Innovation alone can’t save us, unless we redefine the word progress.
Photo by Avery Tread.
The newest iPhone promises to last longer. The latest car runs cleaner. The next clothing line is “sustainably sourced.” We’re told that progress comes neatly packaged: lighter, faster, greener. But behind every innovation lies another layer of extraction, production, and waste. Our solutions keep multiplying, and so do our problems.
In a single day the average person scrolls, drives, and buys their way through dozens of small choices that feel ordinary, often even responsible. But together they form a loop that we can’t seem to escape: solving yesterday’s problems while creating tomorrow’s, faster than our solutions can keep up.
Consumer culture has made innovation our reflex and replacement our ritual. Each cycle of new products, technologies, and trends promises a cleaner future while leaving behind a trail of emission, mining, and discarded goods.
Senior Editor and Writer of Science Matters, Ian Hanington, calls this “an absurd sort of evolution of capitalism.” After the Second World War, industrial economies that once served war efforts turned to mass consumption as their new engine. When production threatened to outpace demand, corporations manufactured desire, inventing the idea of the consumer and teaching people to express identity through what they bought. Advertising filled homes across North America through new television sets, while planned obsolescence –– the intentional design of products to quickly become out of date –– kept assembly lines moving.
The model worked, and it still does. But it came at the cost of a planet built for permanence being repurposed for disposability.
Today’s “green” revolution risks repeating the same mistake. Renewable energy, electric vehicles, and AI-driven climate tools are marked as fixes, yet each carries their own environmental price tag.
“[T]he main solution to climate change is to electrify everything,” Hanington said. “If we just switch out fossil fuel or gasoline fueled cars for electric vehicles… it won’t really solve the problem. We’ll still need huge amounts of mining.”
Every solution carries costs. Mining is an unsustainable practice that devastates ecosystems and communities, often in the Global South. A recent study noted that training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as hundreds of households, while consuming astonishing amounts of water to cool data centers. The technology we design to save the planet risks quietly overheating it.
The problem isn’t innovation itself, but the system driving it. “Corporations are not going to change on their own,” Hanington says, “there needs to be regulations to change these things.”
Yet regulations rarely keep up. Environmental policy struggles to govern industries that operate across borders and lobby against constraints. Pollution doesn’t respect jurisdictional lines, and voluntary corporate pledges often replace real accountability with public relations.
As long as growth remains the measure of success, sustainability will remain secondary. The market rewards novelty: the newest model, the next release.
Even eco-friendly products are often designed to be replaced, not repaired. Reusables, initially a promising solution, have become inadequate under the weight of consumer culture. With people buying unreasonable numbers of a product meant to be purchased once, the purpose is defeated altogether.
If the roots of the crisis lie in how we define progress, then the solution should start with redefining it. Hanington argues that slowing the pace of consumption isn’t regression, but realism. “[W]e’ve been led to believe that having more stuff is going to make us happier.” Beyond our basic needs, he says, what will really make us happy is “to have time to spend with your family and your friends, with yourself.”
Real progress could mean investing in durability instead of disposability, in communities rather than commodities. It could look like cities designed around efficient public transit and walkable neighborhoods instead of our dependence on cars.
That shift is beginning, quietly. Younger generations are embracing repair-culture, secondhand fashion, and resource-sharing. But cultural changes need policy support: stronger regulations and accountability for the full life cycle of what we produce.
The tools that reshaped the planet can help to sustain it, but only if innovation serves something larger than consumption. The measure of progress shouldn’t be how quickly we can replace what we have, but how long what we create can endure.
