Thursday 13th February - Saturday 15th February 2003
Copenhagen, Denmark

Session 5: Technology, Justice & Democracy

Andrew Brown
Technology and Deep Ecology
Associate Dean for Planning and Development, The University of Texas School of Public Health, Health Science Center, Houston, USA

Ecological damage is largely driven by reckless application of industrial technologies and by unrestrained consumer appetites, which directly or indirectly involve technology. Technology permeates all aspects of living; the process of identifying appropriate technology is central to the determination of any lifestyle.

In his groundbreaking work "Deep Ecology - Living as if Nature Mattered", (Gibbs Smith, 1985), George Sessions proposes seven questions that might be used to evaluate technology as an adjunct to meaningful living.

These questions arise from the assumption that the techno-industrial society, which is responsible for so much ecological damage, is also concurrently damaging the ability of humans to achieve relational health - to live in right relationship with each other and the "larger other" - the environment.

"The narrow emphasis on efficiency of means drives us away from the larger issues of environmental ethics and individual responsibility for the consequences of our actions."

Thus we need to better understand the implications of technological alternatives in order to appreciate their relevance. "We need principles that will help us escape the trap of technocratic society, where technology is the central institution."

The eight platform principles at the foundation of the philosophy called deep ecology. give rise to the seven technology-assessment questions. According to Sessions, "A fully informed, appropriate technology is a meeting ground of ethics, politics, mechanical understanding and deep ecological consciousness."

This paper introduces the seven questions and explores their implications. It aims to stimulate dialogue to expand the scope and context of any discussion on technology.

On-Kwok Lai
Hyper-Linking Ecological Justice and Global Netizenship beyond Cyberspace? Transnational Ecological Activism in/beyond Asia.
School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, Sanda, Hyogo 669-1337, Japan

Highlighting the role of the Internet / Web for social movements and civil society groups operating across state borders in the informational society (Manuel Castells), this paper attempts to contextualize transnational activism within broader power structures and provides an analysis of how this is related to problems of (e-)democracy, ecological justice and global civil society. By using concepts of Risk Society (Ulrich Beck), International Advocacy Networking (Margarett E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink), Globalizes Space (James N. Rosenau), and Cosmopolitan Democracy (David Held ), the theoretically informed empirical case studies examine the transnational ecological movement in Asia.
Examining the dynamics of ecological activism, Part 1 of the paper delineates the linkages between transnational activism, participatory politics and e-mobilization for ecological justice. Part 2 highlights the differential form of mobilizations for transnational activism with two case studies of the Greenpeace China and Greenpeace Japan. Part 3 examines the new media opening up for individuals or novices (not the veteran activists) to directly participate in transnational advocacy activities, and discusses the socio-political meaning of the newly emerging political opportunity structures for electronic (e-) mobilization in and beyond the cyberspace, and questions how these will change the local, regional and transnational politics/justice in Asia. Part 4 examines the barriers and difficulties in advancing eco-democratization in Asian polities and the prospect of the eco-democracy project with special attention to the state's initiatives in controlling the access to, and monitoring the content of, the Internet. The last part of the project critically remarks upon normative and ethical issues regarding transnational eco-activism and e-mobilization.

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Robert Woog
Globalisation – Democracy in Decline
School of Social Ecology and Life Long Learning, University of Western Sydney, Australia

In discussing globalisation one quickly comes across the disagreement about aspects of it that we like and dislike. We bring to our assessment of globalisation different motivations. This paper is no different.

Globalisation presents many faces to many different observers. The most general and the most negative are those dealing with the process of economic globalisation. The ugly face of globalisation has become the huge trans national corporation with a relentless drive to create a consumer dominated global middle class.

This paper will discuss the economic as well as some other aspects of globalisation. It will consider the desire to collaborate between nations and communities for such common good as, social justice, health and sustainable environments. It will also look at the uncontrolled popularist form of globalisation through which people are informally communicating with each other overcoming through the technology of global communication networks, the isolation enforced, in the past, by the tyranny of distance.

It will be argued that globalisation has been an evident and powerful social trend for at least half a millennium and that the protesters have arrived at the rally, 500 years too late. A somewhat controversial proposition will be made that the protests opposing globalisation are the manifestation of the same forces that are driving globalisation, the so called "will to power". In a globalised society the powerful are those who grasp and are capable of utilising purposefully the compression of space and time. Those who are capable of using and are greatly advantaged by the compression of space and time are a minority of the worlds population and their actions are leading to a decline in democracy.

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