Nature, Technology, and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis by Victor Ferkiss

Abstract

650 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE fermentation. Although in the 1950s and 1960s biotechnology was promoted as a “green technology,” where rich countries’ scientific resources would solve the problem of the poor (chap. 6), that promise was not fulfilled; in the 1970s biotechnology became just another element of industrial policy in the United States, several European countries, and Japan (though the book pays almost no attention to France). It was what Bud terms “the wedding with genetics” (chap. 8)— mainly the link to the promise of recombinant DNA—that sensational­ ized biotechnology and propelled it to the commercial, regulatory, and political vanguard in the United States and Europe. In fact, in elabo­ rating on the consequences of this powerful union (chap. 9), Bud concedes that practically the entire period prior to the 1980s can be considered the “prehistory” of biotechnology. This is a strange position, for it seems to beg the central question: is a genetic-engineering-based biotechnology a continuation or a break with past practices of industrial food and drug production? Unfortu­ nately, this is not the only instance where Bud’s fence-sitting makes it difficult for readers to discern his own position on the economic, political, and social place of biotechnology in industrial and Third World countries. The book has little critical distance from biotechnol­ ogy and its champions, even when it relates the technological and industrial dimensions to some social and cultural trends. Although 220 pages are clearly insufficient to do scholarlyjustice to a hundred years of biotechnology, they do offer intriguing glimpses into important epi­ sodes in this development and add much-needed knowledge to the histories of the food and drug industries. Lily E. Kay Dr. Kay is an associate professor of history of science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, The Molecular Vision ofLife: Caltech, the RockefellerFoundation, and the Rise ofthe New Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and her other publications focus on the cognitive, technological, and social history of molecular biology. She is currently writing a history of the genetic code. Nature, Technology, and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis. By Victor Ferkiss. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Pp. viii+341; notes, bibliography, index. $40.00. Like many of us, Victor Ferkiss is concerned about the environmental crisis and is convinced that any solution to that crisis will necessarily involve the rethinking and reconfiguration of mankind’s relationships with both nature and technology. He also believes that a clearer understanding of “the cultural and intellectual roots of [current] attitudes toward nature and technology” is needed if we are to “change our ways and solve our problems” (p. vii). TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 651 With this end in mind, Ferkiss has written Nature, Technology, and Society, a book in which he travels across time, from the ancient world to the present, and through space, from the Middle East and Europe to Asia and North America. In doing so, he provides his reader with a fascinating survey of historical and contemporary attitudes toward nature and technology and a sound introduction to specific debates and general trends in the recent scholarship concerning the connections between culture, technology, and nature. As Ferkiss tells the story, since the beginning of Western civilization human beings have disagreed about mankind’s proper relationship to nature. There have been two major positions which have prevailed to the present day. Nature was considered either man’s unruly servant in need of taming or it was believed to have an intrinsic value of its own. Adherents of both views believed that nature was worthy of being studied, either to provide insight into man’s proper role in the world or to contribute to man’s ability to control and dominate nature for material benefit. According to Ferkiss, technology has always been used by man to control nature, but it had played only a minor role in the debate over man’s relationship with nature prior to the Middle Ages, when “the medieval technological explosion” set the stage for “an almost complete conquest of nature through technology” (p. 31). During the Renaissance, modern science with its...