Eric Bonds
While some popular and academic discourses endow “green” technology with heroic powers to both rejuvenate our stagnating economy and bring about a more environmentally sustainable society, Eric Bonds and his University of Colorado co-author Liam Downey argue that it is important to place their development, fabrication, and use within a global context of inequitable relationships between nations. The authors did just that by examining three cases of ecological modernization in the automobile industry in an article recently published in the Journal of World-Systems Research. The cases reveal that “green” technologies instituted in wealthy nations are often composed of natural resources extracted from the Global South. Consequently, such technologies have a real capacity to create environmental improvements in wealthy nations, but may also inadvertently increase environmental degradation and human rights abuses experienced by people living near natural resource extraction projects elsewhere on the globe. The article, entitled “Green Technology and Ecologically Unequal Exchange,” can be downloaded at: www.jwsr.org.
