Category: Energy

Latasha Ball and Eric Kennedy, students of CSPO faculty member Gregg Zachary, provide a revealing glimpse of two parallel technological systems in the Navajo nation in northern Arizona. Both systems deliver water to people, but in very different ways. In…

By Miles Brundage, Should we expect technological innovations to cure society’s problems? The media are filled with reports of cutting-edge breakthroughs in health, energy, computing, and other technology areas, often accompanied by the explicit or implicit hope that such breakthroughs…

By Alaina George, Traditionally, nearly every Diné interaction requires a prayer of some sort. When hunting, there are prayers sung before and after the kill. There are offerings given to fire when cooking. And each morning, a Diné person is…

This essay, by an ASU undergraduate, explores the human dimensions of socio-technical systems, and their contradictions, as seen through a single life. The writer, LaTasha Ball, grew up and was educated on the Navajo reservaton in northern Arizona. She is…

By Clark A. Miller For three decades, the US has looked at carbon emissions as if they wereThe Little Engine That Couldn’t.” The problem was basically too big a mountain to try to cross. Science magazine reported in 1997, as…

By Chad Monfreda Let’s hope renewables avoid nuclear’s sorry fate. Fifty years ago, the atom was full of promise. Electricity would be too cheap to meter and the world would be made safe, peaceful and rich. Today, Fukushima is but…

By Clark Miller People are generally far more rational than our hyper-scientific culture is willing to acknowledge. Occasionally, however, faulty assumptions are so deeply built into even scientific ways of thinking that errors get perpetuated over and over without ever…