Is modern society making you sick? Are you living longer but enjoying it less? Maybe modern technology is not as good as we thought.

John Ashton and Ron Laura, two Australian scientists, have written a very good book entitled The Perils of Progress: The Health and Environment Hazards of Modern Technology and What You can do About Them. The chapters deal with such matters as electricity, food, water and environmental technology. The book makes chilling reading. There are also plenty of ideas for action.

For example, the authors recommend that people avoid using hand-held mobile telephones, except in an emergency, and when using the telephone tilt the aerial away from your head as far as possible. Children and adults are encouraged to sit as far away as practicable from a television set and a visual display unit to minimize exposure to magnetic and electric fields. This advice particularly applies to expectant mothers. And as far as possible avoid electric blankets.

The food situation is not much better. A great deal of progress is being made in medicine but the gains here are undermined by food technology. For example, modern technology has turned one of nature's oldest and most important whole foods - wheat - into a precursor for disease.

The authors go on to argue that these problems have arisen because we have made a fundamental mistake in how we view the world. Scientists try to reduce all matters down to a few basics: what is called "reductionism". But in the process they overlook the interconnected subtleties of nature.

For example, a giraffe in Africa roaming freely nibbles only on one acacia tree in ten. It does not plunder a group of adjacent trees but glides from one area to the next.

Acacia trees, as we now know, when nibbled by animals, begin to produce a lethal tannin and emit ethylene gas into the air which can travel up to 50 metres. The ethylene gas in effect warns other trees of the impending danger, and they step up their production of leaf tannin to lethal quantities within just five to ten minutes.

Thus the random nibbling of herds of animals is regulated for what appears to be the purpose of preventing the bush from being systematically eaten out or destroyed. Over the thousands of years, giraffes have not destroyed the acacia trees in Africa.

Modern scientists, by contrast, concentrate their attention on one issue (such as creating a different type of bread) but overlook the bigger picture: how one component fits in with others. In producing a new type of bread, they lose accidentally many of the other beneficial qualities of the bread.

Human survival depends on the realization that we are part of nature - part of a whole. Therefore, what we do affects the whole of nature. Humans can use technology to dominate nature but this is no achievement if the price of victory is the long-term erosion of the very things upon which our health depends. Humans are here to be stewards of the planet. We ignore that instruction at our peril.

BROADCAST ON FRIDAY MAY 29 1998 ON RADIO 2GB'S "BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME" AT 9 PM, AND ON MAY 31 1998 ON "SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE" AT 10.30 PM.