Science, Technology, and Environment

The relation between science, technology, and environment is one of the key issues of late modernity. At the beginning of the 21st century, the impacts of science and technology on human life and the natural environment are greater than ever. Whereas an affirmative view on this development for a long time presumed that science and technology help solve the problems of humanity, critical perspectives on the human-nature relationship increasingly found voice during the second half of the 20th century (among others, the social scientists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the philosopher Hans Jonas, and more recently the sociologist Ulrich Beck). of course, this is not a new phenomenon, since skepticism regarding science and technology is as old as science and technology themselves. But because the ...