6. Environmental Stress
New technologies often cause new form of pollution and environmental stress. Pollution may be defined as the addition to the environment of agents that are potentially damaging to the welfare of humans or other organisms. Environmental stress is a more general term that refers to the effects of society on the natural environment. Pollution is the most common form of environment stress, but it is not the only one.
One example of environmental stress resulting from technology is the surprising finding that winter fish kills in Wisconsin lakes were caused by snowmobiles. Heavy snowmobile use on a lake compacts the snow, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight filtering through the ice and interfering with photosynthesis by aquatic plants. As the plant life dies, its decomposition further reduces the amount of oxygen in the water. The fish then die of asphyxiation.
The fish-plant-oxygen relationship is a natural ecological system. The snowmobile is a technological innovation with a variety of potential uses. The production, marketing, and use of snowmobiles are elements of a social system. It is this social system that is responsible for the environmental stress resulting from snowmobile use. The land available for snowmobiling is increasingly scarce in an urban society like the United States. Frozen lakes near urban centers thus seem ideal for this purpose, but snowmobiles cause environmental stress in the form of fish kills and thereby create the need for new social controls over the uses of this technology.
Often the need for such controls does not become apparent until a great deal of damage has been done. Nor is it ever entirely clear that new social controls or new technologies can solve the problem at hand. For example, we know how to solve the problem of sulfur emissions from burning coal (which cause the acid rain that destroys forests and lakes), but these are costly and hence are politically controversial. Opinion polls have shown that Americans think not enough is being done to improve and protect the environment. A large majority believe environmental quality is declining. But when faced with the higher tax bills and energy rates required to pay the costs of cleaning up the environment, they often protest.
Studies of the impact and social control of technologies are an increasingly active frontier of sociological research. The Environmental Sociology section of the American Sociological Association routinely publishes research reports that assess the polluting and environmentally stressful impacts of technology. Many such studies have shown that the people who bear the heaviest burden of pollution are most often those who are least able to escape its effects. The poor, minorities, and workers and their families in industrial regions are exposed to higher levels of air, water, and solid-waste pollution than more affluent people. But these studies have also shown that the effects of pollution frequently either are not perceived or are denied by the people who feel them most. For example, a random sample survey on perceptions of pollution in two highly polluted mining and lumbering towns in central Canada found that “half of the total number of respondents interviewed either did not perceive a pollution problem at all, or else regarded it as being of very little importance.” The study also found that even among those who did perceive the effects of pollution in the air and water and on the landscape, a huge majority (83-89 percent were “not prepared to do anything about it.”
This is not a surprising finding. People whose livelihoods depend on polluting industries generally learn to tolerate and even ignore the pollution associated with those industries. In fact, when environmental activists protect against the polluting effects of mines and smelters, they often find that their most vocal opponents are those who are most negatively affected by the pollution. In the past twenty years, however, there has been a significant change in attitudes, especially on the part of trade union leaders in polluting industries; such leaders are more likely to press for pollution controls than they were in the past. 感谢您阅读《ScienceandTechnolo 》一文，出国留学网(liuxue86.com)编辑部希望本文能帮助到您。
