Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World - Hardcover

Josephson, Paul

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9781559637770: Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559637773 ISBN 13: 9781559637770

Publisher: Island Press, 2002

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The construction of the Three Gorges Dam on China's Yangtze River. The transformation of the Amazon into a site for huge cattle ranches and aluminum smelters. The development of Nevada's Yucca Mountain into a repository for nuclear waste. The extensive irrigation networks of the Grand Coulee and Kuibyshev Dams. On the face of it, these massive projects are wonders of engineering, financial prowess, and our seldom-questioned ability to modify nature to suit our immediate needs. For nearly a century we have relied increasingly on science and technology to harness natural forces, but at what environmental and social cost?In Industrialized Nature, historian Paul R. Josephson provides an original examination of the ways in which science, engineering, policy, finance, and hubris have come together, often with unforeseen consequences, to perpetuate what he calls "brute-force technologies"—the large-scale systems created to manage water, forest, and fish resources. Throughout the twentieth century, nations with quite different political systems and economic orientations all pursued this same technological subjugation of nature. Josephson compares the Soviet Union's heavy-handed efforts at resource management to similar projects undertaken in the United States, Norway, Brazil, and China. He argues that brute-force technologies require brute-force politics to operate. He shows how irresponsible—or well-intentioned but misguided—large-scale manipulation of nature has resulted in resource loss and severe environmental degradation.Josephson explores the ongoing industrialization of nature that is happening in our own backyards and around the world. Both a cautionary tale and a call to action, Industrialized Nature urges us to consider how to develop a future for succeeding generations that avoids the pitfalls of brute-force technologies.

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About the Author:

Paul R. Josephson is associate professor of history at Colby College. He is author of Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (Freeman, 1999),Totalitarian Science and Technology (Humanities, 1996), and New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, 1997), which won the Shulman Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He has published articles in Physics Today, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

From Booklist:

The deleterious ripple effects of large-scale efforts at altering nature to serve human needs is historian Josephson's compelling subject. Not only is he an expert on what he calls brute-force technology--massive dams, irrigation systems, and forest clear-cuts--he's also dedicated to studying the plexus of science, politics, economics, and social circumstances connected to such complicated undertakings. Having written about the Soviet nuclear industry in Red Atom (1999), he now offers striking comparisons between Soviet "hero projects" (exercises in overkill) and those of the U.S and Brazil, chronicling, along the way, the 1930s hydroelectric race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. (a precursor to the arms and space races). The precipitous development of the Pacific Northwest, Siberia, and the Amazon, Josephson explains, involved the building of highly destructive "corridors of modernization" to bring people and technology deep into the wilderness to aggressively exploit and inadvertently waste natural resources. Eye-opening, dramatic, and painstakingly researched, Josephson's unique history of the hubristic ambitions and irreparable environmental and social devastation associated with twentieth-century attempts to turn rivers into machines and forests, fields, and oceans into factories is an invaluable primer on what not to do in the future. Donna Seaman
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