Environment: The dangers of technical fixes to environmental problems

What they needed was something to control these beetles and the solution seemed to be a species of toad from the Americas.

About 100 toads were imported and used to breed thousands more which were then released into the cane fields.

Without any of the predators that kept their numbers under control in the Americas the toads had a fine life: nearly a century later there are thought to be more than 200 million of them.

However, cane toads secrete poisonous chemicals to defend themselves against predators and this has led to populations of their predators collapsing.

This destroys natural balances in plant and animal populations and reduces overall biodiversity significantly.

They are even linked to the deaths of humans and their pets who have touched their toxic skins. What does not seem to have changed is the number of cane beetles.

So what lessons can we draw from this story? One is the problem of huge single crop plantations which are a haven for animals with a taste for that crop.

The other is the danger of major, uncontrollable technical fixes to solve problems caused by non-sustainable economic activity such as plantation agriculture.

It also applies to climate change: for different reasons, Governments, industry representatives, climate change deniers and other anti-environmentalist groups all say that whatever happens we can use new technologies to solve environmental problems.

There are many examples of this. We are encouraged to buy electric cars as they are ‘green’. But the electricity to charge their batteries has to come from somewhere, often through burning fossil fuels.

There are also environmental problems associated with the mining of the minerals used in the batteries and their eventual disposal, and manufacturing batteries uses large amounts of energy.

What the push to ‘drive green’ does is to make us think we can carry on using private cars just as we have always done, when all that achieves is to kick the can of environmental destruction a few years down the road.

Recently a farmer in Herefordshire was sent to prison for 12 months for illegally straightening and clearing the banks of a river flowing through his land because he claimed it would prevent flooding.

In fact, what such actions do is to speed up the river flow, causing erosion of the banks leading to downstream silting and increasing the risk of flooding elsewhere. Not my problem!

In fact, rivers should flow slowly and occasionally flood upstream land: this keeps river flows more regular and the flooding helps increase soil fertility.

There is also the significant loss of habitat and hence biodiversity, again which has a negative effect on the long-term fertility of the land.

Globally we have the Holy Grail of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Huge machines will suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere safe for thousands of years.

It sounds like a great idea but currently only works on a laboratory scale. To make a significant difference to atmospheric greenhouse gas levels the machines will have to be huge … and will of course need energy to run them.

That is, of course, if the technology can be made to work at the necessary scale and without costing vast sums of money.

Another idea being considered is to spray reflective particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat away from the earth, cooling it down and protecting the icecaps.

A nice idea, but apart from turning the sky white rather than blue it could lead to unpredictable weather patterns or even overcooling, creating an ice age.

It also does not respect political boundaries: what if a country decided to take this into its own hands and sprayed particles into its own skies but they drifted over other countries and destroyed their environment?

There are many other ideas, such as to spray chemicals into the ocean to encourage plankton growth which would absorb carbon dioxide. Just search the Internet for other ideas under discussion.

Given the environmental crisis that we are now in, it is almost certain that we will have to look to technological change to prevent or reduce the effects we can see.

The danger is that these new technologies may not work as well as hoped or may cause new, unexpected problems … that may of course call for technological fixes.

We also need to remember that the people calling most loudly for technological fixes are those people will profit most from them or who stand to lose most from adopting more sustainable lifestyles.

For example, much of the international emphasis on carbon capture technologies has been encouraged by representatives at United Nations conferences from Saudi Arabia, a state which it totally reliant on oil production.

Ultimately technical fixes do not solve the patterns of behaviour that are causing the problems, and may of course just encourage them, irrespective of their unexpected consequences. Just think about those cane toads.