Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

New perspectives on how envirotech can help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are more sustainable for humanity—and the planet. Today's scientists, policymakers, and citizens are all confronted by numerous dilemmas at the nexus of technology and the environment. Every day seems to bring new worries about the dangers posed by carcinogens, "superbugs," energy crises, invasive species, genetically modified organisms, groundwater contamination, failing infrastructure, and other troubling issues. In Technology and the Environment in History, Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring adopt an analytical approach to explore current research at the intersection of environmental history and the history of technology—an emerging field known as envirotech. Technology and the Environment in History They discuss the important topics, historical processes, and scholarly concerns that have emerged from recent work in thinking about envirotech. Each chapter focuses on a different urgent topic: • Food and Food Systems: How humans have manipulated organisms and ecosystems to produce nutrients for societies throughout history. • Industrialization: How environmental processes have constrained industrialization and required shifts in the relationships between human and nonhuman nature. • Discards: What we can learn from the multifaceted forms, complex histories, and unexpected possibilities of waste. • Disasters: How disaster, which the authors argue is common in the industrialized world, exposes the fallacy of tidy divisions among nature, technology, and society. • Body: How bodies reveal the porous boundaries among technology, the environment, and the human. • Sensescapes: How environmental and technological change have reshaped humans' (and potentially nonhumans') sensory experiences over time. Using five concepts to understand the historical relationships between technology and the environment—porosity, systems, hybridity, biopolitics, and environmental justice—Pritchard and Zimring propose a chronology of key processes, moments, and periodization in the history of technology and the environment. Ultimately, they assert, envirotechnical perspectives help us engage with the surrounding world in ways that are, we hope, more sustainable and just for both humanity and the planet. Aimed at students and scholars new to environmental history, the history of technology, and their nexus, this impressive synthesis looks outward and forward—identifying promising areas in more formative stages of intellectual development and current synergies with related areas that have emerged in the past few years, including environmental anthropology, discard studies, and posthumanism.

This compelling new book challenges the view that a clear and unwavering boundary exists between nature and technology. Rejecting this dichotomy, the contributors show how the history of each can be united in a constantly shifting panorama where definitions of "nature" and "technology" alter and overlap.

Technology and Environment is one of a series of publications designed to bring national attention to issues of the greatest importance in engineering and technology during the 25th year of the National Academy of Engineering. A "paradox of technology" is that it can be both the source of environmental damage and our best hope for repairing such damage today and avoiding it in the future. Technology and Environment addresses this paradox and the blind spot it creates in our understanding of environmental crises. The book considers the proximate causes of environmental damageâ€"machines, factories, cities, and so onâ€"in a larger societal context, from which the will to devise and implement solutions must arise. It helps explain the depth and difficulty of such issues as global warming and hazardous wastes but also demonstrates the potential of technological innovation to have a constructive impact on the planet. With a range of data and examples, the authors cover such topics as the "industrial metabolism" of production and consumption, the environmental consequences of the information era, and design of environmentally compatible technologies.

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it’s easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident. But in Surroundings, we learn that the environmental past is much more complex than it seems at first glance. In this wide-ranging history of the concept, Etienne S. Benson uncovers the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken over the last two centuries and opens our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today. Through a series of richly contextualized case studies, Benson shows us how and why particular groups of people—from naturalists in Napoleonic France in the 1790s to global climate change activists today—adopted the concept of environment and adapted it to their specific needs and challenges. Bold and deeply researched, Surroundings challenges much of what we think we know about what an environment is, why we should care about it, and how we can protect it.

This book explains how and why the state-socialist regime in Hungary used technology and propaganda to foster industrialization and the conservation of natural resources simultaneously. Further, this book explains why this process was ultimately a failure. By exploring the environmental pre-history of communist Hungary before analyzing the economic development of the Kádár regime, Pál investigates how economic and environmental policies and technology transfer were negotiated between the official communist ideology and the global economic reality of capitalist markets. Pál argues that the modernization project of the Kádár regime (1956–1990) facilitated ecological consciousness – at both an individual and societal level – which provoked great social unrest when positive environmental impact was not achieved. Today, global issues of climate change, urban pollution, resource depletion, and overpopulation transcend political systems, but economic and environmental discourses varied greatly in the twentieth century. This volume is important reading for all those interested in economic and environmental history, as well as political science.

Nanotechnology! Genetic engineering! Miracle Drugs! We are promised that new technological developments will magically save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fueled binge known as modern industrial civilization, without demanding any fundamental changes in our behavior. There is a pervasive belief that technological innovation will enable us to continue our current lifestyle indefinitely and will prevent social, economic and environmental collapse. Techno-Fix shows that negative unintended consequences of technology are inherently predictable and unavoidable, techno-optimism is completely unjustified, and modern technology, in the presence of continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability, but hastens collapse. The authors demonstrate that most technological solutions to social and technology-created problems are ineffective. They explore the reasons for the uncritical acceptance of new technologies, show who really controls the direction of technological change, and then advocate extensive reform. This comprehensive exposé is a powerful argument for why we can and should put the genie back in the bottle. An insightful and powerful critique, it is required reading for anyone who is concerned about blind techno-optimism and believes that the time has come to make science and technology more socially and environmentally responsible. For more information, please visit technofix.org .