii) to remove, suspend or block any User Submissions from the Service. TC Global also reserves the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as TC Global reasonably believes is necessary to (i) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (ii) enforce these Terms of Use, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect the rights, property or safety of TC Global, its users and the public.

Technical Failures

It is possible that you may face disruptions, including, but not limited to errors, disconnections or interferences in communication in the internet services, software or hardware that you have used to avail our Service. TC Global is not responsible for such factors in the disruption or interruption in the Service and you take full responsibility with complete knowledge for any risk of loss or damages caused due to interruption of services for any such reasons.

Advertisements, Third Party Sites and Services

Some of the TC Global Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements, promotions, and links to third-party websites. You hereby agree that TC Global may place such advertising and promotions on the TC Global Services or on, about, or in conjunction with your Content. The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.

The Service may permit you to link to other websites, services or resources on the Internet, and other websites, services or resources may contain links to the Site. When you access third party websites, you do so at your own risk. These other websites are not under TC Global's control, and you acknowledge that TC Global is not responsible or liable for the content, functions, accuracy, legality, appropriateness or any other aspect of such websites or resources. The inclusion of any such link does not imply endorsement by TC Global or any association with its operators. You further acknowledge and agree that TC Global shall not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any such Content, goods or services available on or through any such website or resource.

Termination

TC Global may terminate your access to all or any part of the Service at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately, which may result in the forfeiture and destruction of all information associated with your membership. If you wish to terminate your account, you may do so by contacting us at [email protected] till we develop the procedure on the website and apps. Any fees paid hereunder are non-refundable. All provisions of these Terms of Use which by their nature should survive termination shall survive termination, including, without limitation, ownership provisions, warranty disclaimers, indemnity and limitations of liability.

Warranty Disclaimer

Save to the extent required by law, TC Global has no special relationship with or fiduciary duty to you. You acknowledge that TC Global has no control over, and no duty to take any action regarding: which users gain access to the Service; what Content you access via the Service; what effects the Content may have on you; how you may interpret or use the Content; or what actions you may take as a result of having been exposed to the Content.

You release TC Global from all liability for you having acquired or not acquired Content through the Service. The Service may contain, or direct you to websites containing, information that some people may find offensive or inappropriate. TC Global makes no representations concerning any Content contained in or accessed through the Service, and TC Global will not be responsible or liable for the accuracy, copyright compliance, legality or decency of material contained in or accessed through the Service and cannot be held liable for any third-party claims, losses or damages.

You release us from all liability relating to your connections and relationships with other users. You understand that we do not, in any way, screen users, nor do we inquire into the backgrounds of users or attempt to verify their backgrounds or statements. We make no representations or warranties as to the conduct of users or the veracity of any information users provide. In no event shall we be liable for any damages whatsoever, whether direct, indirect, general, special, compensatory, consequential, and/or incidental, arising out of or relating to the conduct of you or anyone else in connection with the Services, including, without limitation, bodily injury, emotional distress, and any damages resulting in any way from communications or meetings with users or persons you may otherwise meet through the Services. As such, you agree to take reasonable precautions and exercise the utmost personal care in all interactions with any individual you come into contact with through the Service, particularly if you decide to meet such individuals in person. For example, you should not, under any circumstances, provide your financial information (e.g., credit card or bank account numbers) to other individuals.

THE SITE, SERVICE AND CONTENT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS", "AS AVAILABLE" AND ARE PROVIDED WITHOUT ANY REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF TITLE, NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND ANY WARRANTIES IMPLIED BY ANY COURSE OF PERFORMANCE OR USAGE OF TRADE, ALL OF WHICH ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED, SAVE TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY LAW.

TC GLOBAL, AND ITS AFFILIATES, TEAM, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, SUPPLIERS, PARTNERS AND CONTENT PROVIDERS DO NOT WARRANT THAT: (A) THE SERVICE WILL BE SECURE OR AVAILABLE AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME OR LOCATION; (B) ANY DEFECTS OR ERRORS WILL BE CORRECTED; (C) ANY CONTENT OR SOFTWARE AVAILABLE AT OR THROUGH THE SERVICE IS FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS; OR (D) THE RESULTS OF USING THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS. YOUR USE OF THE WEBSITE, SERVICE AND CONTENT IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. SOME STATES / COUNTRIES DO NOT ALLOW LIMITATIONS ON IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO THE ABOVE LIMITATIONS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

Indemnification

You shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless TC Global, its affiliates and each of its and its affiliates' employees, contractors, directors, suppliers and representatives from all losses, costs, actions, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable legal costs) or liabilities, that arise from or relate to your use or misuse of, or access to, the Site, Service, Content or otherwise from your User Submissions, violation of these Terms of Use, or infringement by you, or any third party using the your account, of any intellectual property or other right of any person or entity (save to the extent that a court of competent jurisdiction holds that such claim arose due to an act or omission of TC Global). TC Global reserves the right to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which event you will assist and cooperate with TC Global in asserting any available defenses.

Limitation of Liability

ALL LIABILITY OF TC GLOBAL, ITS AFFILIATES, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, PARTNERS, SUPPLIERS OR CONTENT PROVIDERS HOWSOEVER ARISING FOR ANY LOSS SUFFERED AS A RESULT OF YOUR USE OF THE SITE, SERVICE, CONTENT OR USER SUBMISSIONS IS EXPRESSLY EXCLUDED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SAVE THAT, IF A COURT OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION DETERMINES THAT LIABILITY OF TC GLOBAL, ITS DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, PARTNERS, SUPPLIERS OR CONTENT PROVIDERS (AS APPLICABLE) HAS ARISEN, THE TOTAL OF SUCH LIABILITY SHALL BE LIMITED IN AGGREGATE TO THE VALUE OF TC GLOBAL'S SERVICES AVAILED BY THE USER FOR 12 MONTHS PRIOR TO THE INITIATION OF A CLAIM.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL TC GLOBAL, NOR ITS DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, PARTNERS, SUPPLIERS OR CONTENT PROVIDERS, BE LIABLE UNDER CONTRACT, TORT, STRICT LIABILITY, NEGLIGENCE OR ANY OTHER LEGAL OR EQUITABLE THEORY OR OTHERWISE (AND WHETHER OR NOT TC GLOBAL, ITS DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, PARTNERS, SUPPLIERS OR CONTENT PROVIDERS HAD PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES GIVING RISE TO SUCH LOSS OR DAMAGE) WITH RESPECT TO THE SITE, SERVICE, CONTENT OR USER SUBMISSIONS FOR:

• INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL LOSSES OR DAMAGES;
• LOSS OF ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED PROFITS;
• LOSS OF REVENUE;
• LOSS OF GOODWILL;
• LOSS OF DATA;
• LOSS OF ANTICIPATED SAVINGS;
• WASTED EXPENDITURE; OR
• COST OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUE GOODS OR SERVICES.

NOTHING IN THESE TERMS OF USE SHALL BE DEEMED TO EXCLUDE OR LIMIT YOUR LIABILITY IN RESPECT OF ANY INDEMNITY GIVEN BY YOU UNDER THESE TERMS OF USE. APPLICABLE LAW MAY NOT ALLOW THE LIMITATION OR EXCLUSION OF LIABILITY OR INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THE ABOVE LIMITATION OR EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. IN SUCH CASES, TC GLOBAL'S LIABILITY WILL BE LIMITED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

Governing Law

A printed version of these Terms of Use and of any notice given in electronic form shall be admissible in judicial or administrative proceedings based upon or relating to these Terms of Use to the same extent and subject to the same conditions as other business documents and records originally generated and maintained in printed form. You and TC Global agree that any cause of action arising out of or related to the Service must commence within one (1) year after the cause of action arose; otherwise, such cause of action is permanently barred.

Terms of Use and all other policies available on this Service shall be interpreted and construed in accordance with the laws of India. Any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms of Use and/ or other policies available on this App, including any question regarding its existence, validity or termination, shall be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration administered by the Singapore International Arbitration Centre ("SIAC") in accordance with the Arbitration Rules of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre ("SIAC Rules") for the time being in force, which rules are deemed to be incorporated by reference in this clause. The Tribunal shall consist of 3 arbitrators. The seat and venue of Arbitration shall be Singapore and the language of proceedings shall be English. Subject to the foregoing, the Courts of Singapore shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any disputes relating to the subject matter, herein.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, if a dispute arises with respect to the validity, scope, enforceability, inventorship, ownership, infringement, breach or unauthorised use of any patent, trademark, copyright or other intellectual property right or any non-proprietary data owned and/or controlled by TC Global, whether or not arising from the Terms of Use, such dispute (at the option of TC Global) shall not be submitted to arbitration and instead, TC Global shall be free to initiate litigation, including but not limited to a claim for interim injunctive relief, in a court of competent jurisdiction, in any country or other jurisdiction in which such rights apply.

Integration and Severability

These Terms of Use are the entire agreement between you and TC Global with respect to the Service and use of the Site, Service, Content or User Submissions, and supersede all prior or contemporaneous communications and proposals (whether oral, written or electronic) between you and TC Global with respect to the Site. If any provision of these Terms of Use is found to be unenforceable or invalid, that provision will be limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary so that these Terms of Use will otherwise remain in full force and effect and enforceable. The failure of either party to exercise in any respect any right provided for herein shall not be deemed a waiver of any further rights hereunder. Waiver of compliance in any particular instance does not mean that we will waive compliance in the future. In order for any waiver of compliance with these Terms of Use to be binding, TC Global must provide you with written notice of such waiver through one of its authorized representatives.

Modification of Terms of Use

TC Global reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to modify or replace any of these Terms of Use, or change, suspend, or discontinue the Service (including without limitation, the availability of any feature, database, or content) at any time by posting a notice on the Site or by sending you notice through the Service or via email. TC Global may also impose limits on certain features and services or restrict your access to parts or all of the Service without notice or liability. It is your responsibility to check these Terms of Use periodically for changes. Your continued use of the Service following the posting of any changes to these Terms of Use constitutes acceptance of those changes. You shall also be notified of any modifications to these Terms of Use as and when effected or at least once a year.

Other Provisions

Claims of Copyright or Trademark Infringement

Claims of copyright or trademark infringement should be sent to TC Global's designated agent. If you believe that someone is infringing your copyright or trademark rights on the Site, you can report it to us by contacting our designated agent at [email protected] with a report containing the following information:

• your complete contact information (name, mailing address and phone number),
• a detailed description of the Content that you claim infringes your copyright or trademark along with details on how it infringes upon your copyright or trademark,
• the web address (URL) of the infringing content,
• a declaration that you are filing this report in good faith and that all the information provided is accurate and that you are the owner of the copyright and/or trademark in question.

Please attach your digital signature or physical signature to the report.

Within 36 hours of receiving this notice with the above mentioned details, we will take down the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.

On completion of the take-down procedure above:

• If the complainant is successful in obtaining an order of injunction from a court of competent jurisdiction within 21 days from filing the complaint, the material will be permanently removed from TC Global's Site and database upon TC Global being provided with a copy of such order;
• If the complainant is not successful in obtaining an order of injunction from a court of competent jurisdiction within 21 days from receiving notice from the complainant, the material will be made available for public view once again.

Before you submit a report of infringement, you may want to send a message to the person who posted the Content. You may be able to resolve the issue without contacting TC Global. Please remember, only the copyright/trademark owner or their authorized representative may file a report of infringement. If you believe something on the Site infringes someone else's copyright/trademark, you may want to let the rights owner know.

TC Global may give notice by means of a general notice on the Site / Service, notification within the mobile application on your account, electronic mail to your email address in your account, or by written communication sent to your address as set forth in your account. You may give notice to TC Global by written communication to TC Global's email address at [email protected] or physical address at No. 3, Shenton Way, #10-05/06, Shenton House, Singapore, 068805 .

You may not assign or transfer these Terms of Use in whole or in part without TC Global's prior written approval. You hereby give your approval to TC Global for it to assign or transfer these Terms in whole or in part, including to: (i) a subsidiary or affiliate; (ii) an acquirer of TC Global's equity, business or assets; or (iii) a successor by merger. No joint venture, partnership, employment or agency relationship exists between you, TC Global or any Third Party Provider as a result of the contract between you and TC Global or use of the Services.

If any provision of these Terms is held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable, in whole or in part, under any law, such provision or part thereof shall to that extent be deemed not to form part of these Terms but the legality, validity and enforceability of the other provisions in these Terms shall not be affected. In that event, the parties shall replace the illegal, invalid or unenforceable provision or part thereof with a provision or part thereof that is legal, valid and enforceable and that has, to the greatest extent possible, a similar effect as the illegal, invalid or unenforceable provision or part thereof, given the contents and purpose of these Terms. These Terms constitute the entire agreement and understanding of the parties with respect to its subject matter and replaces and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous agreements or undertakings regarding such subject matter. In these Terms, the words "including" and "include" mean "including, but not limited to."

Miscellaneous

TC Global shall not be liable for any failure to perform its obligations hereunder where such failure results from any cause beyond TC Global's reasonable control, including, without limitation, mechanical, electronic or communications failure or degradation (including "line-noise" interference). These Terms of Use are personal to you, and are not assignable, transferable or sublicensable by you except with TC Global's prior written consent. TC Global may assign, transfer or delegate any of its rights and obligations hereunder without consent. No agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship is created as a result of these Terms of Use and neither party has any authority of any kind to bind the other in any respect.

Unless otherwise specified in these Term of Use, all notices under these Terms of Use will be in writing and will be deemed to have been duly given when received, if personally delivered or sent by certified or registered mail, return receipt requested; when receipt is electronically confirmed, if transmitted by facsimile or e-mail; or the day after it is sent, if sent for next day delivery by recognized overnight delivery service.

You may contact us at the following address:

The Chopras Global Holdings PTE Ltd No. 3, Shenton Way, #10-05/06, Shenton House, Singapore, 068805 Our grievance / nodal officer may be contacted at: Zishan Siddiqui Grievance Officer The Chopras Global Holdings PTE Ltd No. 3 Shenton Way #10-05/06, Shenton House Singapore, 068805 Email: [email protected]

• Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy | September 6, 2021

• The Chopras Global Holdings PTE Ltd. is an entity registered in Singapore. We are engaged in the business of providing a global education, learning, and investment services Site which caters to students, professionals, universities, corporates and governments. We are committed to ensuring that privacy of our clients, visitors, and other users of the website https://tcglobal.com , its subdomains, the web applications and mobile applications (" Site ") is always respected. This Privacy Policy (" Policy ") is to serve as a testament to our sincere efforts to uphold privacy laws. In this Policy, " TC Global ", " we ", or " us " refers to The Chopras Global Holdings PTE Ltd. and its affiliates and " you " refers to a user who has provided any information including Personal Information ( as defined below ) and using any features therein.
• The protection and security of your Personal Information and Usage Information ( as defined below ) is one of our top priorities. This Privacy Policy discloses and explains how we collect, use, share and protect Personal Information, Usage Information or any other information about you. We also provide information regarding how you can access and update your Personal Information and make certain choices about how your Personal Information is used by us. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information we collect by other means (including offline) or from other sources.
• This Privacy Policy explains what information of yours will be collected by TC Global when you access the Site, how the information will be used, and how you can control the collection, correction and/or deletion of information. We will not use or share your information with anyone except as described in this Privacy Policy. The use of information collected through our Site shall be limited to the purposes under this Privacy Policy.

TC Global controls, collects, owns and directs the use of the Personal Information and Usage Information on its Site and TC Global is the data controller and data processor as regards the Personal Information and Usage Information collected on its Site. For any queries regarding this Privacy Policy and the collection and use of data collected or processed under this Privacy Policy, TC Global can be contacted by mail at The Chopras Global Holdings PTE Ltd, No. 3, Shenton Way, #10-05/06, Shenton House, Singapore 068805 ; by phone at +65 9825 6174 or by e-mail at [email protected] .

The legal basis for collection and processing of any information collected and processed by TC Global including the Personal Information is (i) your consent at the time of providing the Personal Information; (ii) where it is in our legitimate interests to do so and not overridden by your rights (for example, in some cases for direct marketing, fraud prevention, network and information systems security, responding to your communications, the operation of networks of groups by the network administrators, and improving our Site). In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect information about you or may otherwise need the information to protect your vital interests or those of another person. We may also process information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract.

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Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Nature in its broadest and original use refers to the biological, chemical and physical worlds whereas natural environment includes all things naturally found on earth, both animate and inanimate. Man is an integral part of nature and cannot live outside the natural environment as he depends on it for virtually everything. He “is constantly aware of the influence of nature in the form of the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he eats, and the flow of energy and information” (Spirkin, 3).

As such most of man’s activities has been and is in response to natural processes in an effort to get maximum utility from nature and enhance its productivity to meets the many human needs. In the human evolution, nature played a pivot role in either advancing it or impeding it. Spirkin further notes that man’s direct reliance to the nature lessens as the society develops and becomes more enlightened. For instance, the society ceases to entirely rely on land for their household food such that man can live on processed food.

The technological advancement results in man indirectly becoming more dependence on nature as most of his activities are focused on matter, energy and information. A classic example is the over reliance by the affluent populations on the electric power for lightning, cooking, refrigeration and for use in all other electric appliance. Yet electricity is produced from nature i.e. water, dynamo etc.

Positive impact of science and technology on nature

“Science and Technology have also been the greatest forces for beneficent social change in human history and will continue to be needed to solve the economic and social problems of the future.” (Baez, 1). Man has not only colonised the habitable part of natural environment, earth, but he has also transformed it over the years. This has resulted in the current natural environment which is due to a history of numerous action and reactionary outputs of man-nature relationship.

The green and industrial revolutions were big milestones in the human development as man could then have his needs better met by nature, without having to gather or hunt. Since that time man has innovatively come up with better ways of enhancing productivity of the land and reducing waste of natural resource.

This has been occasioned by significant scientific and technological strides in biological, physical and chemical fields. As such man’s dominion over nature has amplified significantly; thus more species have emerged while others have vanished, sophisticated structures are built from natural materials like stones, new substances made from existing chemical elements, effective drugs made from naturally occurring herbs, value addition of agricultural products etc.

The acceleration of economic development in the industrialising countries as a result of science and technology has been enormous. Of major importance is the contribution of agricultural technology to food security of developing nations of the world.

Through crop breeding its now possible to develop high breed varieties of crops with superior characteristics to the original varieties, such as;

• early maturing crops which grow fast before the adverse weather conditions set in, as well as outgrowing weeds which would compete with the crop for nutrients,
• high yielding plants that produce more than original varieties in the same conditions,
• drought resistance, a trait that enables the crop to survive harsh weather conditions without significant decrease in yield, and
• Disease and pest resistance, which means the crop is not susceptible to pest and disease infestation, therefore the harvest will be plenty and of good quality.

The contribution of technology to the communication industry has resulted in significant economic and social gains. Computer evolution has played a major part in the ushering in of the information age, where access to wide range of information has been eased.

The world has been transformed into a global village where people from different regions of the world can communicate freely and clearly, exchanging ideas either through: internet, cell phones, faxes, etc. The wide accessibility of information has lead to a more enlightened society, organized institutions and firms, ease of doing business, as well as consumer knowledge as he gets information about various products and goods.

Education institutions have not been left behind. More than ever before e-learning has gained popularity, with a majority of tertiary students opting for this module. Scholars have been able to post their research articles to the internet for public to easily and cheaply access. Further still institutions have also cut down the cost of managing hard copy libraries.

Negative impacts of science and technology

Technological progress has also had some drastic impact on the environment, which is threatening the natural survival of fauna and flora in the ecosystem. The World watch Institute puts it that “Our generation is the first to be faced with decisions that will determine whether the earth our children inherit will be habitable (Brown et al, 256).

Unless man is cautionary on his degradation actions in exploitation of natural resources the environment will remain under siege. The long term effect is even more disastrous as it poses a danger to the survival of man himself. Industrialisation has resulted in greenhouse effect that is characterised by significant increase in the atmospheric temperature. It is caused by increase of greenhouse gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone), in the atmosphere.

These gases absorb and produce thermal infra red radiations – ones responsible for increased temperature. The water vapour account for the greatest percentage of green house effect but its concentration in the atmosphere is not directly affected significantly by man’s activity.

However, according to Clausius-Clapeyron theory, increase in atmospheric temperature results in more water being held in the air. Methane has a much stronger greenhouse effect than even carbon dioxide but its concentration in the atmosphere is small therefore, its overall contribution is little as well. Combustion of fossil fuels resulting in emissions of carbon dioxide is a major human activity that causes significant effect of the environment.

Carbon dioxide is emitted through either burning of coal to produce electricity or combustion of petroleum products mainly used in motor transport. It is these carbon dioxide emissions that are the biggest cause of global warming and it is the global warming which will potentially change the world into a hostile and inhabitable environment. The second major challenge is the genetic engineering. This refers to the deliberate alteration of the genetic composition of an organism from its natural being to a more improved one.

This technology has been adopted and it’s being employed in many parts of the world, especially in the field of agriculture and medicine. There has been lots of controversy on the whether to allow genetic modification of food crops and animals or not. While it is evidenced that genetic modification would increase the yields and quality of the crops thereby alleviating the world’s food insecurity, its effect on human being is not very clear.

Some countries have fully adopted this technology, other have only allowed its partial adoption, while others have put in place stringent measures and policies against it. Human cloning has been another contentious issue amongst the scientists as well the general public. Many people are at crossroads of whether to accept therapeutic cloning or reproductive cloning; while others reject both on the ground that acceptance of the former form of cloning will open an opportunity for the later.

According to Association of Reproduction Health Professionals (7,8), reproductive cloning involves using of any human cell to get a clonal embryo which is then implanted into the uterus of a woman to create a living child- human clone, whereas therapeutic entails using of the clonal embryo to produce stem cells such as organs. In this case the clonal embryo is not implanted in the woman womb, but rather it is developed into an organ like liver, heart etc.

While therapeutic cloning is morally acceptable to some extent, reproductive cloning is controversial as it is likely to cause confusion amongst human beings. For instance, every child is expected to have two biological parents, but in the case of a clone child, he will only have a cell donor, who could either be a man or a woman, but not both. The fact that such a child naturally does not have either a biological father or a biological mother further weakens the family unit which is the fundamental unit of a society.

Intervention measures to mitigate the impact of science and technology on the natural environment

Global warming, an environment menace has become an important issue among the scientists and all interested in environmental conservation. Reduction of carbon dioxide emission is the key to the shielding of the ozone layer from depletion.

This can be achieved by employing the following three strategies: one is to increase the energy efficiency so that less carbon dioxide is emitted, second is the use of bio fuels instead of petroleum oils which emit carbon dioxide. Most of petroleum oils among other fuels are imported from Middle East and are shipped to other countries and transported in heavy tankers thus adding to the carbon dioxide levels. The shift from fossil fuels to bio fuels and the localization of production of fuel in the area it is used would greatly alleviate the problem.

The third important thing that man should consider is to adopt preservative methods of utilizing natural resources such as, forestation, agro-forestry and rehabilitation of water catchments areas among others. The trees and other vegetative plants will use up the carbon dioxide in the air to photosynthesise their food thus purifying the air and reducing carbon dioxide levels. This will not only conserve the environment but it will also enhance the productivity of the land.

Genetic Engineering is a breakthrough in the medicine science as it provides an opportunity to treat terminal conditions like cancer illness and it makes it easy to do organ transplants.

However the technological advancement in the field of genetics has had myriad of disadvantages, some of which include the change of the original species of the fauna and flora into genetically modified organisms. The future of the modified organisms is not very clear. The modified organisms lose vigour with time, thus modification of all species might result in their gradual extinction.

Human cloning is another contentious issue, with proponents arguing that therapeutic cloning be employed to solve several medical conditions while opponents viewing it as an opportunity for mankind to turn to reproductive cloning where he will start ‘improving’ human beings.

The result will be a society of hybrid human beings, lots of confusion as the clone will resemble the mother cell hence not easy to tell one clone being from another. Further still, the success of a clone organism from the clone procedure is not 100%, therefore lots of human clones will be killed or destroyed before a successful clone is arrived at.

Statement of other relevant facts and the consequences of each option

The shift from petroleum oils to bio fuels has had it own share of challenges. First, to meet the huge demand for fuel requirement, we would require lots of biomass such as agricultural vegetative matter. The farmers will produce more agricultural crops for bio fuel industries as opposed to food because the prices of bio fuel feedstock will be a premium.

As a result unprecedented famine and food insecurity would befall the society, defeating the very rationale of turning to bio fuels. Further the current bio fuel; ethanol absorbs water making it impossible to pipeline it as it will rust the pipes. This adds to its cost of transportation and carbon emission by the ship and the heavy trucks that transport it to various parts of the world.

Genetic modification of food crops and animals is the way to go if we are to meet the high demands of food requirements for the rapidly growing human population and solve the perennial food insecurity in the developing countries. Sticking to the convention methods pf plant breeding will limit farmers from getting the best quality and abundance yield in the shortest time.

Enforcement and implementation of policies that prohibit therapeutic human cloning closes all the windows for the infertile couples who through this technology would be able to get their own child. This technology enables patients with terminal illness such as cancer to be treated by organ transplants. The organ will be grown from stem cell and the patients will not have to wait for long to get an organ donor. Usually many patients die of their conditions while still waiting.

Statement of relevant moral principles

The effect of technological advancement has both positive and negative impact to the natural environment. If you consider the modern methods of agricultural production, they will lead to more food of high quality but will have adverse effect on the environment. Nuclear weapons render better protection at the expense of the environment. With technology man’s power over nature has tremendously increased, and he is now exercising it to even his fellow mankind.

It is evidenced that man’s interference with the nature has resulted in many of the global challenges we are facing with today; economic downturn, global warming, and wars among others. “Environmental factors are among the main, if not the sole, factors shaping culture.” (Sobouti, 2) These factors determine the way people dress, their economic activities, their lifestyle in general and a people’s technological advancement among others.

Before adoption of a new technology it is of essence to analyse and assess its impact to the nature as well as the humanity. Technology should only be employed to the extent that it is in consistent with the moral laws of the society, if man has to maintain order on earth and reduce conflict with nature and fellow man. The indiscriminative use of science and technology, without considering its impact is both careless and immoral.

Statement of the decision made

Historically, industrial revolution contributed greatly to the development of man. Given, the great economic gains realised from advancement of science and technology, we cannot totally disregard its use. It also follows that if the futurist challenges are to be solved, science and technology have the keys to the solutions.

However it should be employed in line with set development goals and moral ethics of the society. Governments should make policies and laws to regulate how science is being used. The policies and laws to regulate the use of science and technology should be publicised and the public thoroughly educated on them.

With the public understanding on what is legally acceptable, then the laws can be implemented and enforced. One of the mandates of every government is to protect its citizenry from exploitation of any form by individuals, private sector, civil servants, etc. Therefore, governments should neglect this important duty of protecting the citizens from technology abuse, as that will be an injustice.

Justification of the decision

Science and technology has opened many doors for manipulations of nature including mankind. It is only through comprehensive policies that the major risks of adoption of science and technology can be mitigated, whereas reaping the numerous gains of it. Nations and states should come together to formulate international policies on the same. Otherwise the negative technological impact from one region will affect the entire world as the earth is a single mass composed of many units.

The fight against human activities that cause climatic change requires concerted efforts from all persons; rich and poor, governments and non-governmental organisations, and nations and their leaders. Reverting climatic change is very costly compared to preventing it from happening. It is in the hands of every human being, me and you, to conserve and preserve the natural environment before the backlash of our exploitive activities hit on us. It is only through this that we can make earth a home fit for human habitation.

Works Cited

Association of Reproduction Health Professionals. “Human Cloning and Genetic Modification.”N.d. Web.

Baez, Albert V. “Teaching Youth about the Environmental Impact of Science and Technology.” N.d. Web.

Brown, Lester R. Worldwatch Institute “State of the World.” W.W. Norton: New York, USA, 2, 1989. Print.

Spirkin, Alexander, “ Dialectical Materialism .” N.d Web.

Sobouti, Yousef. The Academies Press, “ The Morality of Exact Sciences ,” Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences. N.d Web.

• The Case of Human Cloning at Kyunghee University
• Counterarguments to Human Cloning
• The Cloning Controversy
• Greenpeace Organization Efficiency and Reasonability
• Energy Resource Plan: Towards Sustainable Conservation of Energy
• Australian, Perth Water Supply Crisis
• Effects of Global Warming on Human Health
• At which Stage Can Centralized and Decentralized Cities Meet to Create a Design that is Essential in Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body?
• Chicago (A-D)
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Ecotechnology

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Basic Ecotechnology Concepts Why do we need biodiversity? What does it have to do with us? In the past, humans were self-centered and believed that their will would conquer nature. Humanity has damaged the natural environment by means of science and civilization for several thousand years, giving rise to some serious after-effects that have gradually appeared.

The extinction of species is a strong warning to us.People now generally forget that human existence depends on the supply from the nature, and that our relationship with the natural environment is not only one of xploitation . Once the natural environment reaches a state from which recovery is impossible, humanity's life-support system will no longer be sustainable. As humans, we should realize that the extinction of any species of butterfly or creature not only symbolizes the degradation of the earth's environment, but it also represents the lowered chances for survival of our descendants.

If we can maintain a biodiverse environment, with more wildlife around us, the human race will have more hope for a sustainable existence. Ecotecology Contents Some people finally started to think about how to reduce humanitys ecological impact to the lowest level after seeing the natural environment continuously being destroyed under the excuse of development. How could the original appearance of ecosystems be restored?How could a balance be struck between ecology and development in order to achieve the goal of a sustainable environment and sustainable humanity? These questions gave rise to ecotechnology. In 1938, Seifert from Germany first mentioned this concept.

It was hoped that river emediation could be undertaken in a way that was close to nature and a cheap way that maintained the beautiful natural scenery at the same time. The first person to mention "ecotechnology" was H. T. Odum of the U. S.

A.His main idea was that minimal labor should be put into changing the natural environment, so the self-renewability of the habitat system could be preserved. Until 1989, the American ecologist Mitsch more clearly defined the concepts and applications of ecotechnology. He pointed out that ecotechnology should emphasize the interactione between the man-made and atural environments so it could achieve the goal of a win-win situation for both man and natural ecology. From this point ecotechnology formally became a subject of study.

Recently, it has drawn more and more attention internationally. In road development, a bountiful space should be left for wildlife. Different countries have different names, meanings and explanations for ecotechnology, so to avoid confusion, the Public Construction Commission, which is in charge of the promotion of ecotechnology, formed an ecotechnology advisory roup in 2002 and came out with the following definition: "Ecotechnology means a profound understanding of ecosystems.All sustainable engineering that can reduce damage to ecosystems, and adopt ecology as a base and safety as an orientation in order to implement the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development, are called Ecotechnology. "Ecotechnology emphasizes thinking of the problem from a holistic point of view. For example, remediation of rivers should not only consider one single area.

Rather, the whole catchment area, hich includes the upstream, middle stream and downstream sections, should be included in evaluation for effective remediation.From the point of view of the ecosystem, construction that is taken for human economic activities should strive to reduce impacts on nature as much as possible. To enhance the understanding of construction professionals about natural ecology, consultation about the environment with ecological experts during planning and construction is necessary. Thus, ecological experts who are familiar with the local environment play very important roles in ecotechnology teamwork.

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Essay on Impact Of Technology On Environment

Students are often asked to write an essay on Impact Of Technology On Environment in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Impact Of Technology On Environment

Positive effects of technology.

Technology has made life easier and more comfortable. For example, solar panels use the sun’s energy to make electricity. This clean energy reduces pollution from coal plants. Also, electric cars don’t use gasoline, so they don’t release harmful gases into the air.

Negative Effects on Nature

Technology in farming.

In farming, technology like tractors and machines helps grow more food. But, using too many chemicals to protect plants can harm the soil and water. We must find a balance to protect our Earth.

Recycling and Saving Resources

Technology helps us recycle things like paper, plastic, and metal. This means we use less from nature. Also, technology like LED lights uses less electricity, which saves energy and helps our planet.

250 Words Essay on Impact Of Technology On Environment

Technology and nature.

Technology has changed the way we live. It has given us many good things like computers, smartphones, and medical machines. But it also affects the world around us. When we use technology, it can hurt the air, water, and land.

Using Resources

To make technology, we need to use a lot of materials from the Earth. This includes metals and oil. Taking these out of the ground can harm the land. It can also make the animals that live there lose their homes.

Waste and Pollution

After we use technology, it often becomes waste. Old phones and computers can harm the environment if they are not thrown away the right way. They have chemicals inside that can get into the ground and water. Factories that make technology also put smoke and other bad things into the air. This can make the air dirty and cause illnesses.

Technology needs energy to work. Most of the time, this energy comes from burning coal or gas. This adds to climate change because it puts gases into the air that make the Earth warmer.

Helping the Environment

But it’s not all bad. We also have technology that helps the environment. Solar panels and wind turbines make clean energy. Electric cars don’t pollute as much as cars that use gas. And we have machines that can recycle waste.

500 Words Essay on Impact Of Technology On Environment

Technology has changed our world in many ways. It has made life easier and more fun. But it also affects the environment, which includes all the natural things around us like air, water, plants, and animals. We use technology to make things, move around, and even to talk to each other from far away. All of this can harm nature if we are not careful.

Factories and Air Pollution

Factories make lots of things we use every day. They make our clothes, toys, and even the phone or computer you might be reading this on. But when factories work, they often make smoke that goes into the air. This smoke can make the air dirty, which is called air pollution. Dirty air is not good for people to breathe, and it can also make it harder for plants and animals to live.

Cars, Buses, and the Air

Cars, buses, and trucks help us get from one place to another quickly. But they also add to air pollution. They burn fuel, like petrol or diesel, and this creates smoke that goes into the air. Too much smoke from vehicles can make the air unhealthy and lead to problems like more asthma attacks in people.

Throwing Things Away

Using energy.

We need energy to do almost everything, like turning on lights, playing video games, or keeping our food cold in the fridge. Most of the energy we use comes from burning coal, oil, or gas. When we burn these things, it can make the air dirty, just like cars and factories do.

Recycling and Reusing

Recycling means taking something old and making it into something new. Instead of throwing things away, we can recycle paper, plastic, and metal. This means less trash in the environment and fewer new materials that we need to take from nature. Reusing things is also good. If we use things more than once, like a water bottle, we make less trash.

Technology has both good and bad effects on our environment. It has made some things harder for nature, like making the air dirty and creating trash. But we can use technology to find new ways to help, like making clean energy and recycling. If we are smart about how we use technology, we can take care of the environment and still enjoy all the good things that technology brings to our lives.

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Ecotechnological Green Approaches to Environmental Remediation and Restoration

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A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section " Environmental Sciences ".

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Born out of the marriage of ecology and engineering, ecotechnology offers great promises and potentials for the development of a sustainable paradigm to solve current environmental problems. It applies ecological principles and the complexity of living communities and ecosystems with technology to remediate contaminants in different environmental matrices (soil, water and air), and restoring degraded ecosystems for the sustained supply of ecosystem goods and services. In contrast to conventional engineering, ecotechnologies rely on nature's wisdom, the natural library of biodiversity, and the inherent capabilities of natural systems or their components. Ecotechnology advocates for bioremediation in contaminant clean-up processes, mediated by miniscule microbes and other biological and natural systems. Ecotech processes can help reduce the ecological footprint of human waste, converting it into resources, and can help combat global warming and climate change. As low-cost, eco-friendly, carbon- and nitrogen positive approaches, they have immense potential to satisfy the triple bottom lines of sustainability, i.e. environmental protection, economic prosperity and social security. To harness the optimum benefits, ecological and environmental technology can evolve on parallel tracks with collaborative rather than competitive interactions, where ecology and engineering work together in a cooperative way rather than in an antagonistic manner.

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Green technologies for sustainable environment: an introduction

• Published: 12 October 2021
• Volume 28 , pages 63437–63439, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Eldon R. Rene 1 ,
• Xuan Thanh Bui 2 , 3 ,
• Huu Hao Ngo 4 ,
• Long D. Nghiem 4 &
• Wenshan Guo 4  

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Water pollution has long been a major source of concern for the environment, the biosphere, and human well-being. In order to safeguard the environment, technologies such as wastewater treatment, reuse, recycling, and resource recovery have been tested and implemented at the pilot and industrial scales. In recent years, the research hotspot of environmental protection has gradually shifted from the well-known conventional technologies to eco-friendly, cost-effective, and sustainable technologies, also known as green technologies which could demonstrate outstanding advantages. Several practical treatment processes have been proposed and applied in practice; however, the green technologies are currently the most attractive for pollution control, especially water and wastewater remediation, preventing air pollution, and also the development of sophisticated, yet usable on-site sensors and analytical instruments. In the context of environmental protection, green technologies are a collection of practical methodologies, techniques, technologies, and materials that are based on non-toxic chemical processes, non-toxic end products, renewable energy sources, and environmental monitoring instruments, among other things, to mitigate or correct the negative impact caused by human activities.

Firstly, concerning water quality, an effective arithmetical method for evaluating the quality of surface and ground water has been described as the water quality index (WQI). The determination of water quality indexes often entails the integration of diverse biological, physical, and chemical aspects of a water source to yield a single value that is unitless but serves as an effective indicator of water quality because it is non-destructive. Secondly, the increased consumption of fossil fuels contributes to global warming, depletion of fossil fuel reserves, and future energy insecurity, all of which encourage the globe to look for alternatives that are more environmentally friendly, simple, and inexpensively available. Thirdly, in many water bodies around the globe, toxic cyanobacterial blooms (TCBs) are becoming a rising source of worry and it has depleted the water quality. By using modern analytical and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) techniques, the dynamics of poisonous cyanobacteria and microcystin (MC) concentrations in different aquatic ecosystems can be determined. Fourthly, the recovery of energy from plastic wastes has become increasingly popular in recent decades, owing to the increased need for energy in the world. The green principles and concepts such as recycling and reusing are being considered as an alternative, but reprocessing plastics and subjecting them to additional heating cycles will almost certainly result in molecular damage such as cross-linking, chain scission, or the formation of double bonds, which will reduce the product's reliability. Fifthly, when we discuss the global issue of climate change, the levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are increasing on a daily basis as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels for the generation of electricity. This has caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 64% of global warming since the industrial revolution. From a techno-economic and green technology viewpoint, researchers have been more interested in novel carbon capture because of its ease of integration with coal-fired power plants, which does not require considerable adjustments (e.g., the use of photobioreactors, photo-sequencing bioreactors, and algal bioreactors). All these five issues have led to the development of an enormous number of indicators that aims at pollution prevention, resource recovery, and the implementation of cleaner production concepts by a variety of national and international entities/research groups.

On December 1–4, 2019, the 2 nd Green Technologies for Sustainable Water Conference (GTSW 2019) was successfully held in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. The aim of GTSW 2019 was to provide a special forum for exchanging experiences, knowledge, and innovative ideas on all aspects of green technologies, with seven main themes: (1) water and wastewater treatment by green technologies, (2) wastewater treatment and reuse, (3) membrane processes, (4) resources recovery from wastewater, (5) nanotechnology for biological waste treatment, (6) bio-processes and bio-products, and (7) disruptive technologies and the application for water resource treatment and management. A wide range of present and future development difficulties in the fields of green technologies for waste to energy conversion, the resource recovery in the form of energy, fuel, valuable products and chemicals, and resilient environmental technologies were addressed by the keynote speakers, all of whom were speaking in a worldwide context.

The outcomes of GTSW 2019 were an opportunity to discuss and assess the latest approaches, innovative technologies, policies, and new directions in infrastructure development, pollution prevention, and eco-friendly processes to promote cooperation and networking amongst practitioners and researchers involved in addressing Green Technologies for Sustainable Water. The papers published in this special edition will provide significant networking opportunities for professionals and will provide the groundwork for future collaboration among these individuals. We are grateful to Prof. Philippe Garrigues, the Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), for providing us with the chance to publish a selection of peer-reviewed papers that were presented at GTSW 2019, and we appreciate him for his support. We would like to express our gratitude to Ms. Fanny Creusot and Ms. Florence Delavaud, Editorial Assistants of ESPR, as well as the entire Springer production team, for their invaluable assistance in bringing this issue to a successful conclusion. The guest editors are confident that the papers in this special issue will be useful reading materials for your study group, and we wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.

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Department of Water Supply, Sanitation and Environmental Engineering, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Westvest 7, PO Box 3015, 2611AX, Delft, The Netherlands

Eldon R. Rene

Key Laboratory of Advanced Waste Treatment Technology, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh (VNU-HCM), Linh Trung Ward, Thu Duc City, Ho Chi Minh City, 700000, Viet Nam

Xuan Thanh Bui

Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Ho Chi Minh City, 700000, Viet Nam

Centre for Technology in Water and Wastewater, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NWS, 2007, Australia

Huu Hao Ngo, Long D. Nghiem & Wenshan Guo

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Rene, .R., Bui, X.T., Ngo, H.H. et al. Green technologies for sustainable environment: an introduction. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28 , 63437–63439 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16870-3

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Global perspective has given us so many topics that are the blessing in disguise, and our newest topic is about the technology in our daily life. The topic gave us food for thought because there were so many interesting technologies that you couldn’t decide which one should you choose. Luckily, we finally decided that the topic would be ecotechnology. Our group includes Gia Anh, Tetsuro and me. At first, I thought that the topic could be too hard for us because this was not an easy topic to do, but now we have finally managed it like people usually said that every cloud has a silver lining. So now let me explain to you what does ecotechnology mean. Ecotechnology is an applied science that find a way to fulfill human needs while causing the minimum of damage to the environment by operating natural forces to …show more content…

Green technology makes our atmosphere cleaner, so thanks to using more and more ecotechnology, our planet will be saved. Like you have noticed, our habitat is being polluted everyday because of us. Can you imagine how much smoke that is released into our air from the factories, vehicles,…. We think that kind of smoke doesn’t affect much for our health, but you are wrong. That smoke eats our ozone layer, then it creates holes for the ultraviolet ray to go through and cause a lot of deadly disease related to skin and our organisms like: allergy, skin cancer, lung cancer, heart attack... Now the ball is in your court, this is the right time for us to fix our mistakes. That’s why we need a solution for this complicated problem, and of course it is the green technology. All the countries in the world has cooperated in order to work on more things about ecotechnology. Green technology allows improvement in economic performance while minimizing harm to environment by increasing the effeciency in the selection and use of materials and energy sources. Our natural sources are running out

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Essay on Green Technology and Environmental Policy

Technology is application of learning towards practical prerequisites. Green technologies encompass different aspects of technology which help us decrease the human impact on the earth and make methods for sustainable development. Social fairness, economic possibility and maintainability are the key parameters for green technologies. Today nature is hustling towards the tipping point at which we would have done permanent irreversible harm to the planet earth. Concentrations done by the Inter Governmental Panel on environmental change show that it isn’t important that the atmosphere would change continuously. Once we achieve the tipping point whole atmospheric cycles can simply flip and within next four decades earth may begin becoming absolutely inhabitable because of incredible atmosphere circumstances. Our present activities are pulling the world towards an ecological landslide which if happens would make destruction simply inescapable. Green technologies are an approach towards sparing earth and are vital in the event that we need to live on earth past two centuries. Green technologies are out of decimation, yet nothing is perfect, everything has its drawbacks too.

What are the advantages of green technologies? Advantages of utilizing green technologies are many. The world longs for to control  the real world’s carbon emissions and control temperature rise, which can be addressed by the utilization of green technologies, for example, sustainable manufacturing, green buildings, fuel efficient transportation, paperless offices, energy efficiency measures, waste recycling and so on. Since Green technology requires greater inclusion, it additionally enables individuals. It is profitable to list every one of the advantages of green technologies in an approach as with precedent examples.

Corporate Benefits: One chief aim any corporation will all be to reduce the cost incurred at cost of the input side. Green buildings, energy efficiency measures, green manufacturing etc are like green technologies and such are as qualified as energy as well as the resource savers.

Use of effective lighting, cooling and so forth sets aside some cash at the purchaser’s end as well as results in huge savings at the power creation end. One unit of electric power spared at client’s end results in around 4.5 units spared (saved) at the generation end. This is not just helping the organizations to cut their input costs yet in addition fills in as a road for them to satisfy their social duties. Numerous partnerships have just put these measures as in practice, e.g. GE has doubled rather its R&D work spending plan to $1.5 billion to reduce energy consumption and waste products.  The revenue on the organization’s venture shows up is likewise high; GE’s “Ecomagination” line of items created $10 billion in incomes in 2005, and is on track to eclipse $20 billion by 2010. Besides, ICT reports show that projects in Holland have discovered that utilizing green ICT measures can lessen normal space required by a corporate worker by more than fifty percentage from 25m^2 and thus reducing the required infrastructure and as well cutting down very promptly on emissions and also on capital investment.

Manufacturing firms can likewise accomplish critical advantages by green manufacturing rather. In manufacturing, green technologies underline on “cradle to cradle” plan and thus in this manner finishing the “cradle to grave” cycle of manufacturing indeed and thus creating the products even as that can be completely recovered or re-utilized. This incorporates decreasing waste. This not  alone just decreases the ecological or environmental print of an item, yet it likewise makes production a naturally maintainable and financially less expensive activity as inputs from source are reduced by design. Further as worldwide worries about nature increase, the manufacturers undoubtedly utilize green manufacturing procedures to be aggressive or competitive in the worldwide market. Utilizing lesser assets and reusing at the source itself involve lesser contamination and a cleaner domain in addition to a large savings that have to come by as resultantly.

Without spoiling the environment and as per the rules of environmental policy only the technologies should do their operations and only the green technology can preserve the environmental policy. The green technology can uplift the world with all the wealth too peacefully and without a peace it will not be possible to uplift the world towards hitting up the massive wealth. And the technology that does preserve the environmental policy can bring about all the peace and wealth as well in the world. Lest there will all be a pollution and a fall. Green technology is all a green revolution towards uplifting the environmental policy, which alone can save the humanity. Improper environment can pollute the human life indeed and make it all go perished fast even. The technology which constructs items and frameworks to help in saving normal resources and condition is known as green technology.It is technology which is natural condition and resource wise well disposed is consequently known as natural technology or clean technology. It utilizes imaginative strategies to make natural friendly items.The need of green technology emerges because of the way that natural resources are declining and contamination has expanded because of very much of utilization of non inexhaustible sources.

Items, frameworks or types of gear dependent on green technology fulfill following highlights or qualities:

• It ought to diminish or limit corruption of indigenous habitat around us.
• It ought to have zero or least discharge of green house gases.
• It ought to be protected to utilize and ought to advance sound condition for every one of the types of life including humans, birds, animals and so on.
• It should help in preservation of energy as well as natural (normal) resources for example, sun based (solar), water, wind and so forth.
• It ought to advance utilization of renewable resources.

Objectives of Green Technology The objectives or elements of green technology should go as per the uplifting of environmental policy. They are decreasing (fuels, waste, energy consumption and so forth.), reusing (of paper, plastic, can, batteries, clothing and so on.) , reestablishing or renewing (renewing energy such as wind power, water power, solar energy, bio-fuel, waste water  and so forth.), refusing (the utilization of plastic packs) responsibilities rather. And without such responsibilities the environmental policy will not be kept up all in an order. The environmental policy, in total, should not at all be spoiled at any cost and for that end without a doubt the green technology alone with the above denoted responsibilities should be erected. And further the following responsibilities should be certainly observed in order to keep up the environmental policy: Which responsibilities are as alluded to following responsibilities by the general population of our country:

• Do not squander power i.e. turn off electrical hardware when not required.
• Do not squander water i.e. never leave taps open while brushing teeth or washing plates.
• Do not squander fuel.
• Do not squander food.

Thus green technology should be erected for the sake of uplifting the environmental policy. Thus green technology when is not erected when it comes as for the technology erection, the uplifting the environmental policy will be spoiled rather. Thus green technology should all be erected for the sake of uplifting the world all so clean like and as for a sure uplifting the  environmental policy. Without fail this green technology when is erected for the sake of uplifting the environmental policy, it wins enormously and thus only we can save the modern world. If it’s not for the green technology, then we can’t be uplifting the environmental policy and as well our dear long and old world rather: is an undeniable truth.

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Publishing a sound paper of environmental science and ecological technology: Some experiences and tips for young researchers

Two factors are of great significance for enhancing young researchers' international engagement: continuously improving their academic level and publishing advanced progress in scientific journals. The journals in the field of environmental science and ecological technology (ESET) are committed to improving research independency of young researchers, so as to promote excellent scientific research achievements. In this editorial, we integrate major challenges that young researchers must cope with in preparing their submissions. These challenges include choosing a proper journal, changing thinking mode, improving the manuscript's layout, and meeting basic requirements for top-tier journals like Environmental Science and Ecotechnology . We also share some suggestions and tips on how to prepare a manuscript, in the hope that they can help young researchers communicate efficiently with editors, reviewers, and readers. As the editors of a journal caring for young researchers of ESET [ 1 , 2 ], we want to see young researchers, especially non-native English speaking researchers, gain higher viability in scientific research and ability to spread their academic achievements to the world.

Guiding young researchers to publish excellent scientific articles is one of the key routes to continuously increase their international academic influence. However, as for preparing a high-impact work, it is found that many young researchers cannot suitably handle basic writing skills, because they lack proficiency in the English language and experience in studying or working in English speaking contexts. Their papers are thus not readable and often rejected even though the results in the work may well reach the standard of the targeted journal. In the field of environment, many of these “hard-to-read” manuscripts may take longer time than expected to be eventually published. This may delay students’ graduation, undercut the novelty of as-prepared works, or temporize the dissemination of obtained scientific impacts. If we have to follow the “publish or perish” rule, it is urgent for young researchers educated in non-English environments to better understand the principles of academic writing and turn their thinking mode into English writing to further grasp the knowledge of writing a good academic article.

To date, reputable journals in the field of environment require more than academic English writing with correct grammar, proper wording, and high fluency. They also require a systematic understanding of the academic description logic, such as formulating a layout to tell a good story, setting a clear research purpose, clarifying the research innovation, and highlighting significant contributions towards the field of environment. It is vital for preparing a manuscript to catch the eyes of editors, reviewers, and readers. Apart from these, to avoid unexpected rejection, choosing targeted journals by considering research scope, impact factor, journal reputation, and journal format is critical before submitting a manuscript. Based on our experience of revising more than a hundred manuscripts written by young researchers in the ESET field in China, we will briefly summarize the common writing standards and accordingly provide some suggestions. Altogether, we hope this editorial can help non-English speaking young researchers find a way to improve their hard-worked manuscripts for successful publication in their targeted journals.

1. Start-up before manuscript writing

1.1. browsing for targeted journal(s).

Many inexperienced young researchers tend to prepare their manuscripts in haste based upon their immature ideas, thus sending an “uncertain, incomplete, or unconfident” manuscript for review. Due to their limited knowledge, they have little idea about selecting a suitable targeted journal. This would largely reduce the submission efficiency due to possible major revisions even before the actual submission, which would be needed to meet the interest of readers, description style, writing format, and quality/novelty of the work in the targeted journal. Therefore, before writing the manuscript, listing a few targeted journals is important.

To date, the field of environment has been expanding, with more exciting cross-field subjects involved in this field, including (bio)energy, advanced materials, microbiology/ecology, artificial intelligence, etc. Therefore, it is difficult to say that some of the highly reputed environment-related journals, such as ES&T or Water Research , are really suitable for every research. To publish their work, young researchers should clearly investigate which filed they have worked in and what kind of journals are truly suitable for the work.

To achieve this, young researchers may make good use of academic search engines (e.g., Web of Science [WOS]), search for keywords in topic or title and set the timeline within the recent 3–5 years. Then, all the related published literature will be listed with detailed information (such as article type, journal name, and published date). One can summarize the journals that mostly published or cited the works of interest. This is a good way to find the targeted journals and make a shortlist of 3–5 journals based on the journal's interest, reputation, and quality of the work. Finally, one has to visit the selected journal's website to check the research scope and download its “Guide for Authors” for a detailed check.

1.2. Telling a good story

For the targeted journals, the main story of the work must be established with the obtained data and analysis (for example, making sure of the argumentative basis, the applicable scene, and the specific scientific question). This demands attention from most young researchers and their supervisors. Noticeably, most reputed environment-related journals and their handling editors will take this seriously because a high-impact paper should be easy to read and convincing for cohort researchers in this same field. The manuscript should fill in a specific research gap and provide useful information to the readers. Therefore, a reasonably well-written story must be thought through before writing the manuscript.

2. Arrangement of the manuscript's framework

Lastly, to ensure that all the written content can fit in the main story of the work, young researchers are recommended to arrange the framework completely before writing. The framework usually involves (1) correcting and double-checking all the data and analyses for the manuscript; (2) arranging all the Figures/Tables along with the supplemental materials; (3) confirming the main description and corresponding references for each Figure/Table logically; (4) highlighting the main novelty and findings in the work and their main supporting information; and (5) designing a vivid graphical abstract to strongly support and highlight the novelty. After all these preparations, it is the right time to write the manuscript.

3. Tips for manuscript writing

Generally, a research manuscript consists of the title, abstract and keywords, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, and conclusions. Among them, the materials and methods section is relatively easy to prepare and should be done first, followed by introduction, results and discussion, conclusions, title, and abstract/keywords sections. The writing tips for each part are shared as follows.

3.1. Materials and methods

The main purpose of this part is to inform the readers of the “experimental materials” and “experimental methods/equipment” so that they can repeat the experiments when necessary. This part usually uses passive voice because these materials and methods have already been used before manuscript submission. More importantly, besides tense, other points should be noticed for this section, including (1) dividing the section into subsections with types of experiments, methods, or analyzing procedures; (2) marking clearly the sources of experimental equipment/materials (model, company, and country); and (3) detailing each step of newly created or improved method/procedure in the main text or supporting materials.

3.2. Introduction

Introduction is a microcosm of the whole work. It is extremely important for the manuscript. Generally, an introduction should specify not only the achievement of the work, but the recent progress and the existing bottlenecks in the field. In this case, environmental experts and even cross-field researchers can quickly grasp which field this paper falls in, why/how the authors have conducted the work, and what the specific problem is that the authors have solved. In our experience, a satisfactory introduction in a well-reputed environment-related journal should systematically guide the readers to clearly understand the authors’ story from a broad perspective to a precise one and from a general direction to the specific problem.

The specific writing structure is suggested as follows. (1) Motivation: why is this topic important? The importance of the research direction should be emphasized to convince the readers that the topic is necessary. (2) Literature review: what is the progress on this topic in practical or academic sciences? The current academic progress of the topic should be given to prove its importance and necessity. (3) Knowledge gap: what is the main problem in the topic? The main technical bottleneck and research barrier of this topic should be pointed out. (4) Research question: based upon the knowledge gap, what is the specific question that needs to be solved? The specific question in the work and the corresponding solutions to solve the question should be given. (5) New findings: what are the main innovations and contributions of the work? The main findings, along with some inspired results, should be demonstrated to prove the specific contribution of the work.

Young researchers should pay attention to the tenses used in this part to avoid confusion. Generally, describing well-known facts/events demands present tense, while discussing the individual literature or presenting scientific results past tense. But for readability and clarity, more and more top journals now encourage authors to describe the results using active voice. It should be noted that relatively strong and precise words are encouraged to clearly describe the scientific problems and new findings in the introduction so as to highlight the insights provided by the manuscript.

3.3. Results and discussion

If the introduction is the microcosm of the work, the results and discussion section is the core of the manuscript. In this section, authors should display the main results, detailed analyses, and corresponding discussions to convincingly represent the new findings, and how the proposed problem/question was solved, thus providing a significant contribution to the field of environment. The results section mainly emphasizes data presentation and interpretation, while the discussion part focuses on data analysis, explanation, correlation, and how these data reflect the problem/question proposed and prove the insights obtained.

Generally, to write a satisfactory results and discussion section for a well-reputed journal, several suggestions can be considered. In the results part, the following contents should be included: (1) presenting the main results as concisely as possible; (2) summarizing the information presented in Figure/Table; (3) providing appropriate references for the obtained results; (4) providing a comparison with previous literature if needed; and (5) stating the problems or deficits in the obtained results if any. In the discussion part, several points might be included: (1) describing the significance of new findings; (2) analyzing and explaining the new understandings or insights from your results; (3) based upon the findings, developing possible solutions to the problems; and (4) describing the contribution/improvement in the work and evaluating the next steps to advance the research.

Concerning the tense for this section, we usually use past tense in passive voice to describe the obtained results, while present tense and passive voice can be used in the discussion part. For example, present tense is usually used for describing well-known facts. However, past tense or passive voice can be used for indeterminate description such as the information obtained from some literature or expected from the obtained results. Notably, as for expressing the comparison of various literature (e.g., A is in good agreement with B) and results (e.g., Figure A shows/demonstrates …), either present tense and past tense can be used according to the ritual of the targeted journals. Additionally, for summarizing the results and drawing a conclusion that are highly fitted/similar to the fact, present tense is usually used to make a clearer and more convincing statement.

4. Conclusion

After the results and discussion, similar to the end of a story, we must make a strong statement in the conclusion section. A good conclusion section should serve two functions: (1) to simply but eloquently summarize the main results, findings, and possible solutions of the work; and (2) to provide a corresponding comment, judgment, or future perspective based on the work to better guide the readers and further the research work in the field of environment. In a word, this section should concisely summarize the whole work and try to present a bigger picture to demonstrate the significance of the work in the field.

The title of the manuscript, often the first words seen by the handling editors, reviewers, and readers, should completely reflect the core innovation of the work and catch the eyes of readers. Besides, a good title cannot be too simple (not completely reflecting the insights), too specific (not attractive to cross-field readers), or too broad (not focusing on the new findings). Additionally, many highly reputed journals have word limits for titles. Therefore, over-wordy or vague descriptions in titles are not recommended. Moreover, a good title should be simple, attractive, informative, and specific, containing 12–15 words on average and implying the requirement for accuracy, depth, and innovation. Additionally, technical terms or abbreviations are usually not suggested in the title. Altogether, young researchers should pay attention to writing a concise title that can summarize the innovation, catch the attention and interests of readers, and differ from those of other similar publications.

4.2. Abstract and keywords

The abstract for an article is as much as a trailer for a movie. It can be regarded as the epitome of the main research content presented in the manuscript. Usually, editors would make a quick decision (reject or send for peer review) and evaluate the quality and importance of the work simply by glimpsing the abstract. Abstract is also important for readers to decide whether they will read/download the work. Therefore, to increase the acceptance rate and gain more work viability, young researchers should strive to make the abstract more accurate and interesting. Based on the word limit (150–250 words) in many well-reputed journals, the following are some suggestions for writing a good abstract. (1) Keep it simple and clear. Use strong and specific language to describe the highlights and importance of the work. (2) Mind word limit. A typical word limit is 150–250 words. Come as close to the word limit as possible, but do not go over it. (3) Avoid too many technical terms. Express them with accurate but easy-to-read language to better catch the eyes of even the cross-field researchers. (4) Mind tense. Use present tense to describe the findings or main contributions; Use past tense to present the completed experiment; Use future tense to predict the potential perspectives.

5. Summing-up

In this editorial, we have briefly discussed the necessity and difficulty of “how to publish a good paper in the field of environmental science and ecological technology”. Some experiences and tips are shared with non-native English writers to help them with publication. Based on our experience in reviewing and revising manuscripts by inexperienced young researchers, this editorial briefly introduced the strategies for preparing quality manuscripts, including: (1) how to precisely fulfill the start-up work before writing the manuscript (i.e., selecting targeted journals, establishing the main story, and arranging the whole manuscript framework) and (2) how to suitably write a high-impact manuscript (i.e., discussing the purpose, logic, style, writing pattern, and word tense/voice of each section in the manuscript). Furthermore, several tips for each section of the manuscript are provided to increase the viability, readability, and acceptance possibility of the work. In short, we hope that the information provided in this editorial will be helpful for non-native English writers working toward a better academic manuscript in the field of environment that can be successfully published in well-reputed journals. And by helping them publish, we aim to further support young researchers in gaining higher scientific viability and spreading their academic achievements from desk to the world.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Higher Education Teaching Reform Project of Heilongjiang Province (No. SJGY20210330) and the Postgraduate Education Teaching Reform Project of Harbin Institute of Technology (No. XYSZ2023015).

Biographies

Dr. Shih-Hsin Ho is the deputy editor of Environmental Science and Ecotechnology. He is a tenured professor at the School of Environment, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. His research interests include microalgae, bioenergy, biochar, wastewater treatment, etc. He has published over 250 research articles, which gain more than 16000 times citations, enabling him an H index of 67 (Google Scholar). He currently serves as the (guest) editorial members of J. Hazard. Mater. , Chin. Chem. Lett. , Bioresour. Bioprocess. , Algal Res. , Results Eng. , and Carbon Res ., etc. He authored several books concerning algal technology, bioenergy, and wastewater treatment. He is awarded of the 2015 National Young Thousand Talents (China), 2022 World Highly-Cited Researcher, and 2020–2022 World's Top 2% Scientists, etc.

Dr. Nan-Qi Ren is the Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Science and Ecotechnology . He is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment, a tenured professor at Harbin Institute of Technology, and a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering. He focuses on urban water-related research, including urban water policy and management, biological wastewater treatment, resource and energy recovery from wastes, environmental biotechnology, and ecological technology. He is the member of International Water Association (IWA), American Society of Microbiology (ASM), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Water Environmental Federation (WEF, USA), Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences (CSES), and China Energy Society (CES).

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