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 negative effects of modern domination of science and technology over both human and nonhuman life as well as on abiotic realities have reached a global scale, the demand for a reconfiguration of the use of science and technology to transform nature emerges. Thus, issues pertaining to the consequences of science and technology are currently being discussed by politicians as well as by social and natural scientists. Geography, which as a discipline, throughout its historical development, was concerned with nature and the environment (from the first descriptions of the Greek explorer Herodotus in the 5th century BC until the modern-day analysis of geo-ecosystems, or the study of the social construction of nature), is a key science in environmental discourse.

Irrespective of their arguments, most critics refer to the rationalization and instrumentalization of the natural environment that has attended modernity. Rationalization means an abstract, mathematical representation of nature, based on reason rather than faith or myth. Instrumentalization, on the other hand, focuses on the benefit to humans in human-nature relationships. Both processes, critics say, lead to an alienation of humans from nature followed by the form of maladjustment of people to the environment that is currently called the ecological crisis. Despite a consensus about the critical role of science and technology in the process of modernization, there is confusion about the differences between them. Therefore, a review of these two social activities will be given in this entry. Also, the role of science and technology in the development of the ecological crisis will be examined.