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

Abstract

Review: Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World By Paul R. Josephson Paul R. Josephson. Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. Washington, DC: Island/Shearwater, 2002. 311 pp. ISBN 1-55963-777-3 (cloth). US$25.00 In the chapter on fishery and other related aquaculture technologies, Paul Josephson begins with a simple yet harsh statement: It is science that provides the basis for rational decisions about fish behavior and reproduction, about where and when to catch, and about the influence of water chemistry, currents, and the like on fisheries. Unfortunately, all too often, captains have used science only to locate schools of fish and capture them (p. 198). This is an effective summation of his entire approach and concerns. Josephson's work, a comparative study of force in Eurasia and North America, reveals the way in which national factors and scientific theories across the world have consistently undermined the biological basis of life and supplanted it with an industrial one. Brute force technologies, Josephson's term for the concrete-steel-PVC culture, transform nature into readily available commodities ... more machine-like, more predictable (p. 10), a transformation whose costs are not yet clear to humans. Brute force technologies are standard engineering practices and harsh chemical methods that are unforgiving, a premature search for monocultures that is based on an incomplete understanding of the biological consequences of human activities (p. 12). Josephson's opening chapter on dams in Soviet Russia and the United States explores the consequences of the unwisdom in altering the flow of rivers, the dredging of their shoals, and the general over-exploitation of water for electricity, navigation and fishing. Looking at geo-engineering projects such as the hydropower stations on the Volga, the works of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Grand Coulee Dam, Josephson demonstrates how state policy, ideas of national pride (especially in Stalinist Russia), and skewed definitions of caused massive geological and biological alterations in these countries. Josephson concludes that neither the American nor the Russian governments considered the social costs of this brute force of technology. Economy and social prosperity boomed when the Grand Coulee Dam works were under construction. After 1950, with construction work all but over, there was a 50% decline in population in three years. Shifting focus to forestry management, Josephson looks at the way in which the lumbering and paper industry ignored the ecological viewpoint when seeking to transform forests into a source of sustained yield. Reading the forestry management technologies in the Maine area of the United States and the Arkhangel region of the former Soviet Union, Josephson suggests that the ideology of progress was based on a flawed assumption-that modern scientific management would make the forest available for multiple uses for future generations (p. 74). Forestry specialists therefore transformed the forest into a living machine (p. 77). In the chapter Corridors of Modernization Josephson looks at what he calls the Cartesian grid of regularity and structure (p. …