Is technology and environmentalism compatible? Is technology neutral?

[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).