Is technology and environmentalism compatible? Is technology neutral?

[auroraglacialis]

This thread is a fork of http://www.tree-of-souls.com/general...f_pandora.html when it came to a debate there.

The question was basically if the visions inspired by Avatari in people about the future can go together, especially technological advances and strong ecological awareness:

Originally Posted by Aurora

Avatar in generally has inspired vision, the vision itself is very much different in all people and some of the visions certainly contradict each other. I think people who would want to "live like the NA'Vi" in the wild would certainly disagree a lot with advancing technology at the cost of nature even further for the next decades so that people could spacetravel or develop genetics to a point at which making Ikran and glowing plants are possible.

Originally Posted by Human No More

Advancing technology is NOT mutually exclusive with nature. That's just Ludditism.
While I want to live more closely with nature, there is no reason to avoid technology based on that. Same with space travel, most people opposed to it are stuck in a flat-Earth mentality.
[...]
I see the majority of technology as neutral - it's how you use it, how you apply the knowledge gained, what you do with the ability that matters. Not what is developed.

I dont see the majority of technology as neutral really. Some can be in a certain context - open source software for example is great in the context of software. The use of technology can be positive and negative - one can use GMOs to make money in pesticides (as Monsanto does) or use it to create bioremediation strategies, glowing plants, algae that produce diesel. But the maintenance of technology is not neutral. To have open source software running, you need hardware, that needs mineral ore from open pit mines in Chile (or below surface mines that bury miners), plastics from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, electricity from dams in the Amazon to smelter the ore, the labor of assembly line workers in Taiwan that put the whole thing together and so on. You cant really do it without this, can you? You could make it safe for the workers, ideally even create some socialist society that pays them a fair share of the profits (which would however mean that the product would be way more expensive), but from an environmentalist point of view, there is little that can be done - you have to have mines and you need water and so on - increasing efficiency, strenghten recycling and financing bioremidation efforts are nice, but never can eliminate the problems and risks altogether. And with dwindling resources, these isses are bound rather to increase than to decrease. So that is why I asked you, what your vision would be how this could work - how technology and its widespread use by all people and environmentalism can truely go together?