More selective than most chemical pesticides in that they ordinarily destroy only unwanted species, biocontrol. agents (such as insects, fungi, and( viruses) eat, infect, or parasitize targeted plant or animal pests. However, biocontrol agents can negatively affect nontarget species by, for example, competing with them for resources: a biocontrol agent might reduce the benefits conferred by a desirable animal species by consuming a plant on which the animal prefers to lay its eggs. Another example of indirect negative. consequcnces occurred in England when a virus introduced to control rabbits reduced the amount of open ground (because large rabbit populations reduce the ground cover), in turn reducing underground ant nests and triggering the extinction of a blue butterfly that had depended on the nests to shelter its offspring. The paucity of known extinctions or disruptions resulting from indirect interactions may reflect not the infrequency of such mishaps but rather the failure to look for or to detect them: most organisms likely to be adversely affected by indirect interactions are of little or no known commercial value and the events linking a biocontrol agent with an adverse effect are often unclear. Moreover, determining the potential risks of biocontrol agents before they are used is difficult, especially when a nonnative agent is introduced, because, unlike a chemical pesticide, a biocontrol agent may adapt in unpredictable ways. so that it can feed on or otherwise harm new hosts.

Current feminist theory, in validating women’s own stories of their experience, has encouraged scholars of women’s history to view the use of women’s oral narratives as the methodology, next to the use of women’s written autobiography, that brings historians closest to the "reality" of women’s lives. Such narratives, unlike most standard histories, represent experience from the perspective of women, affirm the importance of women’s contributions, and furnish present-day women with historical continuity that is essential to their identity, individually and collectively.

Scholars of women’s history should, however, be as cautious about accepting oral narratives at face value as they already are about written memories. Oral narratives are no more likely than are written narratives to provide a disinterested commentary on events or people. Moreover, the stories people tell to explain themselves are shaped by narrative devices and storytelling conventions, as well as by other cultural and historical factors, in ways that the storytellers may be unaware of. The political rhetoric of a particular era, for example, may influence women’s interpretations of the significance of their experience. Thus a woman who views the Second World War as pivotal in increasing the social acceptance of women’s paid work outside the home may reach that conclusion partly and unwittingly because of wartime rhetoric encouraging a positive view of women’s participation in such work.

(The following was excerpted from material written in 1988.)

    For over a decade the most common policy advice given to developing countries by international development institutions has been to copy the export-oriented path of the newly industrializing countries, the celebrated NIC's. These economies—Brazil, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwanburst into the world manufacturing market in the late 1960's and the 1970's; by 1978 these six economies, along with India, enjoyed unequaled growth rates for gross national product and for exports, with exports accounting for 70 percent of the developing world's manufactured exports. It was, therefore, not surprising that dozens of other countries attempted to follow their model, yet no countries—with the possible exceptions of Malaysia and Thailand—have even approached their success. In "No More NIC's," Robin Broad and John Cavanagh search for the reasons behind these failures, identifying far-reaching changes in the global economy—from synthetic substitutes for commodity exports to unsustainable levels of foreign debt—as responsible for a glut economy offering little room for new entrants. Despite these changes, the authors maintain, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—the foremost international development institutions—have ontinued to promote the NIC path as the way for heavily indebted developing countries to proceed. And yet the futility of this approach should, according to the authors, be all too apparent so many years into a period of reduced growth in world markets.