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Book Review
| Resources Under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the Statee. By Paul R. Josephson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. 278 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.
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| This book is a welcome contribution to the growing study of world environmental history. It asks a simple yet provocative question: To what extent does the form of a government, "authoritarian or democratic, centrally planned or market, colonial or postcolonial" (p. 2) influence its efforts to make nature useful to its citizens, and to cope with the environmental and social problems that inevitably follow? A historian of large-scale scientific and technological development, Josephson is ideally qualified to answer this question. In Red Atom (W.H. Freeman, 1999), he examined the history of the Soviet nuclear industry. His Industrialized Nature (Shearwater, 2002) then offered a comparative analysis of what he called brute force transformations of nature in the Soviet Union, Norway, Brazil, and the United States. In this current book, Josephson broadens his perspective still further by exploring the relationship between science, technology, and the environment under a variety of political regimes. The result is a work that should be of interest to anyone concerned with the world's mounting environmental crisis. |
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The specific patterns that Josephson identifies are, perhaps, to be expected. Pluralist states in North America and Europe, he argues, have been most willing among the world's governments to address the environmental and social consequences of development. This is true mainly because their citizens have better access to information and greater ability to influence policy. Authoritarian regimes such as those of China and the former Soviet Union, by contrast, tend to ignore citizen demands in favor of privileged elites, leading to more damaging and inequitable kinds of development. Finally, postcolonial regimes in Africa and elsewhere confront the most severe environmental problems, challenges that stem from years of resource exploitation, weak political institutions, and lingering poverty. |
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But if few readers will be surprised by these historical trends, they should nonetheless pay close attention to the questions raised by Josephson's study. Common to all modern nations is the tendency to rely on large-scale manipulations of nature to achieve progress: big dams for irrigation and hydroelectricity, industrialized farming and commercial production, nuclear power, and automobiles. According to Josephson, such technologies typically create as many problems as they solve, especially those related to environmental and social inequalities. These problems are evident locally, where citizens often compete with corporations and political elites for control of resources. They appear globally as well, where wealthy industrialized nations are able to enjoy better environmental quality in part by relying on less developed countries to absorb their pollution and resource demands. Ultimately, Josephson's analysis challenges readers to question the wisdom of this kind of progress, upon which nearly every nation in the twenty-first century has come to rely. |
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Gregory Summers teaches American environmental history at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. He is author of a forthcoming book on the relationship between consumer society and environmentalism in Wisconsin (University Press of Kansas, 2006). |
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