ABSTRACT
Sustainable ecosystems perform a variety of indispensable environmental services. These environmental services are jeopardised by our current use of non-sustainable technology. The history of technology, from an environmental viewpoint, is really a story about changes in the flows of energy and matter which the humans have superimposed on the natural ecosystem flows. To appreciate how our use of technology has altered the pathways of energy and resources in the biosphere consider the evolution of the agrosystem a technological system dedicated to food production. The greatest changes to our food-getting systems came with the development of technology enabling us to subsidise solar, human and animal energy with fossil fuels. All anthropocentric perspectives remain wedded to economic growth in the traditional sense and the authors define economic growth by the capacity of technology to produce more goods and services, by using more energy and resources.
