Economic Development and Cultural Change
Volume 52, Number 1
(October 2003)
Page 245-251

Reviews
Thomas R. DeGregori. The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern
Technology. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2002. Pp. xxvii+224. $54.99
(cloth).
Vaclav Smil
University of Manitoba

The author is a professor of economics at the University of Houston, but
this is not what you would expect a typical economist to write. The book is
a good read, and it succeeds in what it set out to do: to be an extended,
indeed a relentless, argument against some of the icons of modern political
correctness as these are applied to the fashionable realms of environment,
ecology, natural lifestyles, and greenness. Because we have seen such a
great deal of misinformation, fact twisting, and outright nonsense
regarding these matters, Thomas R. DeGregori does not have to search for
his targets but finds them wherever he looks. So he opens the book by
joining together racism, elitism, and environmentalism and by debunking any
notions that, before their contact with Westerners, natives in the African
bush or on Pacific islands led stable, sustainable, eco-correct, and
paradisiacal lives.

Afterward he demolishes the idea that American indians were "original
ecologists" conforming to ideas of Chief Seattle (he debunks the chief's
story, too) and admonishes us neither to look for any lost Arcadia nor to
have any nostalgia for what never was (except in wishful reports of
gullible Western visitors). The book's two closing chapters address the
human endeavor as a creative force and the role of technology in bringing
the great benefits of modernity. They give the book an unmistakably
Simonian flair, amounting to a paean to modernity and to its executive
branch, modern technology.

My two caveats address two very different problems, one of specifics and
one of the basic orientation. The first problem is common to all writings
that strive to present the widest possible range of perspectives and hence
quote from a multitude of sources, the provenance of which ranges over
scores of disciplines. None of us can be sufficiently interdisciplinary to
sieve critically through this mass of quoted information, so we unwittingly
pass on some errors by relying on all those apparent authorities. This book
has its predictable share of such imported lapses. Here are a few that
caught my attention at the first reading.

We are told (p. 123) that "man had learned to use fire for cooking about
40,000 years ago," while in reality Homo erectus was using fires 400,000
years ago. We are to feel pity for the pigs fed diluted ice cream obtained
by cleaning Ben & Jerry's machines because they "never made it to 600 pound
adulthood" (p. 15), dying at 200 pounds of arteriosclerosis but actually
very few pigs make it that far; the USDA's statistics tell us that they are
slaughtered once they reach 250 pounds. As for the common complaint that
"something is lost" because of modern technology, DeGregori concludes that
"in music, it is clearly not the case" (p. 152). Oh yes, it is. The LPs
could never deliver the full dynamic range (staying almost always below 60
decibels), and while the CDs can do 90 decibels, they usually do not
because of the common range compression to make them sound louder.

DeGregori is at his angriest when marshaling the evidence that Africans
have suffered mistreatment through the establishment of wildlife parks and
the exclusion of natives from some of these reserves. Particularly odious
examples of these reprehensible attitudes, he tells us, are those of Dian
Fossey, portrayed here as a racist and torturer, and Bernard Grzimek,
"zoology curator at the Frankfurt zoo under Hitler" (p. 36; best known for
his great movie Serengeti Shall Not Die), whose idea that a national park
should remain primordial, with not even natives living in it, is seen as
"Nazi purism in its purist form" (p. 36). But modernity has meant that tens
of millions of people everywhere, including millions in rich countries,
have been displaced from their homes during the twentieth century because
of the building of water reservoirs, power plants, factories, and highways,
and it would be naive to argue that all of these projects were necessary or
desirable. Why, then, see the attempts at an effective preservation of some
globally unique patches of African biodiversity, those irreproducible
products of tens of millions of years of evolution, as Nazi purism? If that
is so, then we are surrounded by Nazi expressions everywhere.

Some of my writings have tried to deconstruct the same myths and misleading
claims that DeGregori tackles in this book, so I sympathize with the intent
(it feels right to set the record straight) and the impatience (has not the
other side been getting away with hyperbole for such a long a time?) of his
effort, and given the often theatrically exaggerated claims of the
doomsayers, catastrophists, and politically correct green activists I am
not against using some choice adjectives, irony, and scorn when exposing
its misleading, or utterly false, constructs. But there is, of course, a
major danger with this corrective genre: its practitioners may move much
too far toward the other extreme of the intellectual spectrum.

Julian Simon was the unmatched protagonist of that art. Perhaps its best
recent example is Bjorn Lomborg: his 15 minutes (actually, more like
several months) of fame came as he argued, supported by a seemingly
unbeatable mass of references, that the world's environment is in pretty
good shape and that whatever is broken can be fixed rather easily,
conclusions that no thoughtful scientist can share. Unlike Lomborg,
DeGregori does not deal explicitly with such prominent contentious matters
as global warming or the loss of biodiversity; his main concern is to
examine and expose attitudes, ideas, and assumptions. I applaud this effort
but, as a natural scientist surrounded by so many unmistakable signs of
environmental degradation, I feel uncomfortable when that criticism is not,
at least marginally, annotated by strains of concern and anguish about the
future state of the biosphere.

I must hasten to add that I do anticipate a key defense against this
criticism: authors of these works set out primarily to expose and to
counteract masses of biased and infuriatingly politicized information, so
their books rightly fall into a category of extended riposte rather than
into one of neutral, all-encompassing examination of controversial
subjects, be they global warming, genetically modified organisms, or
organic agriculture. I would have no problem with this argument if I did
not know the depth of scientific ignorance prevalent throughout North
America (after all, 40% of Americans cannot point to their continent on an
unmarked globe). As matters are, however, I always think about those
largely clueless but impressionable readers who consult a green and
politically supercorrect activist one day and an anti-green debunker the
next and advance their understanding of the real state of the world about
as much as they do when perusing irreconcilable Catholic and Lutheran
pronouncements. Attitudes then become a matter of beliefs, rather than one
of judgments based on the best available, and almost always not so
clear-cut, evidence.