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Clean tech: Will it solve the ecological crisis?

By Matthew Mausner

“Clean Tech“, like its close cousin Green Tech, is both a description and an aspiration for innovative technologies and techniques to improve, repurpose, or replace our industrial practices in favor of more sustainable and less polluting practices.

What can make technology “clean”?

There are widespread fears that human-generated pollution and devastation such as deforestation, overfishing, habitat destruction, and global warming, may lead us to a crisis that threatens our civilization and the stability of our current web of life on Earth. However, many people have faith in technology, that it will solve the ecological crisis.

Partly driven by these hopes and fears, and partly driven by the opportunities inherent in every waste stream, investment in clean tech has skyrocketed in recent years.

Clean Tech and Investment

Clean tech has therefore become a new category for Venture Capital funds, conferences, and the investment and business environment of many countries. These actors in the business sector increasingly care about sustainability, energy efficiency, reducing pollution, and increasing ‘circular’ economy dynamics like recycling, reusing, and repurposing the ‘waste’ of our various forms of production and resource use.

Clean tech Incentives and Efficiency

There are government incentives, tax breaks, international NGOs, United Nations programs, and other private and public frameworks to encourage cleantech. There has been increasing investment and growth in categories such as solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and tools for companies in various branches of industry that reduce energy use, waste and emissions, and increase efficiency.

Clean Tech and the Climate Crisis

In actuality, clean tech has yet to solve the ecological crisis, as climate change and biodiversity loss get worse each year. Clean tech has not added up enough to actually offset the negative continued impacts of human resource use on the earth today. Despite massive investment in and deployment of clean tech, it has not succeeded in catalyzing a global shift to environmental sustainability.

A reason for this is that the ecological crisis is also a spiritual crisis, and requires spiritual approaches and solutions. Technological ‘fixes’ are not adequate.

Clean Spiritual Solutions

Spiritual solutions to the ecological crisis can include things like moderating consumption, finding pleasure in spiritual pursuits, and thinking long-term. These could even be called “spiritual technologies.” We call those spiritual solutions in the sense that, they are generated by a set of deeper values and can be part of our spiritual practice. They can also be intertwined with our involvement in self-improvement, community and ecumenical group engagement, and our relationships with a higher power.

Clean Changes to Lifestyle

Unlike a mere cost-saving or utilitarian reason to change behavior, we can apply changes to our way of life that are thus inspired and infused with our spirituality. They thus create deeper and more comprehensive shifts in our individual and collective actions.

Religion and Cleantech

Some of these concepts are not new. Recycling plastic and cardboard might be new. However, recycling waste products including manure, fish bones, and similar materials into fertilizer or fuel is as old as human societies. And in places like Bali or in European Catholic monasteries, such cycles are explicitly part of their spiritual practice.

Once religion gets on board in addressing the ecological crisis, we will have a fighting chance of curbing global warming and stemming biodiversity loss.

Cleantech and Spirituality

When we talk about clean tech together with spirituality, then we’re not just talking about technologies and techniques that use less energy, or generate less carbon, or impact air or water quality less, or shift us away from fossil fuel resources towards renewables.

Clean tech Mindshift

We’re talking about changes in the underlying outlook and purpose, of people, businesses, communities, from the ground up, that shift mindsets and paradigms and thereby address the spiritual roots of the ecological crisis: greed, apathy, arrogance, and short-term thinking.

Clean Energy

For example, there are a number of ways that spiritually-informed shifts to more clean ways of implementing technology can have far-reaching effects, for business, companies, and industry.

Solar in Clean tech

Solar, in particular, is considered cleantech par excellence, as it embodies sustainability by being primarily local, environmentally friendly, and in the sense that it does not generate pollution while operating (although pollution does occur in the production, transportation, and disposal of solar panels).

Cleantech and Houses of Worship

Cleantech is a mode for the spiritual desire to live in harmony with the environment to be made real, focused into concrete action, and embodied in our daily lives. When solar power is put into practice in an architectural, city planning, and related holistic approach to structuring community and life cycle, it can strengthen local sustainability, including in a house of worship. Many religious congregations have embraced clean tech like solar panels, which is a win-win for the congregation and the earth.

* Featured image source