Sustainability dean says humans need to innovate differently

The human ability to innovate – "for everything from farming to computation" – also has led to our greatest challenges of the 21st century: "climate change, environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear annihilation," writes Mark Buchanan of Bloomberg News.

If innovation is the key to our successful growth on a finite planet, then Sander van der Leeuw, dean of ASU's School of Sustainability, says we must "use our technology in a fundamentally different way."

"Every human action upon the environment modifies the latter in many more ways that its human actors perceive, simply because the dimensionality of the environment is much higher than can be captured by the human mind," van deer Leeuw says. Technology, he says, can help us better comprehend reality.

His solution: "Learn to innovate differently, by using technology to reduce the mismatch between our brains and reality."

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