Introduction:

This report explores the influence of technology on the interaction between societies and the
natural world. It examines how technological advancements, throughout history, have
significantly impacted how humans engage with ecosystems. It aims to shed light on why
societies choose specific technologies and how these choices influence the future direction of
technological development and our relationship with the environment.

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?

So, what is technology? In simplest terms, technology is how we make "stuff" and do "stuff." To make
certain kinds of stuff and do certain kinds of stuff, we organize and reorganize social relations and nature.
And techno- logical change is most produced by social actors and institutions. It does not fall from the
sky, and it does not emerge in some predetermined path of linear progress. Specific social groups
(corporations, governments, and other forms of social organization) make it their business to move
technological change in specific directions and for specific purposes. For instance, look at the classroom
when you go back to class to discuss this lesson. A classroom is, in part, a technology for making or doing
stuff. In this case, the stuff to be made is educated people and the stuff to be done is education. The
classroom is organized, created, and maintained by a social institution (your college). Manifest in your
classroom is both social relations (the relationships between people) and relations between the social
system and the ecosystem. Is your classroom organized with chairs in a circle or with all the seats facing a
crucial point? The physical organization of the classroom (the technology of education, if you will) tells
you much about the social relations within it, as well as the social expectations. With seats in a circle,
you expect to have to talk to others in the room quite a bit. With the chairs facing a crucial point, you
expect to be spoken to and for you to speak much less, and then perhaps only to the person occupying
the central point of focus (the lectern).

In a circle, you expect social relations to be more egalitarian, with each participant playing a more equal
role. With chairs facing a crucial point, you expect social relations to be more hierarchical and
authoritarian, with a single power holder (your professor) commanding most of the attention. What you
can see by looking at the physical structure of your classroom is an indication of the social structure of
the classroom. That is, the way that the technology of education (your classroom) is organized both
reflects and determines social relations. The same is true of any technology for doing and making
anything. The technology itself-a computer, a factory, a hog farm, a television, a smart phone, or a
nuclear weapon-manifests specific social relation. Technology consists of both physical, tangible "things"
and the social relations they imply. No technology is separable from its social relations, even though
those relations are intangible and take a little more work to “see”. You will have missed the early part of
your class thinking about the ways in which the physical parts of the technology of education reflect and
determine the social relation parts of the technology of education, instead of paying attention to what is
being said. That is okay, you can get notes from the person next to you. Now think about the relationship
to nature manifest in the classroom. What is all the stuff in the classroom made from? Your notebook,
made from trees. Your seat, made from plastic, is made from oil. Maybe some aluminum made from
bauxite here and there. All the physical things in your classroom have their origins in nature and have
been transformed, through technologies (social relations and physical hardware), into some- thing else
to meet human goals. You have electricity in your classroom too, to power lights, computers, projectors,
etc. That means that your classroom is physically hard- wired to some technology for transforming some
natural element or process into electricity. Look at the electrical sockets in your classroom. You could
follow the wires from those sockets all the way back to the generator, power dam, coal-burning power
plant, nuclear reactor, photovoltaic cells, or wind turbine that has been constructed to convert natural
resources or processes to meet human goals (see Lesson 9).

The socket leads to a coal-fired power plant that burns coal mined in some region quite distant from
your own. People there are busy transforming nature in their location to allow you to have lighting so
you and your professor can produce education in your location. And that electricity is transmitted
through copper wires, made somewhere off-campus, from copper mined in yet another distant
community by still other people. Likely there are not coal or copper mines on your campus. So, your
classroom and you are connected to other parts of the country and the world, using natural resources
from distant ecosystems. Your classroom, and any other technology you use or are a part of, connects
you to a variety of relationships with the natural world, both immediate and far removed. And the
technologies for converting natural resources into other stuff (electricity, books, seats, etc.) also connect
you to other sets of social relations, with people you may never know or see, who mine coal and copper
or work in factories producing wires or wood pulp for paper. So, technology is a series of entanglements
with social systems and ecosystems, close and far, obvious and hidden. Your smart phone, your pen, your
computer-all represent a series of relationships between you and others and between you and the
natural world. Those relationships are not random. They reflect the social origins of the technologies, the
goals of those who designed the technologies, the interests of those who require or request you to use
the technologies, and the ways in which society has been organized to use and change nature.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Social scientists who study technology and technological change have used a variety of schema to
identify various phases or periods in the development of Technology. You have heard some of these eras
of specific Technological applications described with terms such as “the bronze age “Or “the Iron age.
Note that the materials used signify these eras of technology. Lewis Mumford, in his classic work
Technics and Civilization, identified three distinct eras of modern technological development:
"paleotechnic," "eotechnic," anc "neotechnic." The paleotechnic phase was typified using wood as the
primary material and the use of moving water and wind as the primary energy sources. The eotechnic
phase was typified using iron as the primary material and the use of coal to generate steam as the
primary energy source. The neotechnic phase, he argued, was typified using steel as the primary
material and the use of electricity. Here again, the elements of nature, modified through human
intervention, are central to our categories of technological phase. The ways human societies use and
transform nature are key to our understanding of what various technologies are. We can categorize
different technological eras in many ways, by changes they produce in society and nature, both large and
small. For our purposes here, let us look at two very large, very broad, and very transformative eras of
technological change, both of which completely revolutionized the ways that human societies are
organized and the ways that those societies relate to, modify, and rely upon nature. These two periods of
technological transition were so transformative of society and the natural world that they have been
viewed by most as revolutionary: the agricultural revolution and the Indus- trial Revolution.

The Agricultural Revolution

The realization that by planting seeds of desirable plants, people could trans- form ecosystems to make
them produce large volumes of preferred food crops radically changed the relationship between human
societies and nature. Prior to the technology of agriculture, human societies were primarily organized for
hunting and gathering survival strategies. To get the food they required, groups of people collected the
plants and other foods they found in nature. This meant that, as local plant and animal stocks were
depleted, people had to migrate to other areas in search of food. They developed patterns of migration
that followed the seasonal availability of food plants and the seasonal migration of other animals (which
also followed seasonal patterns of the availability of food and water). The technology of agriculture
changed all that, allowing humans to modify their local ecosystems to meet their food needs, rather than
modifying their societies (through migration) to meet local ecosystem conditions. In a real sense, the
power balance between environment and society was shifted toward greater human agency and greater
ecosystem malleability. Humans cleared portions of local ecosystems of their naturally occurring plants,
animals, and habitats and replaced them with increasingly vast fields of human-selected species of
plants. This large-scale transformation of land from natural ecosystems to farm fields has continued ever
since as prairies, savannas, and forests are cleared. Plants were selected for attributes most desired by
humans (food and textiles), and that selection began to replace the process of natural selection in the
evolution of certain species. A similar process occurred with the domestication of animals used for meat,
dairy, and textiles. Animals were taken from the wild and raised and reproduced to serve human needs
(see Lesson 13). Pastures were cleared, ecosystems transformed, and species gradually modified to serve
human goals. With settled agriculture, human populations could remain in a single location, modifying
the environment to facilitate settlement. Settlement al- lowed for the building of permanent structures,
rather than the portable or disposable shelters logically necessary for societies of nomads. Settlement
also allowed for the accumulation of material possessions. Keeping material possessions to a minimum
makes good sense if you’ll have to move them from place to place all the time (something that anyone
who has ever moved quickly realizes). If you can plan to be in a locale indefinitely, you can begin to fill
your permanent structures with “stuff,” thus creating an incentive for the production of more material
things. So, in a real sense, the technology of agriculture is what began the process of human societies
constructing permanent houses and filling them with material possessions. The successes of agriculture
also led to the creation of what sociologists call a “labor surplus.” Where soils were fertile and water was
available, agriculture was very successful and large quantities of food could be produced by fewer and
fewer people. This process of increasing yields and decreasing demand for human labor has continued so
that now, in countries like the United States, vast food surpluses are produced with a very small
percentage of the population engaged in actual primary food production. But even very early in the
process, fertile regions allowed for growing numbers of people to eat, without themselves being
engaged in food production. With large populations permanently settled in a single location without
survival-oriented work to do (food collection or production), other activities and new ways of organizing
people in more complex ways emerged. Along with permanent houses, permanent ritual sites, large-
scale irrigation works to support agriculture, and other engineering projects requiring vast amounts of
human labor were organized. Pyramids, temples, aqueducts, and astronomical observatories were
constructed by harnessing surplus labor (often involuntarily). How the Egyptian pyramids were built is no
mystery: The answer is agriculture. It is worth noting that much of this large-scale construction was
organized to support agricultural success and expansion physically (irrigation works), to appeal to nature
through religion for adequate rain and fertility (temples), and to track seasonal changes to determine
appropriate planting and harvest schedules (astronomical observatories). Supporting larger populations
in one place required more complex social Organization in governance and the production and
distribution of a wider Variety of goods and services, Labor surpluses also allowed for the creation Of
standing armies, and agricultural expansion increased the value of Transforming and taking more land,
especially in fertile areas. With hunting less Important to survival but conflict over access to arable land
more important, the primary goal of weapons technology turned from killing other animals to killing
humans. Agricultural societies gave rise to the first central state authorities, commanding standing
armies and controlling access to land and the distribution of food. While we may think of ourselves as
living in industrial or even postindustrial societies, it is easy to see that many features of both human
social organizations and their relationship to ecosystems stem from the radical social system and
ecosystem shifts that came with the technology of agriculture.

The Industrial Revolution

The discipline of sociology was initially developed by people attempting to understand the vast
transformations of social organization that emerged in the 19th century with the rise of industrialization.
While the great agricultural civilizations emerged primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the first
great industrial civilizations emerged in Europe. European social analysts like Marx, Weber, and
Durkheim established the scientific study of societies and social change in efforts to understand the new
patterns of social relations generated by the emergence of industrial production. The Industrial
Revolution produced the second great technological transformation of the relationship between social
systems and ecosystems, although, as noted in the Introduction to this book, the ecosystemic aspect of
change was not of particular interest to early sociologists. The industrialization of pro- duction generated
a vast array of social changes, far too numerous to address at length here. Among these, however, it is
worth noting the creation of new classes (such as those Marx termed the “proletariat,” or industrial
working class, and the “bourgeoisie,” the capitalist class) and the formation of industrial cities (London
being the first city to reach 1 million in population since The fall of Rome). In terms of the society-
environment relationship, industrialization ushered in societal dependence on enormous inputs of
nonrenewable resources, particularly fossil fuels. Industrial civilization was, and remains, predicated on
limitless supplies of cheap and portable nonrenewable energy inputs (see Lesson 9). It was the capacity
to convert coal into steam, and thus energy, on an ever-increasing scale that gave industrial society its
form and its trajectory. Our current society can be thought of as one designed specifically to thrive in,
and to survive off, endless increases in energy inputs. Those conditions were sustainable at the dawn of
the industrial era when the exhaustion of necessary resources appeared unlikely. In the current era, it is
the foreseeable end to increasing supplies of such energy, and the environmental impacts of using that
energy (see Lesson 9), that are causing many to consider the need to wholly reorient the path of human
society to what some are conceptualizing as a “post-fossil fuel society”. The technological changes that
coalesced into the Industrial Revolution Were intended primarily to vastly increase humans’ ability to
produce an Increasing range of synthetic products, from textiles to machines themselves. Just as the
agricultural revolution made the large-scale production of food possible, the Industrial Revolution made
the large-scale production of other goods possible. And just as agriculture required the growing
transformation of natural ecosystems into farm fields, industry required the growing con- version of
elements of ecosystems (trees, coal, metals, etc.) into natural resource inputs in the production of
products. Of course, as industrial pro- duction expanded and new markets for new products were
expanded to meet the increased supply, the pace and scale of the extraction of natural re- sources and
their conversion to products increased, with two major results. First, ecosystems and habitats, at first
locally and later globally, were pillaged to meet the needs of industry for raw materials. We can think of
these as ecosystem “withdrawals.” These withdrawals would eventually lead to socially generated
problems of natural resource depletion such as deforestation and oil scarcity. Second, the capacity of
industry to produce on increasingly vast scales resulted in the world being increasingly full of social
products and byproducts. The products, although useful for a time, eventually find their way into dumps,
landfills, the oceans, and incinerators. The byproducts tend to be returned to ecosystems as industrial
air-, water-, and land-based emissions. In addition, many of the products create byproducts themselves
during their use, such as cars producing air emissions, discarded batteries, and used motor oil. We can
think of these socially created artificial elements injected by industrial societies back into ecosystems as
ecological “additions.” These new additions to nature would quickly give rise to problems of
environmental pollution (such as pesticide toxicity and greenhouse gases). The Industrial Revolution is
therefore most notable in terms of the social system-ecosystem interaction for increasing the social
capacity for, and rate of, conversion of natural resources into products and byproducts. The result has
been whole- sale disruption of local and global ecosystems that natural scientists have Only just begun to
comprehend. In giving rise to the modern city, the new industrial technologies also quickly gave rise to
the familiar socioenvironmental problems that are part of urban landscapes: urban smog and resulting
respiratory disease, the accumulation of trash and the difficulty of disposing of it in a safe and hygienic
manner, the contamination of freshwater supplies and the threat of waterborne illness, and the social
inequities in exposure to these urban environmental hazards (see Lesson 10). These environmental
hazards were, and are, compounded with other key features of the urban social environment, such as
inadequate housing, congested infrastructure, and lack of healthcare, housing, employment, and justice.
In addition, the urban environment cut off substantial portions of the human population from direct
daily contact with natural environments, which had been a key fact of human existence since the dawn
of the species. This disconnection from nature would lead many in “modern industrial society,” including
sociologists (see the Introduction to this book), to conclude that society was no longer dependent on
nature and that the two could be thought of as separate concerns.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL TRAJECTORY

As you can see, both the revolutions in agricultural technology and industrial technology completely
transformed the relationship between social systems and ecosystems. In the broadest sense, the
greatest change that emerged from each was an enormous increase in the incentive and capacity to
adjust natural systems to meet social needs, rather than adjusting social systems to meet naturally
occurring ecosystem realities. In this process, the human capacity for technological innovation, our
ability to develop new techniques to transform the natural world, has been key. As social systems now
come to realize the dramatic negative social implications of their vast transformation of ecosystems, it is
important to ask: Where is our technological trajectory headed? Why? Who or what determines the
path of technological innovation? And how might we choose a path of technological innovation that
resolves some of the conflict between social systems and ecosystem?

Social Institutions and Technological Decision Making

Social institutions pursuing specific social goals control the progress and direction of technological
change. These institutions exert substantial control over the research and development process in
numerous ways, including influence on educational institutions, research facilities, research and
development funding, and the distribution of profits derived from out- comes. At each point of the
research and development process, these social institutions can influence the agendas of scientists and
engineers and, thus, the trajectory of technological innovation. There is no “runaway technology,” as
some environmentalists have argued. Nor is there a clear “natural evolution” of technological direction,
as most might assume. The direction of scientific and technological research and development is a result
of human intentionality and decision making (see Lesson 6). As a result, the history and current direction
of technological research and development reflect the power and the political and economic interests of
the social institutions that control the process.

The main social institutions guiding the technological research and development agendas are
universities, states, and corporations. Each of these institutions has specific interests, which are reflected
in their agendas for scientific research and technological innovation, and which thus shape the social
system ecosystem interactions that the rest of the world inherits. Universities have historically been
viewed as the institutions with the greatest dedication to the “objective” pursuit of scientific truths and
as being some- what independent of political and economic pressures. In universities, it was often the
scientists and engineers who set the research and development agendas, and they were immune from
the influence of the political and economic goals and rewards stemming from states and corporations.
However, as the costs of research and development increased and public funding for universities
declined, states and corporations gained greater influence over the agendas and goals of science and
technology workers within universities. As a result, the interests of states and corporations ripple
through the university system and reduce the capacity of these formerly more autonomous institutions
to chart a distinct technological research and development direction.
Governments are the primary source of funding for basic scientific research. Basic science seeks to
explain natural phenomena and forms the knowledge base that supports engineering. The knowledge
base upon which applied science will be built is thus influenced by the ways that state decision makers
prioritize certain paths of inquiry and distribute funding for it. The goals of states in funding basic science
are clear. First, states fund basic science and some applied research and development to enhance their
military power. Since governments are the market for weapons systems, they have a personal stake in
making sure that the creation of ever-more-powerful military technology is a major thrust of
technological innovation. As a result, the pursuit of more effective military systems has become one of
the dominant goals if not the dominant goal of the technology research and development agenda of our
species. The enormous amount of funding offered by the state for military research and development
directs the human techno- logical trajectory toward destructive ends while sapping funding from quality
of life-enhancing research along other paths of human inquiry (such as health, environmental protection
and remediation, renewable energy, etc.). Since military technology is particularly environmentally
destructive, energy- inefficient, and natural resource-intensive, it has a significant negative impact on the
nature of social system interactions with ecosystems. The other goal of states in sponsoring research and
development is the pursuit of global “economic competitiveness.” By using tax revenues to subsidize the
research and development agendas of corporations based within their borders, states try to boost their
gross domestic products. Increasing the economic power of the country increases the relative power of a
state, giving it greater influence over the global arenas in which it competes with other states. Because
of this, increasing the economic power of the state becomes a technological goal, along with increasing
the military power of the state. And those two goals are intertwined in a military- industrial complex
because the greater tax revenues gained through successful international economic competition make
more funding available to support military research and development, and greater military power
facilitates greater access to the global natural resources, waste sinks, markets, and labor pools needed
for economic growth (see Lesson 3). The interests of corporations in technological research and
development Are less complex than those of states. Corporations pursue Technological innovation to
enhance profitability. Corporations are the leading Institutional source of funding for technological
innovation and the primary Employers of engineers. As a result, the goals of corporations have greater
Influence over the human technological trajectory than those of any other social institution.
Corporations use the government subsidy of basic research as the basis for their applied research (see
Lesson 6) that produces profit- enhancing products to be sold to states (military hardware), other
corporations (including labor-replacing technologies), and individual consumers (consumer goods). Lines
of research that will lead to products that may produce social or ecological benefits but do not promise
to generate profits are not funded and not pursued. Corporate profitability is then, in some sense, the
ultimate criterion for determining much of the human technological trajectory. Given that technology is
such a big factor in shaping the relationship between social systems and ecosystems, we can see that
corporate interests have come to be a major if not the major factor in determining how social systems
and ecosystems will interact (see Lesson 5). The goal of corporate profitability influences the direction of
Technological innovation in other ways. Corporate profitability sets much of the research agendas of
scientists both within the firm and within the university. By sponsoring university research, corporations
create a system of incentives and disincentives for the pursuit of various lines of scientific inquiry and
engineering development. By providing the laboratories in which research and development are
conducted, corporations control the scientific and engineering infrastructure of society. By offering
shared profit incentives with educational institutions and university researchers, corporations influence
the direction of higher education. The nature and structure of scientific and engineering education tend
to reflect the social agendas of the institutions that fund it. Corporations have also been known to
overtly and covertly squelch lines of scientific investigation that may threaten the goal of corporate
profitability, as we have seen in research on the health effects of tobacco, the ecological threats from
pesticides, the environmental impacts of acid rain, the health and ecological impacts of genetically
modified organisms, and the contribution of carbon dioxide emissions to global climate change (see
Lessons 5, 11 and 15).

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, AND POWER

The trajectory of technological innovation is influenced by a relatively small number of decision makers
in governments and corporations who establish research priorities, provide research facilities, and
determine the distribution of funding. The result is a global technological infrastructure, system, and
direction that reflects the interests of a privileged few and pursues those interests despite the many
obvious negative consequences for social system-ecosystem dynamics. The fact that the bulk of
technological decisions are made in corporate boardrooms and opaque government institutions shields
technological innovation agendas from democratic processes. Although the outcomes of research and
development decisions often become obvious to the public at large, the decision-making processes that
lead to these outcomes are unavailable for public input and public influence. We all must live with the
technological consequences in terms of the products that are and are not available, the technologies
that do and do not exist, the employment opportunities that are created and destroyed, and the public
health and ecological impacts that are generated, but we are generally denied a role in determining
those consequences.

For example, you may not even be aware that one of the leading areas of technological research and
development investment right now is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the engineering of matter on
an atomic and molecular scale to produce new materials and technologies with at least one dimension
sized from 1 to 100 nanometers. Nanotechnology allows for the creation of a myriad of new materials
not found in nature, and the production of microscopic machines. Although you may not be aware that
governments, transnational corporations, and universities are already heavily invested in
nanotechnology, you may already have nanomaterials in your body. A wide range of cosmetics,
sunblock’s, and athletic wear includes nanoparticles, liter- ally tiny particles of unknown (at least to us)
materials. Nanoparticles can pass through your skin, enter your bloodstream, and cross the blood-brain
barrier. We do not know what the health effects of nanoparticles are because there has been little
investment in doing that research. The lucrative research in nanotechnology is in creating new nano
products and getting them to market quickly. You might prefer for the research on the public health and
environmental impacts of nanoparticles to have happened long before you started rubbing them into
your skin. But since that is not profitable research, you would need a way to influence the research and
development agenda before new products and processes are developed.
Democratic input into research agendas is quite limited. What often passes for democratic controls on
technology are mechanisms for “public consultation” arranged after modern technologies are created.
These public consultations are often organized by the very institutions that sponsor techno- logical
research and whose interest is to gain public acceptance for the innovations. These public forums are
designed primarily to reduce public fears, which are viewed by those who have a personal stake in
technology as irrational (see Lesson 11). You have already been told that it is irrational to fear microwave
radiation from smart phones and not to worry about the health effects of genetically modified
organisms; you will soon be told not to fear the nanoparticles entering your body. Research on the social
and eco- logical implications of technology is often highly politicized (see Lessons 6 and 14) and
commonly intended to boost the chances for public acceptance of existing and modern technologies.
This makes it difficult for people to reach informed conclusions about the costs and benefits of
technological change.

The Myth of "Progress"

Another factor that keeps the public from participating in science and technology decision making is the
myth of “progress,” a set of Ideological constructs promoted by the institutions that control the research
and development process. Most people tend to think that research takes a natural course determined by
free inquiry and the evolution of ideas and that technologies are routed along a linear progression where
one development automatically follows from another. That is, people are led to believe that there is in
fact no institutional agency in the technological trajectory and that what little human agency exists is in
the hands of individual experts pursuing either public good or private gain. The ideology of capitalism
argues that the pursuit of private gain naturally leads to the common good. The combination of the myth
of technological neutrality and the ideology of capitalist ethics produces complacency regarding research
and development on the part of the public. This complacency serves the interests of the institutions that
do have agencies in determining the societal technological path and the social system-ecosystem
relations that go with it. People tend to ask, “what will they think of next?” rather than telling
technology-producing institutions what they should be working on next.

While it is true that democratic citizenries could demand and exert greater influence over the research
that states support, the ideological power of objective science (see Lesson 6), technological neutrality,
and capitalist ethics keep this possibility from entering the public consciousness. Science and technology
decision making has been organized out of politics. The result is that powerful individuals and
institutions are left to use the human technological capacity in pursuit of their own interests unchecked
by the majority. In no other arena are the long-term con- sequences for human society and the
environment as great and the political discussion so muted. Conflicts do emerge from time to time (on
nuclear technology, genetic technology, etc.), but even then, the political discourse revolves around a
ban on the implementation of a specific technology rather than a quest for democratic control over the
processes that generate technology. Should our social institutions invest in renewable energy re- search
or military drones? Should science education promote genetic engineering or sustainable organic
agriculture? Should engineers be working on more energy-efficient transportation infrastructure or the
next iPhone upgrade? Should scientists spend more time and effort investigating the environmental and
public health impacts of nanoparticles or developing new nanotechnology-based consumer products? If
you knew that your cosmetics contained nanoparticles, whose health effects are unknown and
unstudied, you might want some say in that decision. Rather than waiting passively to receive the next
“big thing” from technology producers, we should be actively participating in deciding what “big things”
they ought to start working on.

The Democratization of Technological Innovation

If we are to seriously pursue a more environmentally sound relationship Between social systems and
ecosystems, we may find it useful to make the Technological innovation processes subject to democratic
controls. The potential social and ecological impacts of technologies must be assessed by informed
publics, under conditions in which citizens are empowered to determine the goals of research and
development, the prioritization and funding of that research, and the way technologies will be
implemented or prohibited. This input needs to occur at the earliest stages of the innovation process,
determining the purpose of basic lines of inquiry to use our scientific and technological capacity to
maximize democratically determined social and environmental benefits. That would be a quite different
model than the one in place currently, in which institutions produce and implement technologies
without public input and then the public must overtly object to negative social and ecological
consequences they appear (see Lessons 11 and 12). After-the-fact protests and control efforts in which
the public ex- presses opposition to prior technological decisions are certainly less than al for democratic
governance and the creation of a technological trajectory that serves social and environmental goals. A
sustainable social system- ecosystem dynamic requires a new technological revolution, not just in what
technologies are created, but in how society organizes and directs the innovation process.