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.

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.

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.

Recent developments have successfully changed our approach to practical applications of engineering by improving the methods of design and manufacturing, for example, shorter development cycles. The text focuses on directing such new methods towards a specific ecological purpose.

This comprehensive second volume explores the environmental influences on building design introduced in the first volume to the depth appropriate to students of architecture, architectural technology, building surveying and cognate disciplines.

In the 1970s, the first wave of environmental regulation targeted specific sources of pollutants. In the 1990s, concern is focused not on the ends of pipes or the tops of smokestacks but on sweeping regional and global issues. This landmark volume explores the new industrial ecology, an emerging framework for making environmental factors an integral part of economic and business decision making. Experts on this new frontier explore concepts and applications, including: Bringing international law up to par with many national laws to encourage industrial ecology principles. Integrating environmental costs into accounting systems. Understanding design for environment, industrial "metabolism," and sustainable development and how these concepts will affect the behavior of industrial and service firms. The volume looks at negative and positive aspects of technology and addresses treatment of waste as a raw material. This volume will be important to domestic and international policymakers, leaders in business and industry, environmental specialists, and engineers and designers.

Contributions by prominent scholars examining the intersections of environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. Environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology have taken divergent paths despite their common interest in examining human modification of the natural world. Yet philosophers from each field have a lot to contribute to the other. Environmental issues inevitably involve technologies, and technologies inevitably have environmental impacts. In this book, prominent scholars from both fields illuminate the intersections of environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology, offering the beginnings of a rich new hybrid discourse. All the contributors share the intuition that technology and the environment overlap in ways that are relevant in both philosophical and practical terms. They consider such issues as the limits of technological interventions in the natural world, whether a concern for the environment can be designed into things, how consumerism relates us to artifacts and environments, and how food and animal agriculture raise questions about both culture and nature. They discuss, among other topics, the pessimism and dystopianism shared by environmentalists, environmental philosophers, and philosophers of technology; the ethics of geoengineering and climate change; the biological analogy at the heart of industrial ecology; green products and sustainable design; and agriculture as a bridge between technology and the environment. Contributors Braden Allenby, Raymond Anthony, Philip Brey, J. Baird Callicott, Brett Clark, Wyatt Galusky, Ryan Gunderson, Benjamin Hale, Clare Heyward, Don Idhe, Mark Sagoff, Julian Savulescu, Paul B. Thompson, Ibo van de Poel, Zhang Wei, Kyle Powys Whyte