Technology and the Environment

Early Work Linking Technology and the Environment with Human Social Organization

Some of the early attempts to examine these interrelationships were undertaken by sociologists, but with a heavy influence of other disciplines, most notably biology. These came to be known under a broad rubric of human ecology (e.g., Duncan 1964; Commoner 1971, 1992; Catton 1980, 1994; Catton and Dunlap 1978; Hawley 1981).

Human ecologists developed a framework that came to be known as the POET model, so named because of the acronym formed by the four major variables:population (human social), organization, environment, and technology. While this model served as a useful way to focus discussions about human-environmental interactions, it was not particularly influential in guiding empirical research. One of the chief criticisms spoke to the ecological nature [Page II-307]of the model itself, in that it did not specify an outcome and did not make specific predictions (for an in-depth discussion, see Dietz and Rosa 1994).

As sociologists and others came to recognize the limitations of the POET model, it was modified by a number of researchers around several emerging themes. A series of arguments were advanced that a set of models should be specified that could predict environmental impacts, such as deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and air and water pollution. As a very general way of conceptualizing the problem, environmental impact was seen as being a function of population, technology, and human consumption levels (which came to be referred to in many of the models as “affluence” because of the high correlation in many societies between levels of wealth and patterns of consumption). They presented the IPAT model, in which (Environmental) Impact = Population ∗ Affluence ∗ Technology (Ehrlich 1968; Commoner 1971, 1992; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981, 1990; Dietz and Rosa 1994).

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