Daedalus articles from June 1996

Daedalus archives from June 1996

Introduction. (study of economic development and environmental issues)
June 22, 1996... THE SEARCH FOR AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM that can provide both more and better goods and services compatible with the long-run quality of the planetary environment has intensified with each recent decade. Industries and governments, as well as...

The liberation of the environment.
June 22, 1996... THE PASSAGE OF TIME HAS CONNECTED the invention of the wheel with more than ten million miles of paved roads around the world today, the capture of fire with six billion tons of carbon going up in smoke annually. Must human ingenuity always...

Time for a change: on the patterns of diffusion of innovation.
June 22, 1996... THE SUBJECT OF THIS ESSAY is the temporal patterns of the diffusion of technological innovations and what these patterns may imply for the future of the human environment.(1) But first let us set the clock back nearly one thousand years: return...

Population, technology, and the human environment: a thread through time.
June 22, 1996... Plato observed it, the old testament taught it, and Thomas Robert Malthus feared it. It has been called the principle of plenitude, which "presupposes a richness, an expansiveness of life, a tendency to fill up, so to speak, the empty niches of...

How much land can ten billion people spare for nature?
June 22, 1996... If people keep multiplying and farmers keep farming as they do now, farmers will soon need to grow their crops on twice as large an area as what they use today.(1) Doubling the population without changing the way we farm would expand the...

Freeing energy from carbon.
June 22, 1996... THE DOING OF MORE WITH LESS attests to the practical advancement of societies. In fact, labor, capital, and inputs of other factors to the economy have demonstrably decreased per unit of output and value added since the beginnings of the...

Life-styles and the environment: the case of energy.
June 22, 1996... WHEN WE SPEAK OF PRESSURES on the natural environment, we should speak more about home loans, old-age income, and women drivers, more about shrinking households and all-night shopping, and perhaps less about coal mines and pulp mills. In this...

Elektron: electrical systems in retrospect and prospect.
June 22, 1996... And I saw something like the color of amber, like the appearance of fire round about enclosing it; from what appeared to be his loins upward, and from what appeared to be his loins downward, I saw what appeared to be fire, and there was a...

Materialization and dematerialization: measures and trends.
June 22, 1996... "REVENGE THEORY" POSTULATES that the world we have created eventually gets even with us, twisting our cleverness against.(1) Helmets and other protective gear have made American football more dangerous than its bare predecessor, rugby. Widened...

Toward the end of waste: reflections on a new ecology of industry.
June 22, 1996... I WANT TO THINK SIMPLY AND ABSTRACTLY about all of industry, considered as a single block. That block takes in materials and energy, transforms them into products and wastes, and then excretes the products and wastes. At the end of their useful...

Humans in nature: toward a physiocentric philosophy.
June 22, 1996... WHAT IS THE QUESTION TO WHICH humans are the answer? Narrowly speaking, this was the riddle the Sphinx posed to Oedipus: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?" When Oedipus knew the answer--man--the...

Sustaining the human environment: the next two hundred years.
June 22, 1996... IT IS SURELY PRESUMPTUOUS TO LOOK into the two-hunded-year future of this changing world. Yet the questions we pose today about sustaining the world's habitability, the environment, and the quality of life of its human population force us to...