Sustainability Beyond Technology

This is a thoughtful collection of essays that offer a much needed transdisciplinary critique of technological quick fixes to the challenges of sustainability. The authors provide some compelling insights into theories and practices of sustainability. * Bobby Banerjee, Professor of Management, City, University of London *
There is much written about sustainability and business and capitalism, but too little about the interface of sustainability and technology. Yet, technology may hold the key to our collective future prosperity or failure. This important volume raises important and provocative issues. It is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the relationship between sustainability and technology. * Pratima Bansal, Canada Research Chair in Business Sustainability, Ivey Business School *
Sustainability beyond Technology offers a new philosophical perspective within the quickly growing field of philosophy of sustainable development. While philosophers of technology traditionally do not take environmental issues into account, such an uncritical stance is no longer possible in the age of global warming. The authors of this volume open a new and critical perspective on the great acceleration accompanying technological progress and fill a major gap in our understanding of sustainable technology and innovation. The book is a must read for philosophers of technology who are interested in the opportunities and limitations of 'Earthing Technology' in the Anthropocene. * Vincent Blok, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Technology and Responsible Innovation, Wageningen University *
Humanity is facing a range of sustainability challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss, health pandemics to food insecurity. New technology is often portrayed as the silver bullet solution to these challenges: geoengineering, vaccines, lab-grown food, etc.; the list of technological innovations that promise to save the planet and humanity is long. Sustainability Beyond Technology critically engages with these debates, putting today's technological hopes into their philosophical and historical contexts. The authors are able to unpack the blinding optimism that is often connected with technology without being luddites. The book puts forward a critical evaluation of technological progress, offering its readers alternative pathways to the sustainability transition. * Steffen Böhm, Professor in Organisation and Sustainability, University of Exeter *
In varied ways, the authors attune the reader to how technology organizes and mediates human action and thought, often in ways that continue to belittle and degrade the wider environments upon which they have been dependent for continued life. Whether framed as parasitical, ignorant, or arrogant, the essays tease out the paradoxical and problematic nature of this long-sedimented, one-way relationship, and they do so in provocative ways. Humanity has been augmented through technology, to a point of indistinction. As the effects of this technological mediation have spread, the question these essays then ask is whether there is anything like an 'exterior' left to colonize. Does the technological-industrial complex by which all human activity and thought is now governed find itself at a point of collapse, given there is now very little 'out there' to which it might relate? * Robin Holt, Professor, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School *
Technology is at the centre of debates about sustainability, but paradoxically is a term that is severely undertheorized. Not anymore. This excellent volume offers profound thinking, from different angles, on the question of technology—what it is, what it does, and its role in sustainability transitions. * Giorgos Kallis, ICREA Professor at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, author of Limits, and The Case for Degrowth *
This timely volume brings together the latest work by an international group of experts on the role of technology in sustainability. It critically examines the connections between technology and sustainability from the viewpoint of different scholarly traditions to offer a synthesis on to what extent technology can alleviate adverse environmental and social impacts in the Anthropocene. It challenges the conventional understanding of technology as a mere set of tools, instruments and systems, and that it is 'the solution' to prevailing problems, suggesting that technology must also be examined as undesired and biased. It will be a definitive source on technology and sustainability in the new decade. * Jouni Paavola, Professor of Environmental Social Science, University of Leeds *
These crystal-clear essays prime us for the political debate over technology and ecological sustainability—long overdue, now urgent in 2021. Among many other contributions, Pasi Heikkurinen's and Toni Ruuska's taxonomy of philosophic perspectives on technology provides an invaluable orientation to a diverse and nuanced intellectual terrain. * Ariel Salleh, activist and author of Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice, and Pluriverse *