This volume describes how technology has shaped society and the environment over the past 200 years. Technology has led us from the farm to the factory to the internet. Technology's impacts are now global, and change continues to accelerate. Technology has eliminated many problems, but has added many others (ranging from urban smog to the ozone hole to global warming). 

This book is the first to give a comprehensive description of the causes of technological change and how they relate to global environmental change. It organizes history into a sequence of technology clusters, each with its distinctive environmental "footprint". The result is a new, original explanation of change -- illustrated with innumerable quantitative examples, data, and graphics -- that makes this book required reading for all now looking to technology for environmental solutions: technologists, environmentalists, policy makers, and academics. 

Written for specialists and nonspecialists alike, this book will be useful for researchers and professors, as a textbook for graduate students, for people engaged in long-term policy planning in industry (strategic planning departments) and government (R&D and technology ministries, environment ministries), for environmental activists (NGOs), and for the wider public interested in history, technology, and environmental issues.