Industrialized Nature by Paul R. Josephson, Island Press, $25, ISBN 1559637773 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
GUESS what? In the great war of the second half of the 20th century, Russia and America were on the same side. Sure, they stood head to head throughout the cold war, but who remembers that? No, the big war, the lasting war that shaped our world was the war against nature. And they were both on the side of what environmental historian Paul Josephson calls “brute-force technology”.
Together, they paved the planet and plugged the great rivers with “pyramids of concrete”. They turned forests into cellulose factories, oceans into fish ponds and prairies into an endless bio-industrial landscape. They remade the very atmosphere itself.
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Many Americans have got used to the idea that their assaults on the environment – from the Hoover dam to the interstate highway system, from the irrigation of the Californian desert to the nuclear-power industry – were good and that those launched in Stalin’s 1948 “plan for the transformation of nature” were bad. Not so, says Josephson. Both were bad because they were built on puny science, misplaced ideology, dodgy finance and towering hubris. Hubris is his favourite word.
Engineers are given a rough time in this exhilarating book. Their assumption “that climate and geology can be made to fit technology, not the other way round” is shown to be misplaced over and over again. They barely notice the huge downside as their giant works suffocate nature’s bounty. But the author also has it in for generations of natural scientists who, with their roots in 18th-century enlightenment, used language and analysis that often connived to subjugate nature.
Some of Josephson’s best writing is about Stalin’s assaults on great Russian rivers such as the Volga. Stalin didn’t so much tame as kill them. But he shows too how the Grand Coulee dam in the American north-west, that was sold to the American taxpayer as the promise of an irrigated Eden for millions of poor farmers, in fact wrecked one of the world’s great salmon fisheries and watered land gobbled up by the rich to grow the “industrial potato chip”.
Josephson is no caricature green. He admits to a “long-term affection for hydropower stations, canals, nuclear power plants and other great hero projects”. And his acceptance that these great Modernist totems have often come at too great a social and environmental cost is almost sorrowful. But his conclusion, however regretful, is that brute-force technology is big in muscle and small in brain. Like a lumbering giant, it cannot help but destroy. And worse, brute-force technology almost inevitably serves brute-force masters.