Slowing the nanotechnology treadmill: impact science versus production science for sustainable technological development

Abstract

Nanotechnology is promoted as a solution to problems as diverse as world hunger, energy dependence, and environmental degradation. Nanotechnology research aims to provide new materials, production processes, and military and commercial applications that will transform social relations and economies. While some view nanotechnology as advancing ecological modernization, this analysis of science funding structures, priorities, and institutional goals raises the concern that the past decade of nanotechnology investment has served to accelerate the Treadmill of Production. The transnational race to develop nanotechnological capacity provides an opportunity to examine how scientific potential is developed and unleashed, and to what ends. Investment patterns in nanotechnology research demonstrate an emphasis on production science, and relatively little attention to impact science aimed at understanding the environmental and public health risks nanotechnology may pose. The result of that skewed allocation of research dollars is that nanotechnology research, which might be harnessed to improve sustainability, has instead decreased the capacity of social systems to comprehend and respond to changes in ecosystems.

Keywords:

• nanotechnology
• sustainable development
• impact science
• Treadmill of Production
• precautionary principle
• technological trajectory

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions, Tammy L. Lewis for dialogue and support, Paulo Roberto Martins for encouraging his interest in nanotechnology, and his fellow participants in the annual Brazilian seminars Internacional Nanotecnologia, Sociedade e Meio Ambiente whose insights inform this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth A. Gould

Kenneth A. Gould is Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Urban Sustainability Program at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Sociology, and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the political economy of environment, technology, and development. Dr. Gould’s publications examine the role of socioeconomic inequality in environmental conflicts, environmental social movement coalitions, the gentrification impacts of urban greening initiatives, and the implications of economic globalization for efforts to achieve sustainable development trajectories. He is co-author of Environment and Society (1994), Local Environmental Struggles (1996), The Treadmill of Production (2008), and co-editor of Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology (2015).