Michael and Joyce Huesemann spend their winters in Sedona, as many people do. But our plethora of seasonal snow birds don’t often collaborate on such an exceptional and important book as Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment by the Huesemanns.

Back in the ‘60’s I read Economics in One Lesson by economist Henry Hazlitt, originally published in 1946. The “one lesson” expressed by Hazlitt is: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

The additional lesson to be learned is that this economics lesson should be extrapolated to all human activities. And that is exactly what Techno-Fix does. It comprehensively looks at the evolution of technology and examines the unintended consequences of technological advances such as industrialized agriculture, genetic engineering, the automobile, high tech medicine and high tech warfare, to name just a few.

Techno-Fix is a pessimistic wake-up call of a book, very similar in message but much more detailed, to The End of the Wild by Stephen M. Meyer, published in 2006. In the latter, Meyer argues that nothing can change the destructive course humans have imposed on nature, that only “weed” species that can adapt to the new, changed Earth will survive.

The Huesemanns take this a step further in a chilling analysis of the attempts of humans to control and dominate nature, with the very destruction of the human race as a direct, albeit long-term, consequence. They definitely are challenging the religious tenet that man is superior not only to all other creatures on Earth but to Earth itself.

From the book’s back cover: “Techno-Fix challenges the pervasive belief that technological innovation will save us from the dire consequences of the 300-year fossil-fuelled binge known as modern civilization. Far from enabling us to continue our current lifestyle indefinitely, the authors show how our continued fixation with modern technology will instead hasten social, economic and environmental collapse.”

Techno-Fix is a very important read for 2012.