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https://theconversation.com/searching-for-a-technofix-to-climate-change-has-many-dangers-could-radical-humility-save-the-planet-276046>
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Review: Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? – Richard
King (Monash University Publishing)
In 1989, environmentalist Bill McKibben announced to the world that nature was
dead. Due to the rapid rate and scale of anthropogenic climate change, he
argued, the idea of nature as an entity independent of human activity had
become obsolete.
A new book by Richard King,
Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the
Planet?, conducts a postmortem on this idea of “nature”. And it describes a
dangerous ideology that has taken root at the heart of the environmental
movement.
King considers the moral, political, social and economic implications of a
particular way of attempting to solve climate change, known as the “technofix”.
This mindset looks for “a technological solution to tackle a social or
environmental issue”.
We are, King suggests, entering “a period in which mitigation and adaptation
are giving way to re-engineering”. As the consequences of climate change become
harder to ignore and the environmental and moral costs of inaction become too
high, “radical interventions such as geoengineering and de-extinction are
taking root in the imaginations of thought leaders and policymakers across the
globe”.
But solutions that come in the guise of technological progress may harbour
dangers to the planet that we can’t fully fathom or control.
Brave New Wild examines proposals involving nuclear power, geoengineering,
de-extinction approaches to conservation, nanotechnologies capable of
manipulating matter at a molecular level, smart technologies and interplanetary
colonisation. It outlines potentially terrifying scenarios associated with the
technofix mindset."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
