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of climate change illustrates with excruciating clarity the price that liberals have paid as a result of their overdependence upon scientific rationality and their alienation from technology. Yes, much technology is aimed at countering the unexpected effects of past technologies. Yes, technology creates new risks and uncertainties, reinforces power asymmetries and anomie, and continually destabilizes social arrangements and even moral frameworks. But humans are an innovating species, and we are utterly committed for our survival to an unending technological journey. In acknowledging this perhaps uncomfortable fact, liberals would do well to recover the message of pragmatic optimism in David Lilienthal’s Democracy on the March: that technology tempered by democracy can be an incredibly powerful tool for social betterment. /

ENDNOTES

1 Swift, Jonathan. 1729. A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burthen to their parents or the country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. Friends of Harvard College Library.

2 Buck v. Bell, 1927; see: Kevles, D.J. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics. University of California.

3 Sarewitz, Daniel., and Roger Pielke, Jr. “Breaking the Climate Change Gridlock.” Atlantic Monthly. July 2000.

4 Brown, Mark. 2009. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

5 Lippman, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. Harcourt, Brace and Company. 233-234

6 Hughes, Thomas P. 1989. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Illinois: University of Chicago.

7 Ibid.

8 Allenby, Braden R., and Daniel Sarewitz. 2011. The Techno-Human Condition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. 58.

9 Lantz, P., Shultz, C., Sieffert, K., Lori, J., and Ransom, S. “The Impact of Expanded Models of Prenatal Care on Birth Outcomes: A Critical Review of the Literature.” (ms. in prep); Gortmaker, Steven, and Paul Wise. 1997. “The First Injustice: Socioeconomic Disparities, Health Services, Technology, and Infant Mortality.” Annual Review of Sociology. 23: 147-170.

10 CDC Media Relations. 2011. “CDC National Survey Finds Early Childhood Immunization Rates Increasing.” Center For Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed: www.cdc-gov/media/releases/2011/p0901_cdc_nationalsurvey.html

11 Lilienthal, David. 1944. Democracy on the March. Pocket Books.

12 International Energy Agency. 2010. Energy Poverty: How to make modern energy access universal? Special early excerpt of the World Energy Outlook 2010 for the UN General Assembly on the Millennium Development Goals. France: IEA

13 For more complete articulation of this logic, see: Prins, Gwyn, et al. 2010. The Hartwell Paper: A New Direction for Climate Policy After the Crash of 2009. UK: LSE Mackinder Programme.

14 For example, Pielke, Roger Jr., Wigley, Tom, and Christopher Green. 2008. “Dangerous Assumptions.” Nature. 452: 531-532.

15 Tennessee Valley Authority. 2011. TVA At a Glance. Accessed: www.tva.com/abouttva/pdf/tva_glance.pdf

16 For more on the public works rationale, see: Alic, John, Sarewitz, Danial, Weiss, Charles, and William Bonvillian. 2010. “A New Strategy for Energy Innovation.” Nature. July 2010. 466: 316-317. Also: Sarewitz, Daniel, and Armond Cohen. 2009. “Innovation Policy for Climate Change: A Report to the Nation.” National Commission on Energy Policy. Accessed: www.cspo.org/projects/eisbu/report.pdf

THE NEW INDIA VERSUS THE GLOBAL GREEN BRAHMINS

The Surprising History of Tree Hugging

Siddhartha Shome

On March 26, 1974, a crew of out-of-town loggers arrived near the small village of Reni in the Uttarakhand Himalayas with plans and a permit to log the nearby forest. Opposition to increased logging by outsiders had been growing. But with the men of the village away one day for some government work, the loggers took advantage of the men’s absence to start cutting down trees. When word got back to the women of Reni, dozens of them ran to the forest to confront the loggers.

Shouts filled the air as the women did something that