Advances in Science and Technology: The Demand for a New Worldview
- The Earth & I Editorial Team
- 5 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss at Crisis Points—Adopting New Worldview Essential to Resolving Environmental Issues
The following article is based on a presentation by Professor Cliff Davidson (professor emeritus at Syracuse University) and commentary by Professor Arnaud Delorme (Paul Sabatier University in France) given at an environmental conference “Climate Change, Environmental Crises and the Future of the Earth,” part of the World Summit 2025 held in Seoul, South Korea, on April 12, 2025. Prof. Davidson and Prof. Delorme spoke on the conference's second topic, “Advances in Science and Technology: The Demand for a New Worldview.”
Human civilization today is not on a path to a sustainable future, as evidenced by continuing climate change, losses in biodiversity, consumption of huge amounts of natural resources, and an ever-increasing population. Changing to a sustainable path is not just a good idea—it is necessary if we are to provide future generations with the resources they need to live productive and happy lives.
Yet the systems we have established to create comfortable and satisfying lifestyles are inconsistent with achieving sustainability. Thus, we need nothing short of a new global vision that redefines our relationship with the natural environment. Such a new worldview can guide our activities to help us change how we use the world’s resources, how we spend our time, and make thoughtful decisions on what we value most.
A solid understanding of science and technology is a key part of a transition to a sustainable future, but it cannot be considered in isolation. Human attitudes toward the environment as well as human preferences for the use of technology are equally important. Upon exploring people’s use of science and technology throughout history and examining how those technological advances have impacted the environment and our attitudes toward the environment, we consider what we can learn from this complex history that can help us overcome some of the challenges we face today.
Technology and the Rise of Environmental Concerns
As technology has grown throughout history, environmental damage has grown but in complex ways: Essentially there has been an inverse relationship between human development and environmental damage. In times of human progress, the damage grows significantly. But in times of economic strife and lack of progress, natural systems recover and even thrive.
Environmental damage accelerated with the invention of the steam engine. London and other cities in England became choked with smoke, and factory workers endured long hours and dangerous working conditions. The environmental deterioration was severe in the colonies as well—natural ecosystems were replaced by monoculture farms where crops like cotton, spices, tea and coffee could bring in maximum profits.
In the 1960s and 10970s, the first space travelers helped spark unprecedented environmental awareness. Below is the famous “blue marble” photo taken by astronauts on the Apollo 17 mission from 29,400 km (over 18,200 miles) on December 7, 1972. It has become one of the most reproduced photos in history. People all over the planet have been influenced by this picture, and it has heightened awareness of the fragile environment we depend on.
Concern about the environment has risen enormously over the last century. There are now over 100,000 chemicals produced for industrial and household use that are unknown in nature, and the number is increasing at about 1,000 new chemicals per year (Colburn et al, 1996).
The new compound tetraethyl lead, soluble in gasoline, was invented in the 1920s. Despite well-known health effects caused by lead, which include serious neurological disorders, this human-made form of lead was added to gasoline starting in 1922 so cars could drive faster. After spewing millions of tons of lead worldwide, and spending millions of dollars of research showing the health effects of lead on a planetary scale, such as in northern Greenland and Antarctica and on classroom children, lead was finally banned as a gasoline additive in the U.S. in the late 20th century, followed by most other countries around the world (Davidson, 1999; Denworth, 2009).
The use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants grew quickly, but it wasn’t until some 50 years later that the British Antarctic Survey collected data showing chlorine atoms in CFCs were reducing ozone concentrations in the stratosphere. The resulting “ozone hole” can allow ultraviolet radiation from the sun to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and reach human beings, and cause severe sunburn and possibly skin cancer. CFCs have now been banned around the globe.
Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change
Two broad global problems have highlighted the dangers of continuing current human activities without major changes, namely loss of biodiversity and climate change. We depend on ecosystem services for our survival, so biodiversity must be maintained. Many human activities threaten biodiversity.
One prominent activity is our use of dangerous chemicals in the environment, e.g., pesticides to kill insect pests and herbicides to kill weeds. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) summarized results from many individual studies showing that pesticides and herbicides can biomagnify as they move through the ecosystem, reaching concentrations high enough to kill fauna at the top of the food chain.
Climate change can be understood as a failure to maintain greenhouse gas concentrations at a constant level, essentially a balance between emissions of greenhouse gases on one hand, and removal of these gases by carbon “sinks,” mainly trees and other vegetation.
Climate change can be understood as a failure to maintain greenhouse gas concentrations at a constant level, essentially a balance between emissions of greenhouse gases on one hand, and removal of these gases by carbon “sinks,” mainly trees and other vegetation.
Despite tremendous efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and hold regular global conferences to negotiate among countries of the world, we have been unsuccessful on both sides of this balance. We have increased emissions from fossil fuel combustion in our cars, aircraft, ships, trains, and other forms of transportation as well as fossil fuel combustion in our electric power generation plants, factories, homes, and other stationary sources. We have also reduced the amount of uptake of carbon dioxide by cutting down trees and other vegetation so we can use the wood for various needs and use the land for farms, industries, human habitat, and other purposes. We are thus changing both sides of the balance in undesirable ways, resulting in increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.
There are also other greenhouse gases, such as CFCs discussed earlier, which are much more potent than carbon dioxide. Furthermore, melting of the permafrost in the polar regions can release huge amounts of methane, another greenhouse gas which is more potent than carbon dioxide.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released reports regularly about the status of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the changes in climate resulting from them; in fact, both carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperatures have been increasing, thus accelerating a changing climate, according to IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report in 2023.
Nevertheless, there have been many successful environmental regulations that have greatly reduced toxic air and water pollution in the U.S. and other countries. These regulations are the direct result of tremendous efforts by numerous individuals and organizations over many years.
Principles Toward Environmental Sustainability
Based on current knowledge about the resources of the planet and the needs of people, there are many who believe we can support the current population based on resources available and current technology. But our existing economic, industrial, and political systems are not able to account for the uneven distribution of wealth, nor do they account for the lack of sustainability in the way we use the resources available.
In short, it is thus difficult to define an adequate endpoint for an acceptable sustainable lifestyle, and it is even more difficult to find a way to get there. We can, however, describe some ideas proposed by researchers to make use of technologies to become closer to solving our environmental problems.
One of the earliest well-known sets of principles are those published by The Natural Step (TNS) to offer general guidance. The four principles are given below:
Eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of substances extracted from the ground.
Eliminate our contribution to the progressive buildup of chemicals and compounds produced by society.
Eliminate our contribution to the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes.
Eliminate our contribution to conditions that systematically undermine people’s ability to meet their basic needs.
Note that the last TNS principle addresses social sustainability—undermining selected groups due to prejudice, selfishness, or other human flaws cannot lead to sustainability. In fact, poverty of any type and for any reason is not sustainable. The impoverished are often merely surviving, which does not give them a choice to live sustainably. As we saw earlier, there have been skirmishes and wars throughout history, and many of these conflicts are ultimately about resources.
In fact, poverty of any type and for any reason is not sustainable. The impoverished are often merely surviving, which does not give them a choice to live sustainably.
Hawken (1993) moves one step further by challenging business to consider a new roadmap for their operations, so they are promoting sustainability while they promote their own goals for meeting the needs of people and making a profit. This is one of the early calls for a “circular economy” consistent with reduce-reuse-recycle to transform the one-way “linear economy,” which moves from raw materials-to-manufacturing-to-landfill.
In a later volume, Hawken, Lovins and Lovins (2000) present the circular economy applied to many case studies, where they emphasize careful and limited use of “Natural Capital,” namely the resources built by the planet over billions of years of evolution. To enable far more efficient use of those resources, they propose products with far less mass where every component is reusable or recyclable. They also point out the benefits of switching from an economy where people buy things to an economy where most items are rented, so companies have a vested interest in building cars, household appliances, and other consumer products with long lives and less need for frequent servicing.
There are also sets of principles specific to a particular discipline. For example, the nine Hannover Principles are most relevant to architects and designers of buildings. The list of principles is followed by the statement, “The Hannover Principles should be seen as a living document committed to the transformation and growth in the understanding of our interdependence with nature, so that they may adapt as our knowledge of the world evolves.”
Anastas and Warner (2000) describe the new field of green chemistry to assist those developing chemicals for a wide variety of uses. Similarly, Anastas and Zimmerman provide a set of principles for engineers designing products for industry and consumers. Both sets of principles are directly relevant to our industrial and engineering design efforts around the world. Jeanine Benyus (1997) provides ideas for biomimicry, where products are designed to mimic the way plants and animals have evolved to accomplish certain functions. The link to nature is described in her book: “In a biomimetic world, we would manufacture the way animals and plants do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms, modeled on prairies, would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant.”
The field of industrial ecology helps designers consider how certain products and processes can fit into overall frameworks of change for society. Several books by Graedel and Allenby (e.g., 2010) describe industrial ecology as a way of organizing our industries in the way natural ecosystems are organized by connected trophic levels.
Green plants at the top of ecosystem gain energy from the sun by photosynthesis, and this energy makes its way through the entire ecosystem. Herbivores eat green plants, primary carnivores eat herbivores, and secondary carnivores eat primary carnivores. All of these organisms die and decompose by bacteria and fungi so that their remains are recycled as nutrients in the soil for the next generation of green plants. There is no waste of mass anywhere in the system. If we can organize our industries so that wastes from one industry become inputs to another industry, we can reduce wastes.
Consistent with the ideas above, renewable energy can replace everything we do with fossil fuels. Some authors believe we can do that with current technology, just by expanding the scale of use of wind, water, and solar.
Consistent with the ideas above, renewable energy can replace everything we do with fossil fuels. Some authors believe we can do that with current technology, just by expanding the scale of use of wind, water, and solar (Jacobson, 2023). We may even have enough capacity to transition from gasoline and diesel vehicles to electric vehicles. The ability to store energy for intermittent periods of calm winds, lower water flow, and darkness at night can be achieved through batteries, pumping water uphill to be released later, and other innovations.
A New Worldview for Resolving the Environmental Crisis
The world faces an environmental crisis. We have more than 8 billion people on the planet, and our use of resources has never been greater.
Although many countries have limited discharges of toxic pollutants in air and water, the use of specific chemical poisons and loss of habitat have significantly reduced biodiversity. For example, populations of bees, butterflies, and many other insects have dropped compared with the 20th century. Populations of birds have fallen, and some species of amphibians and reptiles are endangered. Ecosystems are the only sustainable systems we know of, and modeling our industrial systems after ecosystems will hopefully bring us closer to sustainability. Much more effort to stop the reduction in biodiversity is important since we depend on many ecosystem services.
Finally, climate change is increasing and its impact on our civilization could be enormous. Significant reductions in greenhouse gas concentrations in the air must be achieved, despite the challenges in doing so. Replacing fossil fuel combustion with renewable energy is almost certainly part of the solution, and sequestering carbon dioxide to reduce emissions may be another part. Both mobile and stationary sources must be targeted for change. Unfortunately, time is not on our side—time will be needed to make real changes in our industries, in heating and cooling our homes, in transportation, and in other activities that produce carbon dioxide. The sooner we can start planning and implementing these changes, the better our chances of avoiding the worst effects of changing climate.
Efforts up to now have not been successful in implementing the scale of change required for significant progress on any of the environmental problems we have discussed. With a new worldview that emphasizes success if we can change our economic trajectory and if we can work together toward a common goal, we can make real progress. Combined with strong leadership in countries around the world, we can do what is needed to solve the environmental crisis we now face.
Commentary on Advances in Science and Technology: The Demand for a New Worldview
Environmental Solutions Through the Human-Nature Connection
In his commentary on Professor Davidson’s presentation, Professor Arnaud Delorme emphasized the importance of a transformation and shift in human consciousness toward nature in resolving environmental issues. He emphasized that a deep awareness of the human connection with nature is crucial for people to feel inclined to protect and preserve nature—technological innovations alone are not enough to inspire people to change.
Prof. Cliff Davidson’s speech presents a compelling case for the necessity of a new global vision—one that redefines humanity’s relationship with the environment to secure a sustainable future. He outlines how technological advancements have shaped civilization, both positively and negatively, and how our past choices have often led to environmental degradation. Prof. Davidson rightly emphasizes that while science and technology are essential to addressing these problems, they are not sufficient on their own. Our attitudes, values, and willingness to act decisively are equally critical.
His central argument is difficult to refute: We are not on a sustainable trajectory. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion all point to an urgent need for systemic change. However, history shows that humans tend to act only when crises become unavoidable. This pattern is troubling, as climate change operates on a scale that is not well suited to human cognition. It unfolds gradually over decades and centuries, making it difficult for people to perceive the immediate urgency. Unlike sudden disasters like earthquakes or floods, which demand and receive immediate responses, climate change remains a creeping catastrophe, one we acknowledge intellectually but struggle to internalize emotionally.
This pattern needs to change. Prof. Davidson highlights various approaches to mitigate environmental harm, such as green chemistry, green engineering, the circular economy, and industrial ecology. These frameworks are crucial, but they require widespread adoption and, more importantly, a paradigm change in how humanity views these innovations. This is linked to our work at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), where we focus on “global mindshift.” We cannot merely rely on policy changes, scientific breakthroughs, or corporate responsibility; a deeper transformation in how we see ourselves in relation to nature is necessary.
These frameworks are crucial, but they require widespread adoption and, more importantly, a paradigm change.
One of the most profound needs is for human connection—both with one another and with the environment. This is key. Too often, environmental discourse is framed in abstract terms—carbon footprints, emissions targets, biodiversity indices. While these are essential concepts, they do not resonate deeply with most people. Numbers and policies alone do not create change. What creates change is a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. If people feel truly connected to the natural world—not just intellectually, but emotionally and physically—they will be far more inclined to protect it.
A study published in the journal Global Environmental Change found that individuals are significantly happier in natural environments compared to urban settings. The research revealed that participants experienced greater happiness outdoors in all green or natural habitats than in urban environments. This is where healing must occur. The modern world has disconnected individuals from nature and from each other. Many people live in cities, surrounded by concrete, experiencing nature as something distant or recreational rather than as an essential, intimate part of their lives. This disconnection fosters apathy and inaction. However, when people spend time in nature, engage in community-driven environmental efforts, and feel a personal stake in the well-being of their surroundings, their motivation shifts. They do not act simply because they are told it is necessary; they act because they feel, deeply, that it is right.
Humans are intrinsically connected to Earth’s electromagnetic environment, including its geomagnetic field, which has been shown to influence physiological processes such as heart rate variability. Research suggests that fluctuations in the Earth’s geomagnetic activity, often driven by solar phenomena such as sunspots, correlate with changes in human autonomic nervous system function, potentially affecting emotional and cognitive states.
The Interconnectivity Tree Research Project of the HeartMath Institute aims to demonstrate that trees exhibit unique electrophysiological signatures in response to environmental and energetic shifts, suggesting a bioelectromagnetic network that connects all living systems. Furthermore, research at IONS has explored telepathic phenomena, providing evidence that consciousness may be capable of nonlocal interactions, indicating that human minds can synchronize beyond conventional physical boundaries (Radin, 2006). These findings collectively support the idea that humans are deeply embedded within nature’s rhythms, resonating with the dynamic forces of Earth and the cosmos.
These findings collectively support the idea that humans are deeply embedded within nature’s rhythms, resonating with the dynamic forces of Earth and the cosmos.
The concept of nature-based solutions, such as biomimicry, is particularly powerful in this regard. Rather than forcing nature to conform to human needs, we should learn from nature’s efficiency, resilience, and balance. By designing systems that mimic natural processes, we not only reduce environmental harm but also reinforce the idea that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. There are also radical movements advocating that humans should take what they need from nature, but not more, and not profit from nature.
In conclusion, Prof. Davidson’s speech highlights both the dangers of our current trajectory and the potential for a better future. The key takeaway is that solutions exist, but they require more than scientific innovation—they require a transformation in human consciousness. We must recognize that the environment is not an external resource to be exploited but an integral part of our collective existence. The question is, will we act before it is too late?
Cliff Davidson, PhD, is a professor emeritus and director of the Center for Sustainable Engineering at Syracuse University. With a PhD in environmental engineering science from the California Institute of Technology, he specializes in research in “environmental transport and fate of air pollutants, assessment of performance of green infrastructure for stormwater management, and protection of cities from extreme weather events due to climate change.”
Arnaud Delorme, PhD, is a professor at Paul Sabatier University in France and a faculty member at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, specializing in the study of human consciousness, evidential mediumship, and statistical analysis of electroencephalographic signals.
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