The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination by Donald Worster

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 685 sis reveals power hierarchies that entrench such practice and so resist innovation. Even when women gain technical competence and it be­ gins to be acknowledged, female “techno-fears” persist among both women and men. Male designers monopolize product design, mar­ keting feedback is limited, consumers remain gendered stereotypes. Although critical to the technological enterprise and sustaining it, women’s contributions and perspectives continue to be devalued. Technology fails to “be directed toward a sustainable everyday life” (Cockburn and Ormrod, p. 174). Cockburn and Ormrod’s “feminist project” argues that women need to gain and use technical knowledge and have it recognized. With key skills and jobs, and as “valuable strangers,” women become positioned to interrogate the practices that shape our technology and our technological priorities. By keeping the focus on process as technology moves from design to production to distribution to use so as to reveal the dynamic inter­ play of gender and technology, these books offer models to explore these important interconnections further. Joan Rothschild Dr. Rothschild heads a project on Feminism, Design, and Technology at the Center for Human Environments, Graduate School and University Center of the City Univer­ sity of New York. Her publications include Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology (New York, 1983), Teaching Technologyfrom a Feminist Perspective (New York, 1988), and the forthcoming Engineering Birth: Unmasking the Dream of the Perfect Child. (Bloomington, Ind.). The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagina­ tion. By Donald Worster. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 255; notes, index. $25.00. This anthology contains sixteen essays, five previously published and most of the others presented originally in public lectures. As always with Donald Worster’s scholarship, the essays are eloquent, provocative, moralistic, and totally engaging. They are addressed pri­ marily to environmental historians but raise issues that transcend nar­ row subdisciplines and deserve the attention of all in the historical community. Worster points out that nature and history have become separate areas of specialization; only environmental history joins the two. Too often, he rightly asserts, historians ignore both environmental and technological forces in analyzing the development of ideas and insti­ tutions. Worster’s own approach to environmental history is antielitist and antimaterialist (except for the material of the natural world). Why do we produce too much? Worster answers, “Simply because powerful elements in our society do not allow us to recognize that there is such a thing as too much productivity, too much chasing after wealth” (p. 86). A “tiny elite” controls most of the private land and takes most of the profit from it (p. 103). 686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The way to salvation, Worster predictably maintains, is to live suc­ cessfully in nature and to mold our behavior to nature’s laws. We should make the first priority the preservation of plant and animal life of all species “because the living heritage of evolution has an intrinsic value that we have not created but only inherited and en­ joyed. That heritage demands our respect, our sympathy, our love” (pp. 154—55). Anthropocentric approaches—and Worster includes sustainable development in this category—emphasize economic de­ velopment and technological solutions. As an example, the irrigation of arid lands in the West affirms technology as a “divinely ordained instrument of domination over the natural world” (p. 121). In fact, American argricultural practice in general raises the author’s wrath. He claims that American farmers have always preached soil preserva­ tion better than they have practiced it. Worster wants us to think seriously about Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, although he seems to be uncomfortable with Leopold’s ability to reconcile private property with new ethical responsibility. Instead, the author calls for a new cooperative society in which individual desires always yield to the public good—which necessarily embraces environmental values. There is something vaguely utopian socialist about all of this, an anal­ ogy I suspect the author would not find unattractive. Perhaps most problematical, Worster sees the environmental move­ ment in the United States emerging from four qualities of American Protestantism: moral activism, ascetic discipline, egalitarian individu­ alism, and aesthetic spirituality. John Muir personifies these qualities, but...