The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

SUSTAINABILITY AND INNOVATION: ENVIRONMENTAL RATIONALITY AND REVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE

Innovation is the inbuilt mechanism that mobilizes processes within a structured system and drives it towards its prescribed and embodied ends. In economics, innovation occurs as a technological change or reorganization of processes that re­news the productive capacities of the system and expands them for the use of new materials, the implementation of new instruments, the design of new products, the creation of new needs and the management of the productive forces. But innovation within the rationality that has cradled and triggered its potency, does not lead to sustain­able development. By ignoring and neglecting the ecological limits and the environmental conditions for a sustainable economic process, the innovation of productive forces under the prevalent economic rationality has driven an environmental crisis (Leff, 1995, 2009a; Benton, 1996).

Thus, the question of the contribution of sustainability to innovation or innovation for sustainability should be inquired in its twofold relationships but in a new perspective. It is not sustainability, as an emergent objective, which reorients innovation as an end prescribed in the tendencies and possibilities of the workings of modern rationality, those that were set at the insept of its driving mechanism towards unsustainable growth, as a way of dialectical transcendence in the reflexivity of modernity. Thus, beyond viewing sustainability as a new objective towards which dynamic innovation should be oriented to reconstruct an ecologized world order subject to the constraints of the dominant economic order, it should be viewed as a new condition of human life that reorients innovation toward the purposes and goals of a sustainable social order founded in a new environmental rationality.

The construction of such environmental rationality implies new thinking and a shift in scientific theories. In this context, sustainability has become the main attractor in the emergence of interdsiciplinary paradigms of environmental sciences. These innovations in knowledge imply new methods of complex thinking, as well as the ar­ticulation and hibridization of different disciplines and areas of knowledge, the application of new interdisciplinary methods to complex socioenvi - ronmental problems and the elaboration of new interscientific objects of science. Thus, environ­mental economics has evolved as a new branch of mainstream economics for the crematistic valuation of nature, extending its arms to embrace environmental goods and services (Fisher, 1918; Pearce, 2002); ecological economics has emerged as a new interdisciplinary paradigm that intends to subsume economics as a subsystem in a more embracing ecological system, where population processes, technological innovation and changes in human behaviour merge in the remodeling of economics (Costanza et al, 1991).

In a more critical approach, Nicholas Georges - cu-Roegen (1971) intended to innovate a new economic paradigm - that of bioeconomics-, establishing the intrinsic link between the law of entropy and the economic process. From the limits of biospheric resources and the ineluctability of the law of entropy, sustainability has reflected as an imperative to lessen the amount of matter and energy entering the global economic system and its metabolic “throughput” along the transforma­tion of nature and its entropic degradation, today reflected as the threat of global warming and climate change. Thus, an imperative oftechnologi - cal innovation has triggered new efforts towards ecoefficiency, the increase in resource productiv­ity, a shift to renewable sources of energy and the recycling ofwaste (Hinterberger & Seifert, 1995).

The configuration ofenvironmental knowledge has lead to the development of new scientific fields and environmental branches within the established scientific paradigms; of new hybrid and interdis­ciplinary domains of scientific research and new horizons of philosophical inquiry. Thus, we have seen a display of novel approaches to problem­solving knowledge that imply the articulation of a variety of theoretical paradigms and practical forms of knowledge. These efforts have brought about novelties in the management and application of available knowledge and induced innovations in research methodologies as those of complex environmental systems (Garcia, 1986, 1994). But seldom do they imply a shift in scientific para­digms, a revolution in knowledge or the invention of a new rationality by reflective thinking.

The emergence of the ecological era in our times carries with it and is rooted in a new epis - teme; this is not only the rearrangement of already existing disciplines, but the eruption of a novelty in philosophy, methodology and science that can be conceived as a breakthrough in knowledge and in human thinking. In similar ways as the development of knowledge in social sciences in modern times led to structuralism (Foucault, 1970), post-structural knowledge is being codi­fied and reordered by an ecological understand­ing of the world order. This emergent ecological episteme influenced the new approaches to the Ecology of the Mind (Bateson, 1972), complex thinking (Morin, 1980, 1993), Gaia Theory - life as a self-regulatory systems in equilibrium with its environment - (Lovelock, 1979), the Web of Life (Capra, 1999), and autopoiesis governing self­organizing processes (Maturana & Varela, 1994).

These inquiries have led to new paradigms of complex thinking on the interrelatedness of onto­logical and epistemological orders and the creation of new ecological and environmental disciplines: human ecology, ecological economics, ecological and environmental anthropology, deep ecology, political ecology, environmental sociology, envi­ronmental law, etc. These scientific disciplines, discourses and bodies of philosophical thinking involve novelties arising from the convergence, articulation, hybridization oftraditional paradigms while being “ecologized” and problematized by an emergent environmental knowledge (Leff, 2001).

In this process, the differentiation of concepts referred to as “novelties in thinking” is becom­ing somewhat blurred, once innovations in the different areas of human being, thinking, cre­ativity and intervention on nature have become increasingly intertwined. Sustainability emerges in the crossroads of different forms of rationality, in the hibridization of nature, culture, economy and technology, of the real and the symbolic, where nature and culture are increasingly being intervened by technological and economic ratio­nality. Thus, creativity in nature through natural evolution has yielded to biotechnology, where new forms of biological artifacts are being produced by scientific-technological innovations drawn by the global market economy.

This outcome of modern civilization is not the result of the evolution of nature towards an ecologyzed and complex world order. Environ­mental complexity (Leff, 2003) has emerged from the intervention of knowledge in nature, as a process of rationalization based on the axis of modern rationality that, by ignoring and external­izing nature from the social system, has fueled the economic system towards unsustainable growth, environmental degradation and the entropic death of the planet. Thus, sustainability demands new thinking and the reorientation of the innovation processes. Here is where environmental rationality emerges planting its roots in new life territories and viewing new horizons to guide social creativity towards the construction of a sustainable future.