Environmental Psychology by H. M. Proshansky (review)

Books 27I thus the aircushioned ship could work its way up a sloping beach to shore. There is certainly no dearth of ideas on the part of Thring-only a few have been looked at-nor is there a dearth of scepticims on the part of the amazed reader. Maybe life should be ‘simplicated‘ rather than sustained with elaborate machinery, whose demise means helplessness bordering on calamity. Machines are imperious and the master-slave relation is decreed by the mood of the machine rather than the wish of the man. One sociologist has observed that American women spend as much time on house-keeping now as they did in the 1920’s,despite all the magic appliances at their disposal. Instead of relaxing in their new-found freedom, the women apparently chose to raise their house-keeping standards: perhaps this was their idea of self-fulfillment. Some errors of actual fact may be noted. Thus, steam steering gear was not fitted to the ship ‘Great Eastern’ until 1867, eight years after launch. The first law of thermodynamics is not that the mechanical equivalent of heat (1 B.t.u.) is 838 ft-lb (Joule’s tentative value of the 1840’s, now refined to 778 ft-lb) but that ‘energy can be neither created nor destroyed but only converted from one form to another’. Daydreams and Nightmares. William R. Burch, Jr. Harper & Row, New York, 1971. 175 pp. Arts of the Environment . Gyorgy Kepes, ed. George Braziller, New York, 1972. 244 pp., illus. $12.50. Reviewed by J. C. Kapur* ‘Land, like air and water, is the gift of God and no one has the right to own it’, says Vinoba Bhave, the Indian saint of the land gift movement. But, unfortunately, the gifts of God are being converted into instruments for private gain and the highest rewards are given to those who most quickly deplete and pollute them. The entire system of values, social institutions, education and the arts are being directed towards the acceleration of exploitation and are being sacrificed at the altar of unbridled consumerism. Therefore, what we call an ecological crisis is, in reality, an outward manifestation of a much more serious social malady. ‘We can fit pollution control devices in automobiles, resort to filter tip smoking and accept the delusion that we can stay healthy while doing violence to our life support system. There are no easy cures for the environment and other troubles which crowd our times.’ Thus Burch sets the tone of his scholarly analysis of a major social crisis behind the glitter that deludes the innocent and the naive. Technological solutions and commercial opportunities for stretching the ecological frontier ‘are as myopic and dangerous as social science which assumes that there is no limit to man’s aspirations. And yet, overwhelming majority placed emphasis on discovering technical solution rather than limiting production and consumption.’ And this is obviously true both of the capitalist and the socialist societies. This tragedy is further heightened when the poorly clad and the empty bellied are made to emotionally participate in the tragedy of affluence and waste. Burch, therefore, rightly suspects the intellectualizing of environmental problems when one deals with huge abstractions , such as world systems and mankind, as betraying class background and special interest. I share his pessimism that the future is being determined by the conceptions of those for whom the options to change the suicidal course are so unpleasant to contemplate that nothing gets done. The book edited by Kepes is a compendium of essays through which he attempts to interconnect a broad spectrum of disciplines to establish a link between art and life, between man and man, and man and environment-which provided the vital source of great art in the past. He believes that the current crisis in culture and science is caused by a lack of communication resulting from the *Kapur Solar Farms, Bijwasan Najafgarh Road, P.O. Kapas Hera, New Delhi-110037, India. fragmentation of experience and the dispersal of knowledge in many self-contained disciplines, each with its own private language. The essays by scientists, engineers, planners, architects, psychoanalysts and anthropologists make a valuable contribution in their attempt to run...