In the last century, planet earth has been a tortured witness to the technological development of man. A development that has meant death and massive destruction to the planet we call home.
Ironically we can realize that man as a species, we are the most maladaptive of all the species that have lived on the planet, regardless of our divine origin, or Darwinean, we can ensure that the success of our domain is based on the development of our intelligence.
It is worth mentioning that this intelligence has made us the best and worst species that has inhabited this home. I mean the best, because we have harnessed and used the environment for our benefit more than other species, and the worst, because in that excessive and irresponsible use we have destroyed in a century, what an ecosystem took to form in thousands of years.
The brilliance of fame, power, and money has so blinded knowledge-hungry men; that with the ingenuity of Pandora who played with the evils that plagued the ancient world according to the Greek philosophers, they open the doors of knowledge with the interest of dominating them even without reason or understanding of their use.
Man now as the dominant species on the planet, has given himself the divine right to decide on the future of the other species, ending at the rate of 23 species per month. Destroy natural habitats in fractions of time of what nature created, catastrophes, corruption, pollution, and all the defects of man have repercussions on nature; that like a sponge absorbs our mutant stepchildren every day, every hour, waiting for the moment when it ends up exploding with a force that will end what we know now.
Effects of the use of technology on nature
It is ironic to observe how each discovery that benefits man and advances another 100 years of knowledge in just 1 hour, resulting in the destruction of thousands of years of work done by nature in just a few years; With this I refer to the great disasters that have tormented nature.
Pesticide pollution, oil spills at sea, the dangers of nuclear radiation and forest fires threaten Earth's ecosystems. It is essential for the defense of life on the planet that the errors that have led to situations of serious ecological damage are disseminated and analyzed.
Oil spills
One of the biggest causes of ocean pollution is oil spills. 46% of the oil and its industrial derivatives that are dumped into the sea are waste that is dumped by coastal cities. The sea is used as a very accessible and cheap deposit of polluting substances, and the situation will not change as long as there are no strict controls, with severe penalties for violators.
13% of spills are due to accidents suffered by large oil container ships, which by negligence of the authorities and disinterest of the oil companies transport the fuel in inadequate conditions. In recent years, some of the most spectacular accidents were that of the Exdon tanker Valdés, which occurred off the coast of Alaska on March 24, 1989, and that of the Aegean oil tanker on December 3, 1992, in front of the entrance of the port of La Coruña, in Spain. Another 32% of spills come from washing the tanks of large vessels that carry this fuel.
Both oil spills and forest fires seriously affect the food chains of ecosystems.
The spills cause large deaths of waterfowl, fish and other living things in the oceans. This alters the balance of the ecosystem and modifies the food chain. In the affected areas, fishing, navigation and the use of beaches for recreational purposes become impossible.
Trees are not the only victims in forest fires: many animals are trapped in the smoke, while others migrate.
Nuclear leaks
Certain substances propagate energy by disintegrating their atoms, and also the residual heat - persistent for years - that they generate. This phenomenon, known as radioactivity, is particularly intense in the case of plutonium.
Currently, 424 nuclear power plants installed in 25 countries produce 16% of the world's electricity. Some countries, like the United States, pressured by the terrible Chernobyl accident, have canceled construction projects for new nuclear plants.
The explosion in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986 released large amounts of radioactivity. The cloud that formed moved to other countries, due to the action of the winds. The most polluted area comprised some 260,000 km2 of the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, and directly affected 2,600,000 inhabitants.
The Soviet authorities only officially admitted 31 victims, but it is estimated that radioactive emissions caused 32,000 deaths in the first ten years, and that 400,000 people had to be displaced from their places. The explosion of the nuclear reactor caused terrible effects on the health of the population: an increase in infant mortality, thyroid cancer, an increase in the number of children born with leukemia, malformations, tumors and other conditions, which will be transmitted genetically. In addition, the disaster caused the destruction of entire crops and food contamination.
Nuclear power plants have high construction and maintenance costs, and have also proven not to be efficient enough. In any case, the trigger for the cessation of construction of some plants in the world has been the accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine.
Another problem related to nuclear leaks, and no less important due to its consequences, is the destination of radioactive waste. Initially, it had been chosen to dump them on the ocean floor. But the procedure was soon shown to be unsafe.
Different alternative solutions have been sought, and the debate is currently ongoing. Perhaps the best of the proposed methods is underground, airtight and termless storage.
Forest fires
Every year, man dismantles about 12,000,000 hectares of tropical forest. However, this reduction is not the only one suffered by the forest areas of our planet; To this must be added the excessive exploitation suffered by other types of forests and the loss caused by fires.
More than 7,000,000 hectares of jungles, forests and bushes are destroyed annually for this reason. Among the factors that favor this phenomenon are high temperatures, droughts and a great lack of humidity, and strong, dry winds that contribute to fire dispersal. What starts out as a spark quickly turns into a moving focus of fire and cannot be stopped or controlled.
Three forest sectors can be distinguished in the mode of advance of a forest fire. The highest level, that of the fire that occurs in the treetops, that is, where the branches and leaves are, is the one with the fastest advance and the most difficult to control. At medium level, where the bushes grow, the fire progresses less rapidly but affects not only these but also the herbaceous layer -weeds and bushes-. At the lower level, below the ground, the advance occurs at a much slower rate, but the damage caused by the fire when it reaches this part is greater than at any other level, since it burns the roots and carbonizes the humus causing irreparable losses.
On many occasions fires originate naturally or sometimes in a controlled manner, but, not infrequently, these catastrophes occur due to carelessness, especially in natural tourist areas or in protected areas where man lives in close contact with nature, making camps. and outdoor life.
Nature and knowledge
Long before man came to the planet, nature lived in a delicate balance with knowledge. We can imagine this relationship where nature seeks to reach the origin through knowledge as shown in the following graph.
We must therefore understand that nature since ancient times has been the maximum guardian and corrector of the use of knowledge, allowing species to access it when it considers they have the capacity to handle it.
Since the arrival of man, this relationship has been broken by interposing his presence to that of nature. Shown in the following graph.
Nature has to react to the breakdown of man, thus producing earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, which man causes.
That is why the climate changes so radically, there are droughts, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, which remind us that the end of the world will not be of divine origin, if not purely human; we will be the executioners and we will dictate our own sentence that will be our destruction like a coward who practices suicide.
For this reason we have to redefine applied knowledge; based on what we have paid years ago with our mistakes, and being more loyal to a planet earth that sinks in complex chains of bureaucracy, politics and power.
The technology
We define technology as the application of knowledge to transform material resources into products that facilitate the accomplishment of a task.
The use of applied knowledge is for the exclusive use of the human species.
Thus we observe how dinosaurs once built niches, beavers build prey, prairie dogs burrow underground, ants and termites make mounds of sand like ancient medieval castles, to name a few.
The technological advance of our days has had a radical increase. We can compare the technological development of the last year with the technological development that occurred in the last decade, as well as the technological development of the last decade with the technological development of the century. Thus giving exponential growth
I propose to the reader of this essay to reflect on the following points proposed here:
Technology must be environmental
It must take care of man and nature not only making the most of their material and energy, if not environmental, resources, becoming part of a sustainable development that can maintain or improve nature, not creating mutants or playing with it, but strengthening it, and restoring balance between species.
Technology must be shared
We must share the use of knowledge, and not manage it as our own, like the industrialized countries that give their waste to poor countries, we must take care of it and respect it, but more than anything share it, since we can only advance if we advance together as a world society, without barriers or skepticism, without yokes or borders.
Bibliographical sources
- Manifesto for a technology at the service of man Grenoble, October 12, 2000, France Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute Last visit: July 17, 2002 http://www.barrameda.com.ar/ecologia/desastre.htm Ecological disasters Grupo Barrameda, Argentina Last visit: July 17, 2002 For more information send email to: barramedabarrameda.com.ar
