Resources under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the State (review)

Resources under Regimes is a provocative meditation on the technological and environmental implications of the modern state. By synthesizing a diverse body of scholarship (including some of his own) into a short, accessible volume, Paul Josephson encourages us to ponder a big question: Why do certain regimes act more responsibly toward the environment than others? Josephson frames his ambitious discussion in terms of three main regime-types: pluralist, authoritarian, and postcolonial. He argues that although all three have damaged the environment, pluralist regimes have done the least harm because they foster the development of legal, scientific, and activist institutions that are responsive to environmental concerns. In short, while pluralist states are strong enough to legislate, regulate, and sponsor environmental research, they are not so strong that they prevent their citizens from mobilizing behind environmental issues. In contrast, authoritarian regimes are so strong that they undermine the development of democratic institutions and thus face less citizen resistance in initiating environmentally destructive megaprojects, while postcolonial regimes are so weak that they are unable to enact effective conservation laws, regulate polluters, or promote adequate scientific research aimed at sustainable development.

Josephson is at his best in contrasting authoritarian and pluralist regimes. Without minimizing the environmental damage wrought by the "geoengineering projects" of pluralist states, he shows that the larger scale and greater momentum of similar projects in the Soviet Union and China have been far more environmentally and socially destructive. While the author explains this discrepancy largely in terms of the presence (or lack) of environmentally responsive institutions, he also stresses the tendency of authoritarian regimes—particularly communist regimes—to use technological "hero projects" to glorify the state. In his discussion of right-wing authoritarian regimes, Josephson focuses largely on Nazi Germany and postwar Brazil. Indeed, he draws an interesting parallel between the ideology of Lebensraum, which the Nazis used to justify their exploitation of Eastern Europe's natural resources and "racially inferior" peoples, and Brazil's use of racial ideology in the 1960s to justify its environmentally catastrophic opening of the Amazonian interior.

Josephson notes that postcolonial regimes have had to deal with a number of imposing obstacles to sustainable development. Internally, many of these regimes have been saddled with kleptocratic political leadership, although he emphasizes the deeper problem of economic favoritism benefiting the urban elite at the expense of the rural poor. From the outside, meanwhile, postcolonial regimes have had to cope with economic distortions imposed by former colonial overlords and, in subsequent years, by multinational corporations and international lending institutions. These distortions, Josephson argues, have led developing countries to import technologies that tend to damage the environment, benefit the urban elite at the expense of the rural poor, and incur enormous debt. That debt, in turn, has encouraged postcolonial regimes to seek revenue through the self-defeating importation of hazardous wastes and polluting industries.

Here, as in the rest of the book, Josephson draws on the insights of E. F. Schumacher and the appropriate technology movement to advance a powerful argument against the alleged miracles of untrammeled modernization, with its blind devotion to unlimited economic growth, capital-intensive technology, and industrial monoculture. To the extent that postcolonial, authoritarian, and pluralist regimes have subscribed to such a development strategy, Josephson argues, they have brought about widespread environmental destruction and social injustice. Yet while he rightly condemns the unquestioning transfer of industrial technology to the developing world, he wisely avoids condemning modern technology as a whole. Like Schumacher, he argues that as long as modern scientific and technological knowledge is tempered by a healthy respect for "local knowledge" and guided by the twin goals of environmental sustainability and social equity, its power can be turned to the development of nonpolluting, resource-conserving, and relatively self-reliant economies in rich and poor countries alike.

Josephson's ability to navigate...