The Unsettling of America - book review

http://www.independentsciencenews.org/environment/the-unsettling-of-america/
Date Written:  2012-03-25
Publisher:  Independent Science News
Year Published:  2012
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21658

A book review of The Unsettling of America by Thomas Berry.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In 2002, peasant associations from all over Asia organised an international scientific conference. The motivation for the conference was the fact that peasants and their leaders had no dialogue with agricultural scientists, either from their own countries or with those from abroad. A lack of support from scientists was not the only motivation however. The peasants had also come to believe that the science with which they were familiar was actively hostile to their way of life. As a result, many had demonstrated outside the UN-sponsored International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Phillipines, a research centre set up specifically to support farming in developing countries.

Nevertheless, they certainly did not feel that science was inherently incapable of being useful-some of them had even set up their own independent research farms on which they could conduct their own experiments with the crops that interested them. Thus, these peasants were not anti-science, rather, at issue was the specific type of science conducted at IRRI and elsewhere. It did not serve their needs, they did not even aspire to grow rice in the way that IRRI did, and it was impossible not to conclude that IRRI must have been serving someone else's needs instead.