Pittsburgh City Paper's Bill O'Driscoll reports on the Jan. 13 installment of the Rachel Carson Green Chemistry Roundtable, which featured John R. Ehrenfeld.
Ehrenfeld--a chemical engineer, senior researcher at Yale and former director of MIT's Program on Technology, Business and the Environment--spoke about "preventing pollution by design." He has spent years exploring why industry, in particular still wreaks havoc--even though we know how to do better.
"Always using technology to solve problems defocuses us from the possibility of finding something that really works," said Ehrenfeld. "Shifting the burden becomes an addiction."
Ehrenfeld argued that conventional notions of "sustainable development" share these fatal flaws; deploying technology to reduce environmental damage merely ensures the damage will continue. To truly create "the possibility that all life will flourish on the planet forever" (his definition of sustainability), we need "new basic cultural beliefs and values."
Other participants at the discussion included CMU professor and "green chemistry" pioneer Terrence J. Collins, and Ned Eldridge, present of eLoop, a Pittsburgh-based electronics-recycling company.
Click here to read the complete Pittsburgh City Paper article.
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