Inventing for the Environment (review)

Inventing for the Environment, a volume deriving from an interdisciplinary program at the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, takes on the ambitious task of exploring the connections between technological innovation and environmental impacts. The authors emphasize the need to adopt expansive definitions of terms such as "environment," "invention," and "technology," a useful approach that facilitates the integration of diverse concepts. Although the book lacks the synthetic overview that would have made it a truly groundbreaking contribution to the overlapping fields of technological and environmental studies, its provocative essays will render it useful for a wide readership.

An ideal volume of essays is greater than the sum of its parts, with interconnected chapters working together to provide perspective on a complex issue. Edited works can accomplish this via strong syntheses in the introduction and conclusion, chapter prefaces that call out common goals or questions, and provocative references between chapters. In the case of Inventing for the Environment, the absence of such elements is noticeable. The introduction notes the book's interdisciplinary approach, and indeed the authors are drawn from a range of fields and explore very different aspects of the relationship between invention and the environment. Unfortunately, these diverse perspectives are never integrated, but merely juxtaposed. No one essay references any other essay in this volume, a lost opportunity given the caliber of the contributors. The foreword and preface are too short to do more than introduce a slight bit of context surrounding the genesis of the project, and although the conclusion begins to make essential connections it is hampered by its brevity.

The book unfolds in six main sections that explore the environmental impacts of innovations in urban landscapes, city planning, architecture, public health, alternative energy, and the principles of industrial ecology. These sections provide a clear organizational scheme but do not add the much-needed synthesis lacking in the introduction. The one-page introduction to each section simply summarizes the goal of each individual essay rather than drawing connections among them. Each section includes two individual essays (one by a historian and one by a "practitioner") and a ten-page "portrait of innovation," a biography of a key figure.

Fortunately, the authors produce individual chapters that are, by and large, above-average examples of scholarship in their fields. Several of these provide summaries of a much longer work: Stephen Pyne's seminal study of fire's historical role, Martin Melosi's book about urban infrastructure and public health, Rudi Volti's broad investigation of the cultural context of automobile technologies, and Amory Lovins's prophecy of a new, environmentally oriented phase of capitalist industrialization. As recapped here, these offer tantalizing but partial windows into grander scholarly studies.

The high quality of these essays should offer something for everyone, although few readers will be interested in every selection. As evidenced in the section headings, the focus is almost exclusively on urban aspects of the synergy between invention and environment, for example on ways that houses, cities, industries, or urban parks have been or can be reconceptualized to take advantage of technological opportunities while serving environmental goals. This will make the book most useful in urban studies courses seeking a prominent environmental component. Issues involving ideology, agriculture, and natural resources, among other concerns, receive relatively little attention. But no text can comprehensively explore a topic as broad as the expansive title suggests, and the urban emphasis does enable readers to identify some recurring themes throughout the work.

The multiple perspectives are both a strength and a weakness. The essays range from historical and technical analyses to prescriptions for policymaking, and the style, execution, and documentation are extremely inconsistent. The length of the essays ranges from less than ten pages to more than fifty. In some cases the actual content of the essay may be less valuable than the exposure it affords to a particular disciplinary perspective. Inventing for the Environment offers a set...