The natural environment has, of course, always conditioned technology. For example, the nature of an environment (polar, desert, jungle) engenders the development of technologies appropriate to that environ merit to enable man to adapt successfully to it. Further, emerging scarcity of some technological resource may ignite a research for, and gradual transition to, a new technology using resources present in the environment in greater abundance, as, for example, in the case of the gradual change from wood-based to coal-based technology in England that began in Elizabethan times and stretched until the end of the eighteenth century.
In modem Western society, environment has begun to condition technology in new ways, although admittedly more indirectly. The safety and quality of the environment and public perceptions of it have begun to translate into presidential politics and congressional mandates to regulatory agencies to protect or enhance environmental quality or safety, occasionally even at the cost of some perturbation of the tech-economic stares quo. In France, Italy, and recently the United States, political parties have been formed, organized around a complex of technology / environment issues. In general, in the last fifteen years, the gradual development of broad-based environmental awareness, the lobbying and litigious activities of environmental interest groups, and guidelines issued and reinforced by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) in response to congressional mandates have markedly increased the heed paid to the environment by many coq)orations in going about their technological activities. Both research and development priorities and capital investment programs of the corporations have been affected by this.
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