BOOK REVIEW : A Fresh Approach to Technology, Ecology

DISCORDANT HARMONIES: A NEW ECOLOGY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY by Daniel B. Botkin Oxford University Press $19.95, 241 pages

Earth Day has come and gone and spawned a gaggle of books that pretty much repeat the familiar hand-wringing about global warming, the ozone hole and other catastrophes real and imagined. Now comes “Discordant Harmonies” by Daniel B. Botkin, a book that cares no less about the environment than the others do but has something fresh to say on the subject.

Botkin, a biologist and ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, argues that it is a mistake both conceptually and practically to create a conflict between users of the environment on the one hand and defenders of it on the other. People who use the environment can actually help it, he says, and people who leave it alone can actually do harm.

“By gaining a deeper understanding of the implications of 20th-Century science and technology for the environment,” he writes, “we can find a way to combine technology with our concerns about our environment in a constructive and positive manner.”

This is a swell idea, which Botkin then develops along lines that are sure to make neither side happy. His basic insight is that change--even destructive change--is a central and irreducible part of nature. Thus, efforts to preserve a natural, unspoiled, untouched environment are both misguided and doomed to failure.

“Nature changes over essentially all time scales,” he writes, “and in at least some cases these changes are necessary for the persistence of life, because life is adapted to them and depends on them.”

But recognizing that raises the next question: “Once we have acknowledged that some kinds of change are good, how can we argue against any alteration of the environment?” His answer:

“To accept certain kinds of change is not to accept all kinds of change. Moreover, we must focus our attention on the rates at which changes occur, understanding that certain rates of change are natural, desirable, and acceptable, while others are not. As long as we refuse to admit that any change is natural, we cannot make this distinction and deal with its implications.”

Merely leaving nature alone is not the answer, he says, however attractive that approach may seem. He cites case studies to show that, left to its own devices, nature is not always benign. At the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, for example, some 6,000 elephants starved to death during a drought in 1970 after first destroying most of the vegetation in the park. The authorities had decided not to intervene but to let nature take its course.

Botkin supplements his argument with a historical review over several millennia of how people have looked at the natural world around them. Plato, Aristotle and Cicero believed “that there is an order in nature and that there is a purpose behind the order”: The world exists for the benefit of human beings.

Lucretius took the opposing view. “In every century,” Botkin says, “there have been those who shared with Lucretius a skepticism about the perfection of nature, the design of nature, and the purpose for that design.

“But throughout the history of the West, one of the dominant themes about nature has been the belief that the universe, the solar system, and the Earth are incredibly well suited to the requirements of life.”

Botkin argues that far from being the enemy of the environment, technology, wisely used, is its only savior. But it must be wisely used. Technologists and environmentalists should not be enemies, he says. They must work together. This symbiosis, in Botkin’s view, must be promoted by a new social view of the harmony between these two poles.

We have gone off on the wrong course, he says, and he would like to set things right. As often happens, the description of the problem outpaces the author’s suggested solution. That’s reasonable. There is great value in clearly drawing the issue. At least we now know what we’re facing. Leave it to somebody else to figure out what to do about it.