| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. By Paul R. Josephson. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002. vii + 311 pp. Maps, notes, index. Cloth $25.00.
Paul Josephson takes us on an ambitious, eclectic, and at times very personal tour of large-scale, or "brute force" technologies. He compares hydropower dams and forest and fishery management as examples of resource management technologies in the United States, Canada, the former Soviet Union, Brazil, and Norway. These technologies either cleared the way for the destructive effects of modernization ("corridors of modernization") or were brute force technologies themselves. Josephson's approach is informed by Ernst Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (Harper & Row, 1973) and James Scott's Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998), but his goal is to go beyond a critique of capitalism. He concludes that the belief in the possibility and necessity of controlling nature, and the inevitably detrimental consequences of realizing this approach cut across economic and political systems.	1
The author addresses a series of important issues—for example, which role science and engineering played in the creation of brute force technologies and what their relation was to political, economic, and bureaucratic regimes; how—regardless of the national context—large-scale technologies and political, economic, and bureaucratic structures are intertwined and become mutually reinforcing; or how decision-making under uncertainty could be improved in terms of justice.	. . .

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