Technology and Culture

This essay reviews three recent books that assess the interwoven relationships among the histories of technology, agriculture, and the environment. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode's Creating Abundance, J. L. Anderson's Industrializing the Corn Belt, and Christopher Henke's Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power each fit within an emerging genre labeled "envirotech," an approach that challenges presumptions that technology's impacts upon society, the economy, and plants and animals are predictable, deterministic, and unidirectional. Instead, these studies of biological innovation among various American crops and livestock breeds, of the mechanization and chemicalization of farming in postwar Iowa, and of the emergence on large-scale agricultural systems in the Salinas Valley of California, make clear that the technological choices bring unintended consequences to rural landscapes and societies. Among other themes, these sophisticated histories make clear that nature fights back against technological inputs, which in turn drives humans to devise ever more complex envirotechnical systems.