I always thought that science museums were supposed to be educational, but where is the line between educating, and promoting a risky new technology?

Welcome to NanoDays!

According to its organizers the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, NanoDays is “a nationwide celebration of nanoscale science and technology” that just last week happened at over 200 museums and other educational institutions around the United States. SmartMeme has tracked the issue of nanoscale technologies for several years and worked with a number of environmental and social justice groups to ignite popular debate about this rapidly growing industry. So I thought I’d do a little cultural reconnaissance and check out the now annual NanoDays at my local children’s science museum San Francisco’s famous Exploratorium.

Our kids are learning about nanotechnology but how much do the rest of us know? Most media coverage of emerging technology is either business press about investment possibilities or an uncritical, “gee-whiz isn’t this neat?” story. The political, social, ecological and ethical implications of powerful new technologies like nanotech are largely unaddressed in the mainstream media.

Nano: a Quick Primer

Nanoscale refers to the mysterious world of atoms and molecules that are smaller than 100 nanometers. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter (for reference sake a human hair is about 80,000 nanometer wide and the head of a pin is comparatively gigantic at 1 million nanometers across) so we’re talking about things that are almost unimaginably small.

However, nanoscale technology is not just about making things really small. Its more about creating a different paradigm where our reality of Newtonian mechanics is replaced with the unexpected dynamics of quantum mechanics. Thus, nanoscale materials are fundamentally different than the same materials in larger scales and have different properties such as different colors, conductivity, strength or magnetism.

This has made nanoscale materials very exciting to industrialists but it also means that nanomaterials present unique risks to human health and the environment. Since they are so small, the human (or animal) organism’s natural defenses are largely useless in preventing potential toxic nanoparticles from entering our bodies. The fact is that there is no significant testing, regulation or even labeling currently required of nanomaterials, even though they are in hundreds of everyday consumer products such as sunscreen, make up, clothing and computers. The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nanotechnology Project has compiled a Consumer Product’s Inventory with over 800 consumer products containing nanoscale materials.
But beyond health and safety concerns, nanoscale technologies represent incredible new power to take apart and reconstruct nature at the molecular level. The critical questions are, “How will this power be used? By who? And to do what?”

The “Techno-Fix” Myth

Some of the world’s largest corporations (DuPont, Microsoft, major defense contractors, etc.), governments and militaries are already heavily investing in nanoscale technologies that have the potential to unleash massive changes in medicine, manufacturing, and energy production-as well as warfare, surveillance and social control. All of this is happening without any broader public discussion or democratic decision making.

Based on what I experienced at NanoDays, I don’t expect much critical discussion to emerge from the nation’s science museums. I picked up “Small Talk” a kids activity pamphlet created by PBS’s Dragonfly TV that promises “BIG nanofun.” It encourages you to make you’re own buckeyball (a well known nanoparticle) but fails to mention that studies have found them to cause brain damage to fish, kill water fleas and to be toxic to human liver cells.

I saw enthusiastic exhibits on how nanotechnology give us stain free pants and LED screens, but no mention of the extensive research into military applications. The most dramatic evangelism came at the special feature presentation on how nanotechnology and energy. According to NanoDays, it turns out that nanotechnology will provide the solution to all of our energy and global warming problems!

Does the hype sound familiar? Kind of like nuclear power or genetically engineered crops? To many people this is a familiar story. The common denominator is the larger TECHNO-FIX narrative that assumes that technological developments are inherently “neutral,” always beneficial and can magically solve our most pressing social and environmental problems. One of the most dangerous aspects of this pervasive cultural narrative is that is masks the reality that technological developments are shaped by social forces and are inevitably political. The direction of technological developments are not pre-ordained. Rather, they are shaped by the specific perspectives and agendas of those people and institutions driving them. We should always ask who is funding any new technology; Who will own and control it? Who will benefit from its use and who will lose? What unexpected (or under-publicized) consequences might it have?

Since profit-driven multinational corporations and the military are the main institutions driving technological development, from a social justice perspective, I believe its essential to look critically at new technologies.

The techno-fix narrative draws many of its operating assumptions from the ideology that humanity is separate from the natural world, and that we can and should dominate and manipulate nature to fufill human desires. This ideology is at odds with the wisdom of countless cultures, religious teachings (and increasingly, modern science) that point to the fundamental interconnectedness of all life. Likewise, its good to remember our humility when we’re assessing the degree to which modern science understands the incredible complexities of the life sustaining systems of our planet. After all, isn’t it blind faith in so-called “technological progress” and arrogant assumptions about humanity’s ability to remake the natural world that helped created the ecological crisis in the first place?

As Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” This is not to say that technology may not offer some important solutions. Nanotechnology, for instance, could have useful applications in creating a new generation of solar panels, more efficient electrical transmission, and who knows what else. But we can’t let hype or hysteria rush us into ignoring either the short term risks or long term implications of nanoscale technologies. That is why many environmental and social justice organizations, as well as governments-and even some multinational corporations-are promoting the Preacautionary Principle as a framework for addressing the questions raised by new technologies. Put simply, precautionary approaches remind us that it’s much better to have the foresight to prevent a disaster than to try to clean it up after its too late.

Techno-Fix Memes = Double Danger in the Climate Crisis

Perhaps the biggest battleground for challenging the techno-fix narrative is the debate around how to solve global warming. The sweeping actions that are needed to transition our society off fossil fuels and re-stabilize the atmosphere pose a challenge to powerful, profitable interests like oil and coal. They are increasingly dangling the carrot of easy techno-fixes to distract and derail proposals that would actually challenge the status quo.

From the propaganda on how carbon capture and sequestration technology will make coal “clean,” to Agribiz corporations promoting so-called “biofuels” as a way to keep us in our cars. Obama’s science advisor John Holdren (pictured at the left) is talking about geoengineering the planet by shooting sulphate nanoparticles into the atmosphere in order to reflect some of the sun’s light. (Um, scary…!) See Corporate Watch’s new Techno-fixes report for a more thorough analysis of various proposed techo-fixes for the climate crisis.)

The stakes are high and our movements to stop global warming have to also innoculate the public against the techno-fix narrative. Sophisticated PR and big marketing budgets are already selling the stories of techno-fix that require little sacrifice or transition. These memes could co-opt the growing cultural momentum to address the climate crisis into dead ends and false solutions. Not only could we lose valuable time to address the crisis, but these technologies could backfire. In the sheeps clothing of stopping climate change, untested, powerful new technologies deployed on a wide scale could potentially create major new threats to our environment, human health and the democratic process.

We need better story-based strategies that can frame the debate and direct collective action towards addressing the root causes of our climate crisis: rampant consumerism, alienation from nature, fossil fuel addiction, a profit-driven globalized economy and the outdated story of unlimited economic growth.

Sure some technological advances may play a role in helping solve our problems. But only if they don’t distract us from the real work: shifting our culture, economy and political system from trying to dominate and re-engineer nature, to operating in balance with the planet’s natural systems.

Let’s try teaching that to our kids at the science museums.

Further Resources on Social, Ecological and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology from some of the groups that smartMeme has worked with on the issue:

International Center for Technology Assessment’s NanoAction Project
International civil society technology watchdog The ETC Group
Friends of the Earth USA and Friends of the Earth Australia

Also check out a great overview article of different technology contraversies and battle grounds that ETC Group’s Jim Thomas wrote for the Ecologist magazine

Tags: analysis, climate crisis, cultural narratives, culture, ecology, ethics, geoengineering, global warming, John Holden, nanoscale, nanotech, nanotechnology, Obama, Patrick Reinsborough, science, Story-based Strategy, techno-fix, technology

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 7:16 pm and is filed under meme watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.