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Technological Development and the Environment

A common trend among all human populations is that they modify the environments in which they live. For millennia, societies have created a variety of technologies to log forests for building materials, dam rivers for hydropower and drinking water, and clear land to build cities. With the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, the extent of human-induced environmental impacts began to increase dramatically. Industrialization included major technological advances such as steam power, electricity, and mass production that allowed human populations to significantly increase their consumption of natural resources and generation of waste materials. Chemical manufacturing processes emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, introducing novel and sometimes hazardous products into the environment and resulting in even more challenging pollution problems.

commons.wikimedia.org The 1960s marked a turning point in human understanding of the environment. Scientists uncovered widespread contamination in the atmosphere, soils and waterbodies. Books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) along with infamous environmental disasters such as the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland (1969), toxic waste contamination at Love Canal (1978), the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), and industrial accidents in Bhopal, India (1984), popularized the notion of widespread contamination throughout the world. Chemical contamination from the use of PCBs, DDT, CFCs, asbestos, and other substances were identified as significant problems and many countries began to pass legislation to control and, in some cases, ban their use. Further legislation was passed to monitor and control pollutant levels in the air, water, and soil. US regulations such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act were passed beginning in the late 1960s, paving the way for a new era of environmental regulation to eliminate the undesirable consequences of industrialized societies.

In the 1980s, the related notions of sustainability and sustainable development emerged as the new mantra for environment protection advocates. Sustainable development is often defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” When considering a process or product, a sustainability approach calls for economic profitability, environmental safety, and social benefit. Most sustainable development supporters recognize that technology is a crucial element to realizing more sustainable societies in the future but that technologies also have potential threats. Thus, a combination of technological ingenuity and regulatory safeguards are needed to create a livable planet for humans and non-humans alike.

If nanotechnology is indeed the ‘next Industrial Revolution’ as many claim, it has the potential to improve the environmental performance of technologies but could also have the inadvertent side effect of creating novel forms of environmental contamination. Nanotechnology is touted as the key to improving renewable energy technologies, developing effective and cost-effective environmental cleanup applications, and significantly reducing waste generation in manufacturing processes. However, due to their small size, nanoparticles have the ability to impact all environmental media types including soil, water, and the air, and potential contamination may be difficult to detect without ultra-sensitive devices. Further, if nanotechnologies are combined with biological technologies, they have the potential to change or disrupt ecological functions in unknown ways. National governments in many regions of the world are just beginning to contemplate the environmental implications of nanotechnology development and will need to balance the promise of the technology with its potential negative side effects.