Although Douthwaite argues against the social fix for a large portion of the essay he states that through technological fixes must be temporary and aren’t a permanent solution that this is still a vital contribution to society. (Douthwaite,32) On the complete opposite side of the argument, Johnstone makes the case that technological fixes are absolutely necessary to the good of society and that the responsibility to make safe decisions for society is for engineers and scientists. (Johnstone, 54) The fallacy of this is that science is generally a black and white medium searching for the truth and both other authors argued that this is a poor decision and I agree because social issues aren’t reductionist like science. The Huesemann’s essentially made the same case as Johnstone adding the fact that millions of years of evolution can’t be messed with without consequence as is the entire goal of technological fixes.
Technological fixes can be useful to help alleviate social problems facing humanity but depending on the nature of the fix they can destroy our environment and ecosystems. According to the Huesman’s any of the chemicals and man-made agents we introduce into the environment the more likely humans are to disrupt earth’s system (Huesemann,5) and become liable to cause a trophic cascade. Essentially any progress we attempt to make on our environment can come back and haunt us, this, however, isn’t to say that society shouldn’t try technological fixes. Most of the problems plaguing us environmentally are our fault and to an extent need a technological fix and otherwise one of our largest problems is the availability of fresh drinking water. These types of issues almost certainly need a technologic fix, but the key is that we need to care for our environment and think ahead in regard to our practices.