Technology good or bad?

Technology has moved us forward to the place we are now, but at a cost to our environment. Technological advances really started with the Industrial Revolution and have continued into the technological age, but with every technological advance environmental damage is being done. For example, back in the 1800’s the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the start of what can be said is the advancement of technology, no one knew the amount of damage being done to the environment. They might have had a slight chance of knowing that damage was being done to their health however, when they were not able to breathe the local air or see the sky for that matter. A new technology brought the industrial world out of seeing skies filled with coal smoke and into a “cleaner” world and that technology was the world’s developed to the use of oil.

But as time has gone on the realization that oil, is not the clean substitute that it was held to be. And now in the 21th century, it would make sense for us to look at our world and change. Some people call for more technology, but what I am beginning to understand about technology is even if we find some substitute for oil, the new technological advancement, could have environmental impacts that we just don’t know about yet. Then when this new technology comes out, there is the process of getting the materials, through extraction of the environment.

An example of technology appearing to solve a current problem is the technology used to spark the green revolution. Farmers in Asia were able to approve crop yields by buying genetically modified seeds; the seeds however needed more water, which required a mass amount of irrigation along with a need to buy more seeds the next year instead of relying on the same seed to produce future yields. Not only did it this new technological innovation lead to a heavier increase in irrigation, but also a heavier use of pesticides, that went into destroying the local environment and creating a dependency of farmers on expensive seeds and tools, all in the name to increase crop yields, that were made available with technology.

Which leads me to my conclusion that technology on one side appears to be good for the human race in general, but as we use technology to solve of our current problems, new problems emerge.