http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930865317/qid=1041005419/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/103-7802935-9095012
Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety, and the Environment
by Thomas R. Degregori
Paperback: 250 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.65 x 8.98 x
5.92 Publisher: Cato Inst; ISBN: 1930865317; (November 2002)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
In this provocative work, Thomas DeGregori explores many of the
revolutionary technological advances of the past century, especially those in
agriculture.
Customer Reviews
DeGregori Makes "Bountiful" Sense, December 23, 2002
Reviewer: Victor Mote from Houston, Texas USA
Radical environmentalists and nature-first types beware! Dr. Tom
DeGregori dares to controvert your bluster, and has the courage not to "think
small." DeGregori, a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston Central
Campus, has long played the "Devil's Advocate" to Barry Commoner's "Runaway
Technology Thesis." For a minimum of thirty years, he has steadily proffered
logical counterpropositions to the knee-jerk anti-science of modern ecological
Luddites.
In his wonderful new book, aptly entitled BOUNTIFUL HARVEST: TECHNOLOGY, FOOD
SAFETY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT, DeGregori carefully integrates human evolution,
reason, art, writing, and manufacture as the prerequisites and components of
technology. As he has done elsewhere, DeGregori once again promotes the humanity
of technology, which is both a phenomenon and process, in defiance of those who
would spurn it as a materialistic vice. Early on, he declares that without
technology, we pitiful humans would have had to adapt to our environments "by
the much slower adaptive process known as speciation [the evolution of different
species]." Technology, which is unique to the human species, saved us eons of
evolution and gave us to ability to maneuver and develop throughout the world.
DeGregori reminds us that anti-technology evolved "with, and probably before,
Plato," who argued that with the creation of the alphabet (and writing), the
young would be urged not to rely on their own memory. This in turn founded a
viewpoint that we, as humans, somehow "lose something" with every technological
advance. He unmasks the insanity (and inanity) of such sophistry in his chapters
on food safety, where he cleverly refutes the would-be superiority of "organic
foods." Indeed, we created artificial substances to fend off the very toxicities
and incapacities, which organic farming reintroduces. The author boldly asserts
that a return to purely organic farming might feed one-fifth of the current
world population, involving farm output losses of 53 to 100 percent. Moreover,
organic fertilizers often are accompanied by graveolent diseases that have been
long since stymied, or eliminated, by technological countermeasures. DeGregori
is best when he scoffs at the "whole foods" fad, which encourages well-to-do
(and well-fed) customers to buy potentially fecally contaminated foods at a 57
percent mark-up!
The fact is that human beings never have, and never will, live in "harmony" with
nature because "by nature" humans must transform or, at the very least, disturb
environments to make the regions habitable. Without technology, our physically
inferior species could only survive in tropical or, at best, subtropical
environments. Even the simplest of farmsteads, say, a swidden plot, at least
temporarily clears natural vegetation to make way for crop cultivation. The fact
is that it is only through the implementation of suitable technologies that
humans can minimize the disturbance and the dangers to themselves and their
environments.
As Dr. DeGregori has reminded us for decades: never before have so many of us
lived such long and such relatively healthy lives. The shortest lived and least
healthy among us, as in Africa South of the Sahara, are comparatively miserable
precisely because they do not have the technology to meet their needs. It is the
ultimate irony that the anti-technologists, who oppose irradiated, genetically
altered, and biotechnological foods, are harming the very people--whom they
blatantly otherwise claim to defend--who most need the potential bounty of that
advanced nutrition. Already bypassed by the Green Revolution, Africans can ill
afford to miss the coming revolution in food technology.
Always stimulating and controversial, Dr. DeGregori once again takes up the
cross of sensibility against those who make the headlines and only occasionally
make sense. BOUNTIFUL HARVEST should be read by economists, geographers,
anthropologists, ecologists, and any and all who value their fellow human beings
and their environment. Highest rating*****!
.............................................
an excellent defence of agriculture and biotechnology,
November 5, 2002
Reviewer: Dr Aaron Oakley
Thomas R. DeGregori knows his food technology. A professor of
economics at the University of Houston, DeGregori has written an excellent
defence of modern agriculture and biotechnology.
I would recommend this book as an antidote to the frightening
biotechnology-gone-mad scenarios painted by organisations such as Greenpeace and
Friends of the Earth.
This book is a welcome addition to the biotechnology debate.
........................................................................................................
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813808693/qid=1041005419/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-7802935-9095012
The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology
by Thomas R. Degregori
Hardcover: 272 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.73 x 9.22 x
6.20 Publisher: Iowa State University Press; ISBN: 0813808693; 1st
edition (June 15, 2002)
Editorial Reviews
From Book News, Inc.
DeGregori (economics, U. of Houston) presents a controversial
perspective on contemporary environmental issues, arguing against those who
would hail things "natural" and "organic" and calling "green consumerism" a
fetish of the affluent. He primarily addresses issues of agriculture and food
supply, health, medical practices, and life expectancy, explaining that humans
are inherently technological beings and that the biological evolution that made
us human is bound with the evolution of our early technology.Book News,
Inc.®, Portland, OR
Book Info
Presents a new perspective on today's environmental issues. Offers
practical alternatives and realistic strategies to enhance our natural resources
and environment in harmony with today's modern technology.
Customer Reviews
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The antidote to cultural delusions!, October 24, 2002
Reviewer: Andrew Apel from Iowa, USA
Little more than a year after he published the opus Agriculture and
Modern Technology: a Defense,* Thomas R. DeGregori has returned with another
work of similar scope and perhaps even greater depth: The Environment, Our
Natural Resources, and Modern Technology.** The book examines in detail many
preconceptions and cultural myths about the environment, natural resources and
technology, and shows that many are so badly distorted that they contribute to
the commission of countless wrongs.
DeGregori's deft handling of these preconceptions and cultural myths invites a
comparison to Dawkins' work with memes, or Campbell's syncretistic work with
folklore, but as an economist of strikingly pragmatic bent, DeGregori prefers to
deal with historical fact.
Those who cherish any illusions about the environment, natural resources or
technology will find this a painful book to read. In chapter 1, we learn that
"green consumerism" is still consumerism, barely green, and sometimes outright
dangerous. In chapter 2, we learn how wildlife conservation efforts in Africa
have destroyed cultures, forcing natives from their lands and depriving them of
traditional foods. These natives are then denied access to modern technologies,
with a view to ensure that they somehow remain "authentic" after such
irreversible intrusions, enduring an enforced primitivism at the hands of their
conquerors.
The theme repeats itself in chapter 5, where the notion of the American Indian
as the "original ecologist" is exposed as the typical aftermath of subjugation.
Primitive peoples in their wild, "natural" state (notions of what is "natural"
are scathingly debunked as well) are viewed as savages, akin to animals and
therefore not landowners, justifying their subjugation and the theft of their
land. Once subjugated, nostalgia usurps memory and they are viewed as having
lived "sustainably" in a pristine pre-technological utopia and an elaborate
parody of their past is concocted to mesh with other mythical views we wish to
entertain in the present. If these peoples rebel by refusing to act as expected,
they are once again referred to as savages and often treated accordingly.
Much of the book deals with skewed notions of what is "natural," and they are
mainly exposed in chapter 6. There, we learn that life "in harmony with the
environment" for most of human history has had little in common with its idyllic
portrayals, being instead nasty, brutish and short. As it turns out, the only
thing able to protect us from the uncaring ravages of nature is, and always has
been, technology.
"Here [in this book] the focus is on the consumption practices that reflect the
phobias and beliefs that deny and/or reject the technological and scientific
transformations that have given us longer, healthier lives," DeGregori states in
his introduction. The book achieves this ambition, and a good deal more.
--------------------
* Iowa State University Press, Ames, 2001. 268 pp., [money]. Reviewed in
AgBiotech Reporter, July 2001.
** Iowa State Press, Ames, 2002. 224 pp., [money]