Technology: a life saving straw?

It's hard to simply make a judgment about technology when we talk about its position in the environment. The invention of light help people to see clearly during night, but it causes light pollution that impacts animals. The invention of car, airplane and trains help us getting much further away places in much shorter time, but they causes serious air pollution and also severe depletion of fossil fuel. the invention of varieties of electronic devices that help us a lot during daily life, but also generate enormous amount of electronic wastes that pollute the environment. The invention of plastic water bottles allow us carrying water with us no matter where we go, but tons of plastic bottles piled up everywhere. Whether the technology is a negative or positive force in our lives depend upon how we are going to use it. It is a tool for us to use not something that will dominate our future. I think the best example of it is the nuclear power plant, where is we use it properly, it can generate enormous amount of energy that supply our energy instead of burning coal to get electricity. on the other hand, the nuclear power also generates hazardous wastes that are very difficult to deal with. For some unstable countries and terrorists, nuclear power has become a powerful weapon to help them strive for hegemony. The whole debate about technology is like the coin has two sides. There are negative aspects of technology though there must have something else that have positive impacts of it.

As the I=PAT equation mentioned, the environmental impacts that we have are decided by population times human affluence and technology. We can tell from this that technology plays an important role in terms of environment. When we talking about environmental protection, we can not eliminate the impacts of technology that it will have over the entire issue. The level of technology determines the degree, the range and the area that we may influence, which under most circumstances, by damaging and over exploiting the resources. This kind of going to the debate of whether the developing of new technologies is compatible with environment protection. Facing with the situation right now, I think technology would work in a more positive way for correcting the mistakes that we made before. If we made changes of our current technologies to make them have higher efficiency, save more energy and pollute less; these all the benefits that we get from improving our technology. If we use technology in a more reasonable and environmental friendly way, technology will have bigger positive force than negative forces. In order to use it in the right way, stronger regulations and policies that aiming at different technologies needed to be done before the technologies spread to the entire world because once it get widely spread, it will be difficult to control people how they will use it.