Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  2. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995), 81 (quotation); Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York, 1998), 44–45; Michael D’Antonio, Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America’s Nuclear Arsenal (New York, 1993), 1–2.

  3. Carole Gallagher, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA, 1993), xv, xvii, xxiii (quotation), xxv, 139.

  4. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000), 343.

  5. Quoted in Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development (Boston, 1994), 54.

  6. Ibid., 232–234; William U. Chandler, The Myth of the TVA: Conservation and Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1933–1983 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 78.

  7. Rich, Mortgaging the Earth, 9, 12.

  8. Ibid., 14, 15, 17.

  9. Ibid., 19.

  10. Alan B. Durning and Holly B. Brough, Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment, Worldwatch Paper 103, July 1991, 32–33, 38; Alexander Cockburn, “A Short, Meat-Oriented History of the World: From Eden to the Mattole,” New Left Review 215 (January/February 1996): 37.

  11. Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt (New York, 1988), 162.

  12. John Belamy Foster, “ ‘Let Them Eat Pollution’: Capitalism and the World Environment,” Monthly Review 44 (January 1993), 10, 11 (1st–3d quotations); “You Can Always Tell a Harvard Man …,” Nation, April 2, 2001, 8 (4th quotation).

  13. John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (New York, 1997), 117, 119–120, 258.

  14. Jack Doyle, Altered Harvest: Agriculture, Genetics, and the Fate of the World’s Food Supply (New York, 1985), 35–40; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York, 1997), 303–310.

  15. McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 220–221; Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, 138–139; Doyle, Altered Harvest, 257.

  16. Doyle, Altered Harvest, 258–261; McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 221–223.

  17. Richard Manning, Food’s Frontier: The Next Green Revolution (New York, 2000), 4–5.

  18. Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London, 1991), 63–64.

  19. Ibid., 74–75, 118; Doyle, Altered Harvest, 261 (quotation), 262; McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 224.

  20. McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 223, 224; Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 80.

  21. Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution, 91; David Weir and Mark Schapiro, Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World (Oakland, CA, 1981), 37.

  22. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985), 56, 80, 148; Weir and Schapiro, Circle of Poison, 37–38.

  23. Tucker, Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, 63–119, 157, 167, 176–178; Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York, 1988), 33.

  24. Tucker, Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, 250–258, 273, 275.

  25. Ibid., 321–322, 328–331; McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 236.

  26. George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, 31, 45; Pearce et al., “Debt and the Environment,” Scientific American 272 (June 1995): 52–53; Susan George, The Debt Boomerang: How Third World Debt Harms Us All (Boulder, CO, 1992), 2.

  27. George, The Debt Boomerang, xv.

  28. Pearce et al., “Debt and the Environment,” 53; George, The Debt Boomerang, 10, 13, 16; George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, 164–165; Rich, Mortgaging the Earth, 26–28.

  29. Pearce et al., “Debt and the Environment,” 53.

  30. David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 6.

  31. Ibid., 187, 202, 205, 238.

  32. McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 109.

  33. Ibid., 109–110.

  34. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London, 1991), 201–202.

  35. Ibid., 205 (1st quotation); Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York, 2000), 251 (2d quotation).

  36. Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr., “Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock,” Atlantic Monthly, July 2000, 57, 61; Andrew C. Revkin, “Study Faults Humans for Large Share of Global Warming,” New York Times, July 14, 2000.

  37. Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle over Earth’s Threatened Climate (Reading, MA, 1997), 34 (quotation).

  38. Doyle, Taken for a Ride, 240.

  39. Ibid., 268, 373–374.

  40. Ibid., 269, 375, 377–378, 386 (quotation).

  41. Ibid., 394, 395.

  42. Ibid., 396, 401, 402.

  43. Ibid., 404, 417 (quotation), 418; Keith Bradsher, “Fuel Economy for New Cars Is at Lowest Level Since ’80,” New York Times, May 18, 2001.

  44. Sarewitz and Pielke, “Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock,” 62; McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 16.

  45. Quoted in Andrew C. Revkin, “Treaty Talks Fail to Find Consensus in Global Warming,” New York Times, November 26, 2000.

  46. Doyle, Altered Harvest, 71 (quotation).

  47. Quoted in Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 11.

  48. Marc Lappé and Britt Bailey, Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food (Monroe, ME, 1998), 52–53; Rick Weiss, “Seeds of Discord: Mansanto’s Gene Police Raise Alarm on Farmers’ Rights, Rural Tradition,” Washington Post, February 3, 1999.

  49. Keith Aoki, “Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, and Biopiracy in the (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 6 (Fall 1998): 51; Naomi Roht-Arriaza, “Of Seeds and Shamans: The Appropriation of the Scientific and Technical Knowledge of Indigenous and Local Communities,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17 (Summer 1996): 922 (quotation).

  50. Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, Jr., First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 152 (1st quotation), 185–186; Roht-Arriaza, “Of Seeds and Shamans,” 932–933; Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (New York, 1998), 52 (2d quotation).

  51. Doyle, Altered Harvest, 313 (quotation); Vandana Shiva, “War against Nature and the People of the South,” in Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries, ed. Sarah Anderson (np., 2000), 115; Laurie Anne Whitt, “Indigenous Peoples, Intellectual Property and the New Imperial Science,” Oklahoma City University Law Review 23 (Spring/Summer 1998): 257.

  52. Maria Margaronis, “The Politics of Food,” Nation, December 27, 1999, 15 (1st quotation); “A Farmer for Our Time,” CounterPunch, February 1–15, 2001, 1 (2d quotation).

  53. John Vidal, McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial (New York, 1997), 35, 42 (quotation).

  54. Ibid., 202.

  55. Ibid., 206, 208.

  56. Richard Smith, “Creative Destruction: Capitalist Development and China’s Environment,” New Left Review 222 (March/April 1997): 17, 25, 27 (quotation).

  57. Quoted in Erik Eckholm, “China Said to Sharply Reduce Emissions of Carbon Dioxide,” New York Times, June 15, 2001.

  CONCLUSION: DISNEY TAKES ON THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

  1. Quoted in Richard Corliss, “Beauty and the Beasts,” Time, April 20, 1998, 66.

  2. Dennis Blank, “A Mountain Grows in Orlando,” Business Week, March 1, 1999, 8.

  3. On agency, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (July 1992): 1–29; Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (January 1984): 126–166.

  4. Karl Marx,
“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 595.

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