Seeing Like A State. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Michael Adas

These critiques are followed up by a spirited defense of local communities a repositories of what Scott characterized as m[bar{e}]tris, or knowledge/practice worked out over centuries, sometimes millennia, of trial and error. But he has frustratingly little to say about real alternatives to high tech, large-scale, industrial mode of agricultural production that are increasingly dominant across the globe.

Here his concessions to the success of the latter in temperate climes is at variance with his thorough critiques of the extension of these techniques to much of the postcolonial tropical and subtropical world. As Ernest Schusky's important study on Culture and Agriculture: An Ecological Introduction to Traditional and Modern Farming Systems (New York, 1989) demonstrates, the admittedly impressive increases in yields per acre that industrial agriculture has produced in the United States in the past century or so have been won at a prohibitively high cost. Schusky argues that these gains have necessitated gre ater caloric inputs-in terms of the energy needed, for example, to produce chemical fertilizers and to manufacture and run farm machinery--than they have yielded in terms of food outputs. This imbalance has so far been maintained by America's capacity to draw energy and other resources from the rest of the world, and to produce them domestically. But, if Schusky is right, such a system of agricultural production is nor sustainable for the United States, much less the rest of the world. When Schusky's findings are added to the instances of environmental degradation and wrongheaded approaches to agricultural production that Scott so convincingly chronicles in the colonial era and the post-colonial world, the need for viable alternatives to the high modernist juggernaut is obvious, and local knowledge and environmentally compatible technologies are essential. One can only hope that Scott's well-founded and thoughtful reflections on these questions of vital relevance to planetary survival will be given the attent ion they deserve in a period when high modernism reigns in its liberal market-capitalist variant and its rivals appear to have been consigned to another sort of dust bin of history.