Nanotechnology and global sustainability / edited by Donald Maclurcan, Natalia Radywyl

"The rise of collaborative consumption, peer-to-peer systems, and not-for-profit social enterprise heralds the emergence of a new era of human collectivity. Increasingly, this consolidation stems from an understanding that big-banner issues such as climate change are not the root causes of our present global predicament. There is a growing and collective view that issues such as this are actually symptoms of a much more vicious, seemingly insurmountable condition: our addiction to economic, consumption, and population growth in a world of finite resources.Nanotechnology and Global Sustainability uses nanotechnology the product of applied scientific knowledge to control and utilize matter at atomic and molecular scales as a lens through which to explore the interrelationship between innovation, politics, economy, and sustainability. This groundbreaking book addresses how stakeholders can actively reshape agendas to create positive and sustainable futures through this latest controversial, cross-sectoral technology. It moves beyond issues of efficiency, productivity, and utility, exploring the insights of 22 contributors from around the world, whose work spans the disciplines of science and the humanities. Their combined knowledge, reinforced with various case studies, introduces an exciting prospect how we can innovate without economic growth.This new volume in the Perspectives in Nanotechnology series is edited by Dr. Donald Maclurcan and Dr. Natalia Radywyl. Dr. Maclurcan is a social innovator and Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute for Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Dr. Radywyl is a social researcher and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is also an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. This book is written for a wide audience and will be of particular interest to activists, scholars, policy makers, scientists, business professionals, and others who seek an understanding of how we might justly transition to sustainable societies"--

"Foreword Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis When Donnie Maclurcan approached me in 2004 to help guide some of his groundbreaking PhD research on the societal implications of nanotechnology, I was delighted to discover a like-minded colleague who shared such a consideration. As his PhD conclusions sharpened, Donnie was already beginning to collate the work of others into a volume that would take his dissertation findings about nanotechnology and global inequity one step further. With a steadfastness of vision, unswerving integrity, and belief in the better characteristics of us as global peoples, this book was created. Yet this work has much deeper foundations. In the late 1950s, the field of nanotechnology was foreshowed with Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman's dream of taking advantage of a "new world" available at the nanoscale--the level of atoms and small molecules. What is it about nanoscience that has created so much attention? It has opened a world of new materials and properties simply by the reduced dimensions of familiar materials on the nanoscale. This is because of three main characteristics: The nanoscale is the scale of nature's building blocks, such as DNA and proteins; at this scale, materials have more surface than volume, increasing the importance of surface-interaction properties; and, at nanoscale, the effects of quantum physics begin to dominate over classical physics. Take, for example, the simple interaction of light with gold metal. Light on a golden wedding ring tells us that gold is gold colored. Light interacting with a 20 nanometer-sized nanoparticle of gold tells us that gold has a deep red color--not a trace of gold in sight! It was not until the early 1990s that Feynman's dream became a frontier science and, even then,"--