“Nature, Technology and Society,” [PDF], Science & Society, vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 225-28. (Review of Victor Ferkiss, Nature, Technology and Society: Cultural Roots of the Current Environmental Crisis.)
Nature, Technology and Society is a book that promises much. Purporting to be a study of the cultural roots of todays global environmental crisis, it consists of three parts. The first deals with the history of ideas on nature and technology, beginning with Mesopotamian civilization and ending with the conservation movement in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The second part explores ideas on nature and technology that lie outside the mainstream Western tradition, with successive chapters on Marxism, Islam, Nazism, and “the Orient.” The third part deals with contemporary environmental perspectives in the West, including technology critics, ecofeminism, ecotheology, the Greens, and radical environmentalism.
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