Original scientific paper
The Ecological Messages of Economic and Technological Integrations
Andrej Kirn
; Faculty Ecological Messages of Economic and Technological Integrations
Abstract
Permanent, one-way processes do not occur in nature, and even less so in society. Trends are continually changing new problems are arising and old ones becoming outdated.
Linear thought is comfortable and thus extremely persistent in cases when it is considered that what is desired and valued shall last into the future as well. The civilizational dogma of the exponential economic growth linked with the exponential progress of science and technology is a distinct example of the extrapolational linear certainty that with science and technology we shall solve problems successfully, and therefore, let come what may.
Strange and repulsive seems the possibility that the new-world exponential scientific and technical progress could easily be just a short episode in the development of civilization. The growing systemic conflicts between the biosphere and technology and the exhaustion of natural resources are perhaps signs indicating that our era of science and technology is a limited one. Even today, the world-wide debate of the seventies about the »limits of growth« is not yet considered the past On the contrary, we shall have to live constantly with the awareness of many physical and ecological limits to the development of mankind on a limited planet.
The key bonds of the European integration are economic and technological in nature. Their ecological feature is a new successful transformation of the biosphere into the anthropo-technosphere, a successful use of natural resources for acquiring wealth, for the fulfillment of man’s needs and pleasures.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
155077
URI
Publication date:
30.6.1991.
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