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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.
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| 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. |
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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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Large-scale technological projects were preferred in distinct economic and ideological contexts, supposedly because "the universal requirements of technology are more powerful than national differences. These technologies are self-augmenting and autonomous, drawing important bureaucracies, research organizations, and machines into the regions to be conquered" (p.141). Moderating this determinist claim, Josephson then explains that brute force technologies "require brute force politics for full effect" and "acquire great institutional momentum" (p. 257, italics added). They only appear to be self-augmenting, partly because of ongoing innovative processes. Science is portrayed as being used "for destructive purposes and itself [becoming] a brute force technology" (pp. 198-199), but at the same time truly scientific resource management is depicted as impeded by bureaucrats who determined "which scientificresults to embrace and which to ignore" (p. 251). |
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Decisions to implement large-scale technologies usually were made under conditions of scientific uncertainty, and rarely included public involvement. Josephson's examples show that even the presence of market forces and vocal public opposition did not necessarily slow down the implementation of brute force technologies. The burden of proof, however, has shifted gradually in countries with democratic institutions, from citizens to technology promoters, as have bureaucratic requirements, from feasibility studies to environmental impact statements. |
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While editing could have been more thorough (numbers in abundance make the prose difficult to read at times, maps are undated), the strength of the book is its comparative lens, which qualifies it as an introduction to cross-national resource management. It raises fascinating questions to pursue: What is considered "small," and what is already large-scale (and thus "brute")? Why did the preference for large-scale projects make sense in a particular country, at a particular time? And, if brute force technologies "pulled" politics along with them, how can we explain that, for instance, the United States and the Soviet Union deemed very distinct governmental structures appropriate for these technologies? |
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Sonja Schmid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her dissertation examines technological, economic, and organizational aspects of the Soviet nuclear power industry. |
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