06/17/96 HOW MOTHER NATURE GETS EVEN

HOW MOTHER NATURE GETS EVEN

WHY THINGS BITE BACK
Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
By Edward Tenner
Alfred A. Knopf -- 346pp -- $26

Technocratic hubris has led to some spectacular follies in this century, and Edward Tenner tells the tales with relish in Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. The ``unsinkable'' Titanic sank because its captain and crew felt so safe that they steamed through iceberg-strewn waters at high speed. Thoughtless naturalists wreaked havoc by transplanting starlings, gypsy moths, carp, kudzu, and eucalyptus trees to continents where they didn't belong. Computers were supposed to end the drudgery of physical labor but produced a rash of overuse injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. In short, things bite back because we seek to subdue nature rather than live with it. ``The real revenge,'' Tenner writes, ``...is the tendency of the world around us to get even, to twist our cleverness against us.''
The merit of Why Things Bite Back is that Tenner goes beyond listing the excesses of technology: He grapples with solutions. Machine-smashing neo-Luddites--fans of Kirkpatrick Sale's attention-grabbing book Rebels Against the Future, for instance--will likely be disappointed. Tenner advocates using technology wisely and conservatively, not abandoning it altogether. His message isn't as sexy as the currently fashionable ``rage against the machine,'' but it's a good deal more useful as a guide for coping with the modern world.
Consider, for example, Tenner's account of the benighted history of the pesticide DDT. Invented by a Swiss chemist on the eve of World War II, it was promoted as effective against bugs yet harmless to people. Crop dusters spread DDT far and wide. Popular Science magazine even predicted ``total victory on the insect front.'' But soon the trouble started. Scientists discovered that DDT caused a lethal thinning of birds' eggshells. It also accumulated slowly in humans' body fat. In 1972, DDT was banned in the U.S. as a suspected carcinogen.
Adding insult to injury, DDT didn't even do the job. Well before it was banned, DDT had begun to lose its effectiveness against pests--just as it was killing off some of their natural predators. Through the miracle of Darwinian natural selection, megadoses of DDT led to superbugs that were resistant to other chemicals as well. Later, pests again demonstrated their resilience by developing resistance to supposedly foolproof juvenile hormones that were intended to keep them from reproducing.
To his credit, Tenner doesn't end the pesticide story on that defeatist note. He explains how farmers--some, anyway--learned to cope with the tendency of pests to develop resistance. The farmers did it by resisting an impulse to go for the knockout blow. Writes Tenner: ``Growers have been limiting doses, delaying them until a threshold of economic damage is reached, applying pesticides less often to smaller areas at more carefully calculated times.'' In other words, they applied ``biological judo.''
If only that kind of common sense were more common. Why Things Bite Back is replete with stories of foolishness or simple inability to anticipate consequences. Take the Northerners who moved to the Arizona desert to escape their allergies, then promptly planted olive and mulberry trees that dumped loads of pollen every spring. In football, helmets that were supposed to protect the head became battering rams. Supposedly safer skiing equipment has produced a slew of hard-to-repair knee injuries. Some personal computer users who hurt their wrists substituted voice-activated machines and ended up straining their voices as well.
Tenner tells these stories more with sympathy for technology than with disdain. He's a former executive editor covering physical science and history at Princeton University Press. He began the book while associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, former home of Albert Einstein. While written for a general audience, Why Things Bite Back has the heft of a thesis. It's heavily footnoted with references to primary sources and draws intelligently on such scientific fields as risk assessment. He makes his case through dozens of case studies--from polio to golf to fire ants. In fact, the book's one flaw is that its format is a bit encyclopedic, lacking a narrative or protagonist to pull the reader along.
Why Things Bite Back concludes on a note of cautious optimism. While there's still plenty of stupidity to go around, Tenner says, technocratic hubris has been diminishing since sometime around the end of World War I. He now sees a sensible--though hardly universal--``retreat from intensity,'' exemplified by medicine's shift away from heavy reliance on a handful of antibiotics and agriculture's dawning awareness of the importance of preserving genetic diversity instead of relying on a few high-yielding supercrops. ``Reducing revenge effects,'' he writes, ``demands substituting brains for stuff.''
As Tenner sees it, overweening technological intensity begat disaster. Disaster begat precautions. And today, sustaining those precautions demands vigilance--managing AIDS, stemming soil erosion, avoiding oil spills, ferreting out bugs in computer software. Vigilance isn't fun, which is why Tenner's book lacks the appeal of either a technophobic book such as Rebels Against the Future or a technophilic one such as Bill Gates's The Road Ahead. Then again, Tenner's caution seems apropos. As he puts it: ``If we learn from revenge effects we will not be led to renounce technology, but we will instead refine it: watching for unforeseen problems, managing what we know are limited strengths, applying no less but also no more than is really needed.'' That sounds just about right.
By Peter Coy