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<meta content="Given the energy expended within dominant Cartesian epistemologies constructing and policing conceptual boundaries between the natural and the cultural - energies joined, paradoxically, to the pragmatic Baconian colonisation of nature - the terms environment and technology have come to share an interesting convergence. First, both have become amorphous and diffuse, referring to ubiquitous conditions in human experience. Langdon Winner's pronouncement in 1977 that technology &quot;has come to mean everything and anything; it therefore threatens to mean nothing&quot;  is relevant still. It is increasingly true also of the functioning of the term environment, an observation that goes some way in explaining the centrifugal forces currently disintegrating and dispersing environmental discourses. 
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<meta content="  This poem is reproduced here in 3 sequential sub-headings for the paper. e.e.cummings, Complete Poems, Volume Two 1936-1962 (Bristol: MacKibbon &amp; Kee, 1968), 554. 
  Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics out-of-control as a theme in political thought (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 10.
  A disintegration that disorganises the range of competing vocabularies contesting the politics of the environment so that widely divergent views are now compressed into a single, deeply ambivalent rubric, that of sustainable development, and all can legitimately claim the mantle of environmentalism. See Michael Jacobs, “Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept,” in Fairness and Futurity: Essays on environmental sustainability and social justice, ed. A. Dobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21-45. See also Phil Macnaughten and John Urry’s excellent Contested Natures (London, Thousand Oaks, CA &amp; New Delhi: Sage, 1998) and John Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford &amp; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For an example of rhetorical analyses that seems to me to expose greater incoherence the more they strive to expose order or method in environmental discourses see George Myerson and Yvonne Rydin, The Language of Environment: A new rhetoric (London: UCL Press, 1996) and Tarla Rai Peterson, Sharing the Earth: The rhetoric of sustainable development (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 
  This is not to deny the considerable resources for inquiring into technology buried in the philosophical canon, the excavation of which being one of the first tasks of the post-war sub-disciplines of philosophy of technology. See Don Ihde, Philosophy of Technology: An introduction (New York: Paragon, 1993) and Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London &amp; New York: Routledge, 1999).
  See my Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2001), 100-102.
  See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA &amp; London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
  The foundational work in deep ecology, Arne Naess’s 1973 article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement: A summary,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 76-100 can be read as an early warning to ‘environmentalists’ about this danger. An original discussion exploring the problems with translating counter-modern environmentalism into empirical ‘evidence’ of modernity’s physical decline can be found in Andrew Murphy, “Environmentalism, Antimodernism, and the Recurrent Rhetoric of Decline,” Environmental Ethics 25 (Spring 2003): 79-98.
  Bill McKibben’s account of this ‘death’ in The End of Nature (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1990) not surprisingly met with considerable controversy and misunderstanding. For recent discussions of postnaturalism see Steven Vogel, “Environmental Philosophy After the End of Nature,” Environmental Ethics 24 (Spring 2002): 23-39 and Noel Castree, “Environmental Issues: Relational ontologies and hybrid politics,” Progress in Human Geography 27, No. 2 (2003), 203-211.
  A story told in David Owen, Thylacine: The tragic tale of the Tasmanian Tiger (Sydney: Allen &amp; Unwin, 2003). 
  Dryzek, The Politics of the Earth, goes some way to unpacking this shift in his comparison of the earlier survivalist paradigm of post-war environmentalism with the emerging Promethean paradigm, 23-60. I explore this shift and the historical context of ideas of stability and security in environmental thought in Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, 13-16 &amp; 68-72 respectively.
  See, e.g., Yuek-Sze Lo’s thoughtful response to Eric Katz’s untenable claim that “once human intervention occurs, there is no longer a natural system to be preserved, there is only an artifactual system.” “Natural and Artifactual: Restored nature as subject,” Environmental Ethics 21 (Fall 1999): 247-266, Katz cited 252. Of course, the label ‘Luddite’ is routinely misused by critics to present a simplistic reactionary caricature in places of the subtle socio-economic critiques of specific technological changes by the original Luddites in 19th-century England and by subsequence neo-Luddites such as  Mumford, Illich and Schumacher since. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: the Luddites and their war on the industrial revolution, lessons for the computer age (reading, MA, Menlo Park, CA &amp; New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
  World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 217.
  The literature debunking ‘evidence’ that there is anything resembling an environmental crisis has also swollen in size and authority from the early work of Julian Simonwho felt able to preface a 1994 essay “Scarcity or Abundance?” (reproduced in The Business of Consumption: Environmental ethics and the global economy, eds. L. Westra and P. H. Werhane (Lanham: Rowman &amp; Littlefield 1998), 237-245) thus: “what you read below was a minority viewpoint until sometime in the 1980s, at which point the mainstream scientific position shifted almost all the way to the position set forth here,” 237to the recent empirical work of Bjorn Lomborg in The Sceptical Environmentalist: Measuring the real state of the world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and the political rhetoric of Peter Huber in Hard Green: Saving the environment from the environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
  An interview with William McDonough by Eric Roston, “New war on Waste,” Time (Australia) 34 (26 August, 2002): 48-51.
  Stephen Schmidheiny, Changing Course: A global business perspective on environment and development (Cambridge, MA &amp; London: MIT Press, 1992); Livio D. deSimone &amp; Frank Popoff, Eco-efficiency: The business link to sustainable development (Cambridge, MA &amp; London: MIT Press, 1997); Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth: The coming age of environmental optimism (New York: Viking, 1995); Ernst U. von Weizsacker, Amory B. Lovins &amp; L. Hunter Lovins, Factor Four: Doubling wealth - halving resource use (Sydney, Allen &amp; Unwin, 1997); Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins &amp; L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The next industrial revolution (London: Earthscan, 1999). See also the more recent William McDonough &amp; Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the ways we make things (New York: North Point Press, 2002).
  R. Buckminster Fuller, “Technology and the Human Environment,” in The Ecological Conscience, ed. R. Disch (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 174-180, 178.
  Revealingly, Bill McKibben’s recent an eloquent critique of the dynamics of bioengineering, Enough: staying human in an engineered age (New York: Times Books, 2003), struggles to find any language within which to reclaim technological environments, and ends somewhat desperately offering Ghandian non-violence and wilderness as two “technologies that act as brakes…. Right now, they aren't as important as computers. But one can at least envision a world in which they might be. We've not yet foreclosed that planet; enough remains a possible invention,” 218. Apparently as determinist as his techno-utopian counterparts, Despite his deployment here of religious and wilderness discourses as technologies, McKibben presents technological environments as the antithesis, and the death, of spirit and nature, and can offer only the hope of escape and the politics of rejection.
  Time (Australia) 34 (August 26, 2002). Anthony Weston provides a response to the impulse to save earth in “Is it Too Late?,” in An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy, ed. A. Weston (Oxford &amp; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 43-68.
  Time, 49.
  Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The new biology of machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), 3, 2.
  Ibid., 2.
  Ibid., 212. For a discussion of the failure of Biosphere 2 see the editorial “The Origins of Biosphere 2” in The Eoclogist 25, no. 4 (1995): 158-162.
  I take the term biologic here from David Wann, although I do not want to suggest that he is in Kelly’s league as champion of technobiotic futures, as he retains a “limits to growth” sensibility toward nature and advocates a marriage of nature and culture in which technology is designed to flow with nature. Indeed, he closes his 1990 book with Gary Snyder’s deep ecological enjoinder to “go lightly” on earth. Nonetheless, Wann—who dispenses with the second law of thermodynamics to assert that “[n]atural systems move from disorganization and inefficiency toward balance and stability, and we’re part of a natural system”—raises technological efficiency to the status of a evolutionary law and thereby displaces political critique with unbridled optimism in the capacity of modernity to thoroughly redesign itself in the pursuit of technological prorgess. Biologic: Environmental Protection by Design (Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 1990), xi. 
   Jacques Fresco &amp; Roxanne Meadows, “Engineering a New Vision of Tomorrow,” The Futurist (January-February 2002): 33-36, 33, 35.
  Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977),  p. 91. I discuss the relevance of habitus for the understanding of technology as habitat in “Reinhabiting Technology: Means in ends and the practice of place,” Technology in Society 24 (2003): forthcoming. 
  As Tony Fry has put it, “we design our world, while our world designs us,”  A New Design Philosophy: An introduction to defuturing (Sydney, UNSW Press, 1999), 6.
  I attempt to unwrap at least a bit of this difficult package in Davison, Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, 115-140.
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    <h1 class="ep_tm_pagetitle">Rapt in technology</h1>
    <p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><span class="person_name">Davison, Aidan</span> (2003) <xhtml:em>Rapt in technology.</xhtml:em> Design Philosophy Papers, 1 (4). ISSN 1448-7136</p><p style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"></p><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" class="not_ep_block"><tr><td valign="top" style="text-align:center"><a onmouseover="EPJS_ShowPreview( event, 'doc_preview_1945' );" href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1518/1/DPP_2003.pdf" onmouseout="EPJS_HidePreview( event, 'doc_preview_1945' );"><img alt="[img]" src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png" class="ep_doc_icon" border="0" /></a><div class="ep_preview" id="doc_preview_1945"><table><tr><td><img alt="" src="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1518/thumbnails/1/preview.png" class="ep_preview_image" border="0" /><div class="ep_preview_title">Preview</div></td></tr></table></div></td><td valign="top"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/1518/1/DPP_2003.pdf"><span class="ep_document_citation">PDF</span></a> - Requires a PDF viewer<br />97Kb</td></tr></table><div class="not_ep_block"><h2>Abstract</h2><p style="padding-bottom: 16px; text-align: left; margin: 1em auto 0em auto">Given the energy expended within dominant Cartesian epistemologies constructing and policing conceptual boundaries between the natural and the cultural - energies joined, paradoxically, to the pragmatic Baconian colonisation of nature - the terms environment and technology have come to share an interesting convergence. First, both have become amorphous and diffuse, referring to ubiquitous conditions in human experience. Langdon Winner's pronouncement in 1977 that technology "has come to mean everything and anything; it therefore threatens to mean nothing"  is relevant still. It is increasingly true also of the functioning of the term environment, an observation that goes some way in explaining the centrifugal forces currently disintegrating and dispersing environmental discourses. 
</p></div><table style="margin-bottom: 1em" cellpadding="3" class="not_ep_block" border="0"><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Item Type:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">Article</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Keywords:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">environmental philosophy, philosophy of technology, environmetnalism</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Subjects:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/370402.html">370000 Studies in Human Society &gt; 370400 Human Geography &gt; 370402 Social and Cultural Geography</a><br /><a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/view/subjects/440104.html">440000 Philosophy and Religion &gt; 440100 Philosophy &gt; 440104 Applied Ethics (incl. Bioethics and Environmental Ethics)</a></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ID Code:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">1518</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited By:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><span class="ep_name_citation"><span class="person_name">Dr Aidan Davison</span></span></td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Deposited On:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">10 Aug 2007</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">Last Modified:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row">09 Jan 2008 02:30</td></tr><tr><th valign="top" class="ep_row">ePrint Statistics:</th><td valign="top" class="ep_row"><a target="ePrintStats" href="/es/index.php?action=show_detail_eprint;id=1518;">View statistics for this ePrint</a></td></tr></table><p align="right">Repository Staff Only: <a href="http://eprints.utas.edu.au/cgi/users/home?screen=EPrint::View&amp;eprintid=1518">item control page</a></p>
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