IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 15

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which vividly described
its harmful effects on animals and humans. Thalidomide, a " sedative " developed in 1953, should never
have been given to pregnant women. The result was
thousands of deformed children-but the drug was
not pulled for nine years.
DDT and thalidomide are horror stories, but the
book fails to convey the American public's abiding faith in technological fixes. Johnston relates
that Weinberg was a great admirer of the autosafety advocate, Ralph Nader. Paraphrasing Nader,
Weinberg asserts " ... a safer car ... is a quicker and
probably surer way to reduce traffic deaths than is
a campaign to teach people to drive carefully. " The
theme has antecedents in the Technocracy movement of Howard Scott who observed decades earlier that well-engineered highways would greatly
decrease automobile deaths. Scott and Nader are
right. The rate of motor vehicle deaths, per miles
driven, is now 7% of what it was in 1923, thanks to
safety glass, seat belts, air bags, better highways, and
so on. Of course, this is more than technological
determinism: laws had to be passed mandating seatbelts, speed limits, airbags, safety inspections, and so
on. The public had to be convinced-the slow, hard
process of social change.
Baby boomers likely have warm memories of
a publication that flourished in their young adulthood and sold in millions: The Whole Earth Catalog:
Access to Tools. This large format paperbound book
flourished during a time when thousands of disaffected Americans took to living in communes, many
in the country. The tools and technology described
were those that encouraged " off the grid " living: carpentry tools, forest gear, welding equipment, and
eventually personal computers.
Stuart Brand, the Catalog's founder, now in his
80s, is still a tech guru and Johnston identifies him
with the movement toward geo-engineering, an
attempt to control global warming by, for example,
reducing the influx of sunlight by seeding the atmosphere. Johnston faults these plans as undermining
attempts to attack the root cause: overproduction

March 2021

of greenhouse gases. He describes " geo-engineering [as] a spectrum of half-baked technologies cobbled from the worst traditions of engineering .... "
Johnston does not acknowledge that man has been
re-engineering earth ever since the first cave man
built a fire and sent smoke and carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere. He also presents geo-engineering
as a binary choice-one that would discourage
efforts to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.
Johnston would have presented a more balanced
picture if he had quoted a statement of Brand's-a
talk recorded in Vancouver and presented on
Canadian radio in 2010 where he asserted " maybe
nothing " will happen due to accumulating greenhouse gases but it would be " like playing Russian
Roulette with five cylinders loaded, to not reduce
emissions [italics added]. "
To conclude, Johnston summarizes his work
as a warning against the rhetoric of technological
hubris: we must view with skepticism " evangelists
for numerous miraculous technological cures. "
The point is well made, but the book, inadvertently,
makes another sobering one. In page 78, we find a
group portrait of President Eisenhower's Scientific
Advisory Committee. Composed of 18 white middle-aged males in suits, it may look quaint to our
21st-century eyes, but we realize that there was a
time when the President of the United States was
advised by such distinguished scientists as I. I. Rabi,
a Nobel Laureate in Physics, Jerome Wiesner, who
became President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Alvin Weinberg. In 2020, no such
person briefed Donald Trump. Although the American public may remain enthralled by technological
fixes, the political establishment suffers from scientific blindness.


A. David Wunsch is a Book Review Editor
of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. He
is a Professor Emeritus with the Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department, University
of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA. His e-mail
address is David_Wunsch@uml.edu.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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