Is technology and environmentalism compatible? Is technology neutral?

[Banefull]

Just because I build a bulldozer, clear a few trees, and construct a house for myself does not mean that I am hurting the environment. In fact, I find the phrase "hurting the environment" rather misleading. We don't "hurt" the environment, we put strain on the environment. The ecosystem naturally recycles itself and is definitely capable handling large amounts of stress. Its when we place too much stress on the ecosystem that we overstep our bounds.

Just because we have currently overstepped our bounds does not mean that we have to shut down all progress. We just need to slow it down to a sustainable level. We can have cars, appliances, farms, large scale industry, and more advanced forms of technology so long as our impact on the world does not exceed its capacity to rejuvinate naturally.

[Fosus]

Originally Posted by Banefull

We can have cars, appliances, farms, large scale industry, and more advanced forms of technology so long as our impact on the world does not exceed its capacity to rejuvinate naturally.

Which it will.. as humans are on the top of the food chain. Nothing attacks us, we will continue to overpopulate this planet. I'd love someone to prove me wrong though..

[auroraglacialis]

@HNM: I wrote a long answer to your two-part post, but it seems to have gone lost - I will write it again later.

Originally Posted by Banefull

Just because I build a bulldozer, clear a few trees, and construct a house for myself does not mean that I am hurting the environment. In fact, I find the phrase "hurting the environment" rather misleading. We don't "hurt" the environment, we put strain on the environment. The ecosystem naturally recycles itself and is definitely capable handling large amounts of stress. Its when we place too much stress on the ecosystem that we overstep our bounds.

And imposing stress on someone else is not hurting him? Or even violating him? If I do something that puts you under stress and maybe even not give you anything in return, but rather take, would you not feel hurt or violated? Actually I know such a situation: If I would come over to you and rob you, that would put stress on you, I would take and not give back and you would be stressed but not to a point you cannot revocer. Humans can handle great amounts of stress you know... So what civilized humans are doing now is nothing short of robbery. The only way it can be justified is to say that the natural world, Earth, is not alive or at least not sentient and thus unable to feel the stress or hurt. Such a mechanistic worldview is common in civilization and I think that it is wrong - not neccesarily out of spiritual reasons, but also simply because such a worldview propagates exactly the situations we are in now. If people think they can live on a planet with diminished biodiversity by engineering climate control machines and bioengineer plants that can live with global warming - if people treat the planet as a lifeless thing, they will eventually destroy it. Maybe they will manage by some technology to stay alive and maybe even keep some pet plants for gardens or as a life support system or for food production, but that's it. If everything in nature has to have a value for humans to have the right to be preserved, this is going to be a dire place.

Originally Posted by Banefull

Just because we have currently overstepped our bounds does not mean that we have to shut down all progress. We just need to slow it down to a sustainable level. We can have cars, appliances, farms, large scale industry, and more advanced forms of technology so long as our impact on the world does not exceed its capacity to rejuvinate naturally.

Ok, let me ask you one thing: What is your definition of sustainability? My definition is that something can be done indefinitely. You can use exactly as much wood as will grow back or eat as much food as the land can provide or take as many mineral resources as are formed. But if you look at the latter, you will run into a problem, as mineral resources form over millions of years. Even if you drop resource consumption to 1/10th of the current level (by recycling for example), they will last only for some more decades. And that is at present development - it is commonly accepted however that the desire is to give all 7 billion people the same living standards, which is when it just ceases to work out.
The difference that is hit here is between renewable resources (soil, water, air, wind energy, solar energy, biomass) and nonrenewable ones. And sadly, these days even agricultural land is depleted beyond its regenerative capacity due to soil loss caused by industrial agriculture. The non renewables are of course REEs (for "green energy"),metals, fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, P-fertilizer, gas (as a fossil fuel and as the origin of N-fertilizers).
What kind of level of resource consumption and technology thus do you think is sustainable?

Originally Posted by redpaintednavi

To in the long run sustain space travelling the resources must be taken from other bodies in space (the moon, asteroids, comets, other planets and so on). It is rather improductive to use the Earths resourses for space travelling.

I have several problems with that. For once, it would mean that we achieve the level of a spacefaring, asteroid mining species within the next maybe 3 decades and I dont see that. Just to fly to Mars, which is not as far as the asteroid belt, is a huge challenge. Then even if humans do so (with unforseeable consequences), this may allow them to expand further, to spread out into the tens of billions of people living in some life-support-dependent chambers. But then what? Within a century or two the next limit will be reached and expansion has to go further. Maybe interstellar travel is possible and huamns can spread on and on?
But the whole thing is exponential growth. I am sure you heard about the famous story on the chinese emperor. A person who has done agreat service for the emperor asks for only one small thing. Take a checkerboard and put one grain of rice on the first square, then twice as much on the next and the numbers of rice grains on the board are what he wants as payment. The emperor laughed and agreed, only to find out that the amount of rice was of orders of magnitude larger than all the rice in the world.
The first square was maybe the invention of agriculture in the fertile crescent (before it was made infertile by agriculture), the second maybe horsepulled plows in Europe, then crop rotation, then industrialized farming with machines, then the "green revolution" with fertilizers and pesticides, the next may be GMOs. Each time the population exploded as a result. If the next steps are colonization of the Moon or Mars or the Solar System, you can see, that in exponential growth even these vast resources are soon becoming limiting.
As the first settlers to the USA could not imagine that once the land would become scarce for agriculture, as the developers of the first PCs thought 640 kilobytes will forever be enough memory for such a machine and the industrial fishery was convinced that the abundance of fish in the ocean could never be depleted - just as all of them have been proven wrong by the nature of exponential growth, so even if a new abundant source of XY is found, it will not change the problem unless some other limiting factor comes into play. In nature, a population (or resource consumption) is always limited by the most scarce factor (often food). The only hope humanity has to beat the exponential growth curve is to either hit a scarecity (resources, energy, impossibility of interstellar travel) or to somehow self-impose such a limitation (which is unlikely to happen as civilized people are always in an arms race/food race/technology race, competing against someone else for domination).

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Ok, let me ask you one thing: What is your definition of sustainability? My definition is that something can be done indefinitely. You can use exactly as much wood as will grow back or eat as much food as the land can provide or take as many mineral resources as are formed.

To me, it's making them last as long as humanity will. This means saving what there is and recycling what has already been produced.

But if you look at the latter, you will run into a problem, as mineral resources form over millions of years. Even if you drop resource consumption to 1/10th of the current level (by recycling for example), they will last only for some more decades. And that is at present development - it is commonly accepted however that the desire is to give all 7 billion people the same living standards, which is when it just ceases to work out.

Exactly why the Earth is hugely overpopulated. As it is, there are only a few resources that are measured in decades (oil and possibly gas) which is why dependence on those needs to be removed - others are nowhere near as limited.

If you're interested, here's my result form the test, I've done these a few times and they vary a little but are always around this area: Political Compass Printable Graph

I have several problems with that. For once, it would mean that we achieve the level of a spacefaring, asteroid mining species within the next maybe 3 decades and I dont see that.

Why an arbitrary limit?
The technology is all in place, as is the knowledge, the only obstructions are political, primarily lack of funding due to unnecessary focus on things which are, for the most part, harmful to the world.

Just to fly to Mars, which is not as far as the asteroid belt, is a huge challenge.

Not a challenge, it's been known HOW for decades. Nobody just wants to put themselves in the position to do it unilaterally.

Then even if humans do so (with unforseeable consequences), this may allow them to expand further, to spread out into the tens of billions of people living in some life-support-dependent chambers. But then what? Within a century or two the next limit will be reached and expansion has to go further. Maybe interstellar travel is possible and huamns can spread on and on?

Why such a large population? It is already too large, it would make more sense to stabilise it at a lower population with better quality of life.

But the whole thing is exponential growth. I am sure you heard about the famous story on the chinese emperor. A person who has done agreat service for the emperor asks for only one small thing. Take a checkerboard and put one grain of rice on the first square, then twice as much on the next and the numbers of rice grains on the board are what he wants as payment. The emperor laughed and agreed, only to find out that the amount of rice was of orders of magnitude larger than all the rice in the world.

Yes, I've heard that story before, but since population does not ALWAYS increase in orders of magnitude (indeed, birth rates are dropping), it isn't relevant.

The first square was maybe the invention of agriculture in the fertile crescent (before it was made infertile by agriculture), the second maybe horsepulled plows in Europe, then crop rotation, then industrialized farming with machines, then the "green revolution" with fertilizers and pesticides, the next may be GMOs.

Not with all the current wastes of resources like biofuels and the increasing standard of living in many developing countries which greatly increases demand. There won't be room for new growth, but it will allow support of what has already happened.

Each time the population exploded as a result. If the next steps are colonization of the Moon or Mars or the Solar System, you can see, that in exponential growth even these vast resources are soon becoming limiting.

Or spreading out a too-dense population with stable numbers.

[Fosus]

Originally Posted by Human No More

To me, it's making them last as long as humanity will. This means saving what there is and recycling what has already been produced.

To me this means using resources just like Aurora described. I mean, if resources were used like aurora described, humanity would last forever as long as Earth does.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Sustainability: To me, it's making them last as long as humanity will. This means saving what there is and recycling what has already been produced.

Well, if you can continue with what is already there, then ok. You would need 100% recycling rate and zero growth for that though.

Exactly why the Earth is hugely overpopulated. As it is, there are only a few resources that are measured in decades (oil and possibly gas) which is why dependence on those needs to be removed - others are nowhere near as limited.

Well - many mineral resources are also measured in decades really. Nitrogen fertilizer is actually just natural gas, but phosphorous fertilizer is dug up from the earth and is said to peak in production not much after oil does. For other mineral resources like copper, REEs and other vital resources the time is also running out. Especially with the rising demand that is expected for these in the next decade. It is true, that to some extent, this can be stretched by investing more energy (which poses a problem in itself), but the environmental implications are horrendous. The high percentage ores are all gone, low grade ores are now beeing mined and processed and in the future, even lower grade ores might become viable as prices rise and more energy is invested. This also means larger mines. You can dig up half of England and process it with enough energy into a number of mineral resources, but this would literally eat away the landscape.

asteroid mining...Why an arbitrary limit?
The technology is all in place, as is the knowledge, the only obstructions are political, primarily lack of funding due to unnecessary focus on things which are, for the most part, harmful to the world. ... Not a challenge, it's been known HOW for decades. Nobody just wants to put themselves in the position to do it unilaterally.

I do not really believe that. I doubt that it is only lack of interest for these that hinders it. It is also a technologcial challenge and requires a lot of money, resources and work. Asteroid mining - we are not even close to that. The asteroids are even father away than Mars, to mine them would mean big machinery to be shot up there and then you have to get it all back here. Maybe it could be possible in a century or two, but that 30 years (2040) is a common number that is sort of the latest limit for upcoming peak-everything. At that point in time, new resources have to be found in massive quantities to prevent scarcity.

Why such a large population? It is already too large, it would make more sense to stabilise it at a lower population with better quality of life.

On that I definitely agree!

Yes, I've heard that story before, but since population does not ALWAYS increase in orders of magnitude (indeed, birth rates are dropping), it isn't relevant.

Well - it is only partial about population increase. The reason why population increase is bad is that it equals an increase in consumption, usually food. With industrialization, increased resource consumption does not need to be correlated with population. You can have a constant population but still increase resource consumption exponentially. One example is biofuels. By them literally food is converted to lifestyle. By using this to fuel cars, people increase food consumption without population growth.
If we freeze todays population and just let them develop technologically, the resources of this planet would not be enough.
That is my problem with the idea that recycling will solve the problem. If the people who already are here all want cars and cellphones, it is not enough to recycle what is already there (which is never possible to 100% anyways) but also new resources have to be mined for that development.

There won't be room for new growth, but it will allow support of what has already happened.

So we need a zero growth in population and resource accumulation. That is not equal to a zero growth in resource consumption, but rather means, we cannot use much more resources anymore, but have to do with what is already there. If that can be done, then fine. Although - this would mean that many people would not be able to have the same lifestyle as others.
There is another problem though and that is that just maintaining the status also has an impact. It still requires an influx of resources, it still puts a strain on the environment and it still harms the natural world. If you have a river that has dams in it to provide hydropower and water for irrigation, you can maintain this with little additional resources, but it still means that salmon will not reach their breeding grounds and ecosystems depending on the river will turn dry as the water is used up upstream. Even by just maintaining this, ecology is harmed or restricted.

So of course I think there is a nice utopia we could dream up. A world in which population growth is zero, in which the population actually is reduced to an optimal level, a technology that recycles all mineral resources and metals, a technology that uses mostly natural materials without overusing the renewable resources, A society that despite these challenges turns egalitarian. if all this would work, I would be in favour. But i do not see this happening. It is about as likely as an angel coming down from heaven and showing people the path to paradise. The momentum of civilization as it is now is going into a wrong direction and it is hard to change that. It has to stop now (zero growth) and then people would have to look for alternatives. Maybe there is a way to make a civilization that is sustainable, but for that to emerge, the current status quo has to hit the brakes.

Gradual changes wont do it - that's what I am saying. i am saying, we should change priorities. The priority should be to maintain this planet as a living beeing, to allow nonhumans to live on this planet and to just have a healthy planet. Next comes human wellbeeing, freedom, egalitarian lifestyle and community - human happiness. And only then comes the development of new tools and knowledge. Though it is a bit circular, as knowledge is what may make the other things possible.

I love knowledge. But to love knowledge means also to act on it. Knowledge has not only shown us things about how the universe works, how start shine and how atoms work, but also how humans work, what they need, how ancient societies lived and what social structures are beneficial to humans. Knowledge also tell us that growth as it is promoted now does not work, that we are destroying the planet and causing a mass extinction. What good is knowledge if we do not act on it if it shows us that something is going wrong?

I'd rather have trees and fish and elk and beavers than drive a car. If the price for maintaining the lifestyle we have now is 150 species going extinct every day(!), I dont want it.

[Banefull]

Sorry for not replying earlier. Here we go:

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

And imposing stress on someone else is not hurting him? Or even violating him? If I do something that puts you under stress and maybe even not give you anything in return, but rather take, would you not feel hurt or violated? Actually I know such a situation: If I would come over to you and rob you, that would put stress on you, I would take and not give back and you would be stressed but not to a point you cannot revocer. Humans can handle great amounts of stress you know... So what civilized humans are doing now is nothing short of robbery. The only way it can be justified is to say that the natural world, Earth, is not alive or at least not sentient and thus unable to feel the stress or hurt.

Tell me Auraglacialis, do you really think that the Earth is alive? I was under the impression that it was a rock, a very valuable rock indeed. It is our home, we should take care of it so that we can continue to live it on it. That includes utilizing its resources.

Nature is not a being. It is an abstract concept; you cannot hurt it.

How are we even stealing? Are we not part of nature too? When a gorilla takes a twig or a rock and uses it achieve his ends, what makes that different from a human using a twig or a rock also to achieve his ends?

We are tool users by nature. We utilize resources and we are not the only animals who do so.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Such a mechanistic worldview is common in civilization and I think that it is wrong - not neccesarily out of spiritual reasons, but also simply because such a worldview propagates exactly the situations we are in now. If people think they can live on a planet with diminished biodiversity by engineering climate control machines and bioengineer plants that can live with global warming - if people treat the planet as a lifeless thing, they will eventually destroy it. Maybe they will manage by some technology to stay alive and maybe even keep some pet plants for gardens or as a life support system or for food production, but that's it. If everything in nature has to have a value for humans to have the right to be preserved, this is going to be a dire place.

We have a moral obligation to provide a better life for our children and for the next generation. If we truly care for them, then we would not over utilize our resources so that they may have some. We should care for the environment based upon our concern for others, not for nature itself. We preserve nature so that they can utilize it and experience its beauty.

Life has value. We should not go out and kill things because we feel like it. I subscribe to the view that there are higher forms of life. If a bacterial disease threatens us, we have a right to eliminate it for the sake of preserving human life. If we are suffering from predation from wolves, then we have a right to go and slay them to ensure our safety. If we need to eat, we have a right to go and hunt other animals for food. We have to take these concerns and balance them with the needs of the next generation also. We have to make sure that we do not eat all the deer but still leave a sizeable portion for the next generaiton to hunt sustainably. In this way we would naturally come to preserve large quantities of natural environment out of necessity.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Ok, let me ask you one thing: What is your definition of sustainability? My definition is that something can be done indefinitely. You can use exactly as much wood as will grow back or eat as much food as the land can provide or take as many mineral resources as are formed. But if you look at the latter, you will run into a problem, as mineral resources form over millions of years. Even if you drop resource consumption to 1/10th of the current level (by recycling for example), they will last only for some more decades. And that is at present development - it is commonly accepted however that the desire is to give all 7 billion people the same living standards, which is when it just ceases to work out.
The difference that is hit here is between renewable resources (soil, water, air, wind energy, solar energy, biomass) and nonrenewable ones. And sadly, these days even agricultural land is depleted beyond its regenerative capacity due to soil loss caused by industrial agriculture. The non renewables are of course REEs (for "green energy"),metals, fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, P-fertilizer, gas (as a fossil fuel and as the origin of N-fertilizers).
What kind of level of resource consumption and technology thus do you think is sustainable?

Sustainability for me is not forever. The world and the universe will end eventually. Trying to make resources last infinitely would be pointless.

All resources are limited. When we refer to renewable resources, we really refer to the cost as being renewable. When you buy a soda and throw away the aluminum can, the aluminum is not somehow destroyed. The Earth has a set amount of aluminun. The aluminun can that you just threw away now sits in a landfill. We could still go back and dig out that lone aluminun can but its a lot more expensive than just mining more from the ground. When we look at things like water, the Earth has a set amount of water but some of it is cheaper to utilize. Water that comes from rivers, springs, or aquifers does not need expensive processes (other than filtering) to make it drinkable. If we wanted, the human race could get all of its drinking water from condensing vapor in the atmosphere or desalinizing water from the ocean; it would just be very expensive.

Sustainability to me is keeping the cost of utilization low over a long period of time. Keeping utilization costs low requires that we do not over utilize, that we recycle, etc. Also technology is ever pushing the cost at which we can utilize resources down at a steady rate. Someday we will perhaps be able to get all of our drinking water from condensing water vapor cheaply. Who knows?

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

I have several problems with that. For once, it would mean that we achieve the level of a spacefaring, asteroid mining species within the next maybe 3 decades and I dont see that. Just to fly to Mars, which is not as far as the asteroid belt, is a huge challenge. Then even if humans do so (with unforseeable consequences), this may allow them to expand further, to spread out into the tens of billions of people living in some life-support-dependent chambers. But then what? Within a century or two the next limit will be reached and expansion has to go further. Maybe interstellar travel is possible and huamns can spread on and on?
But the whole thing is exponential growth. I am sure you heard about the famous story on the chinese emperor. A person who has done agreat service for the emperor asks for only one small thing. Take a checkerboard and put one grain of rice on the first square, then twice as much on the next and the numbers of rice grains on the board are what he wants as payment. The emperor laughed and agreed, only to find out that the amount of rice was of orders of magnitude larger than all the rice in the world.
The first square was maybe the invention of agriculture in the fertile crescent (before it was made infertile by agriculture), the second maybe horsepulled plows in Europe, then crop rotation, then industrialized farming with machines, then the "green revolution" with fertilizers and pesticides, the next may be GMOs. Each time the population exploded as a result. If the next steps are colonization of the Moon or Mars or the Solar System, you can see, that in exponential growth even these vast resources are soon becoming limiting.
As the first settlers to the USA could not imagine that once the land would become scarce for agriculture, as the developers of the first PCs thought 640 kilobytes will forever be enough memory for such a machine and the industrial fishery was convinced that the abundance of fish in the ocean could never be depleted - just as all of them have been proven wrong by the nature of exponential growth, so even if a new abundant source of XY is found, it will not change the problem unless some other limiting factor comes into play. In nature, a population (or resource consumption) is always limited by the most scarce factor (often food). The only hope humanity has to beat the exponential growth curve is to either hit a scarecity (resources, energy, impossibility of interstellar travel) or to somehow self-impose such a limitation (which is unlikely to happen as civilized people are always in an arms race/food race/technology race, competing against someone else for domination).

Population growth rates have been declining as populations become more technology dependent. The birthrates in many countries are under 2 per family, therefore, the western world is experiencing negative growth rates in terms of births. The only reason that the more developed parts of the world do not actually experience a population drop is because of immigration from lesser developed parts of the world. Even in these areas, as development increases, population growth rate decreases. If anything, the figures are pointing to a negative population growth rate for the world sometime in the next two centuries. I have no reason to believe that there will be an exponential growth rate in the future.