Resistance to Risky Technology: When Are Our Environmental Fears Justified?

We might as well start with Ned Ludd, the apocryphal figure put forward as the perpetrator of sabotage against the factory system in England during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Luddites were engaged in a protest against the social effects of mechanization in the textile industry. Not that knitting and weaving weren't already technologically intensive activities at the time.