By Robert Gillespie

Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World Paul R. Josephson (history) Island Press, 2002

The wrong sort of thinking about nature--hubristic thinking, according to award-winning historian Paul Josephson--goes like this: let's spray chemicals to produce uniform softwoods for the pulp and paper industry; never mind that the softwood monoculture is susceptible to various budworm infestations and that weakened soils likely will erode. Let's dam this unruly river to control flooding; never mind that salmon won't or can't use the fish ladders, which will devastate the fishing industry, and never mind that families and towns must be relocated, because new towns will grow up in the new agricultural land to be irrigated by the new reservoir.

Industrialized Nature indicts the technology--"brute force technology" in Josephson's signature phrase--that "improves" on nature and leaves in its wake damage to the environment and to individual rights. The "hero projects" of human engineering, Josephson writes, rooted in Enlightenment notions of the desirability of man's dominion over nature, impose "a Cartesian grid of regularity and structure on nature," employing science, policy making, finance and hubris "to exploit natural resources rapidly and with full confidence that plans will not go awry."

But much did go awry in the 20th century in the U.S., the U.S.S.R., China, the Brazilian Amazon, the North Atlantic Ocean. Josephson compares and contrasts the "unforgiving technologies of massive scale" used in resource management, flood control, electric energy production and irrigation for agriculture in the interests of increasingly urban populations. Brute force technology in the deep-sea fishing industries of the North Atlantic, he writes, turns "the oceans, if not the fish themselves, into cold blooded machines."

A chapter on the transformation of the forests of New England and northwestern Russia into factories for the mass production of wood products is also a concise history of logging in Maine, where brute force technology was the aggregate of several different technologies and institutions that developed over time. From horses and oxen to roads and railroads, from axes to water-powered saws to chain saws, from steam-powered vehicles (including the Lombard log hauler, "the ancestor of all track-tread vehicles," invented by Waterville's Alvin Lombard) to modern delimbers and yarders and pulp mills: technological change in power, transport, harvesting and processing meant that loggers could find products from one end of the forest to the other. And "not a gram of cellulose went unused." Those 250-foot wide "beauty strips" that shield us from the ravages around streams, rivers, lakes and along roads "serve to obscure our follies."

Whether they harvested wood or fish, whether they constructed dams or "corridors of modernization"--roads, power lines, railroads--that opened up the interiors of Brazil and the U.S.S.R. to meet growing urban demands for the products of the interior, several political systems used brute force technology to bend nature to their will. In so doing, they failed, Josephson says, not only to fathom the dangers to the environment but to recognize the great costs to the marginalized people who were adversely affected.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the new age of hydropower, U.S. government programs to convince the public of the worth of hydroelectric projects resorted to hyperbole and metaphor, Josephson says. (Electric energy, for instance, "brings the radiance of sunshine to our hours of darkness.") "The machines that repetitively grind, level, move, push, power, snip, cut, de-bark, prune, pulverize, grade, terrace, dig, drill, pump, open, close, puree, mix, seal, snip, behead, descale, and freeze have all contributed to the illusion--ultimately fleeting--of inexhaustibility of natural resources." Brute force technology, able to use the last ounce and the last husk, ultimately will use up the last ounce and husk.

Although Josephson states in a prologue that he writes in "the naïve hope to understand, analyze, interpret, and report," Industrialized Nature is really a cautionary tale about the environmental, social, public health and human costs of large-scale technological approaches to resource management. And, with every documented cost, it is an admonition to "reevaluate the way we live in relation to the natural world, or at least the way in which we manage resources."

We can learn from history so as not to repeat the worst of it, Josephson implies. Proposals are still on the table to develop and transport natural resources quickly from remote areas for the benefit of people in far-away cities, including proposals to open oil and gas exploration in the North Slope of Alaska and federal lands in Utah. If approved, those undertakings, he writes, "will be as costly and irreversible in their environmental and social consequences as those in the U.S.S.R. and Brazil have been. Short-term, shortsighted benefits should not secure these projects."