The New York Times, July 28, 1995, p. C27.
Books of The Times: Hauling Nature Back Down to Earth
The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River
By Richard White
130 pages. Hill & Wang. $17.95
Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark
By Daniel B. Botkind
300 pages. Grosset/Putnam. $25.95
By Richard Bernstein
John Muir's most famous epigram has to do with the inherent
value of untouched Nature, "the great fresh unblighted,
unredeemed wilderness." It was a moving statement coming
from a pioneering environmentalist, one whom later writers
have kept in mind as they tried to figure out the proper
relationship between human culture and the natural world.
But for Richard White and Daniel B. Botkin, the authors of
two valuable new books on the subject of man and nature,
Muir's rhapsodies about wildness as the hope of the world
are unrealistic as guides to action or understanding.
Both writers, however, take what they portray as an
unromantic, illusion-and-dogma-free approach to the
environment. Their shared basic premise is not Muir's
concept of a natural world that needs to be left
uncontaminated by man, but Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of
nature as receptive to human transformation. Mr. White, a
professor of history at the University of Washington, cites
Emerson specifically. His history of the Columbia River
seeks "to blur boundaries, emphasize impurity." To
understand "what we have done and how we have acted in
nature," we might read more Emerson and less Muir, Mr.
White advises. "We might want to look for the natural in
the dam and the unnatural in the salmon."
Mr. White's "Organic Machine" is a compact and suggestive
reflection on those questions with numerous insights and a
knack for exposing unities even while exposing differences.
In their ways, Indians and white men understood the river
by giving it their labor. Like humans, rivers work, Mr.
White writes: "For much of human history, work and energy
have linked humans and rivers, humans and nature." The
Indians, fearful that the salmon would stop running, banned
women from the river, believing that menstrual blood
offended the fish. The white men created factories where
Chinese immigrants worked, banning them in effect from
direct contact with the river.
Throughout his narrative, Mr. White seems intent on showing
that the effort to transform nature is not, as it is
fashionably deemed to be in some academic circles, a
"rape," an act of capitalist avarice. Farmers and dam
builders, he says, even the operators of aluminum smelters
functioned within the intellectual vision of Emerson and,
later, of Lewis Mumford an acolyte of hydroelectric power,
which, he believed, would purify society, freeing both
human labor and nature.
That is no doubt a useful view, and yet two problems affect
Mr. White's otherwise commendable book. One is stylistic.
Mr. White is a very good writer but he meditates too often
in the realm of the vaguely poetic, leaving the reader
puzzled sometimes about his purpose. Second, one can figure
out his riddle about the natural in the dam and the
unnatural in the salmon, but it is never clear how keeping
those things in mind will help us in the future, or,
indeed, exactly who with any real power or influence holds
to a contrary vision.
Indeed, what is most powerful in Mr. White's book is his
description of the way in which the Emersonian and
Mumfordian visions produced not what the two thinkers
predicted, but its opposite. The Columbia River dams, Mr.
White reminds us, may have been built with an emphasis on
"mimicking and not conquering nature" and freeing farmers
and workers from drudgery, but in the end, they helped to
concentrate wealth, not to redistribute it, and they
spoiled the river for the salmon. Drastically reduced in
number, salmon are now created artificially, bred in
hatcheries, barged down the river, schematized on computer
models, all at enormous expense.
This seems to be what Mr. White means by the unnatural in
salmon especially because the work of artificial breeding
is being done in large part for sentimental reasons, to
sustain the salmon as "a cultural talisman," when the truth
is that the Columbia is now a different river, a river for
carp and shad, not for chinook, sockeye and steelhead.
The lesson is that human intervention of a kind of
post-Emersonian type is inevitable and necessary. "To call
for a return to nature is posturing," Mr. White writes,
arguing against unnamed intellectual opponents who are,
apparently, making that call. But he does not tell us what
specifically to do. Is the lesson that we should forget
about salmon on the Columbia, and be content with shad and
carp? Should the dams, however well-intentioned, not have
been built?
Mr. Botkin strikes some of the same themes as Mr. White,
especially in his call to understand man and nature
"without dogma, without romanticism, without fantasy,"
though his book has the same fault of arguing against
putative purists and moralists who remain unnamed. In "Our
Natural History," Mr. Botkin addresses some specific
environmental problems: how, for example, to measure the
carbon-storage capacity of the forests so as to better
understand possible ways of countering the greenhouse
effect. At the same time, he looks for "essons in the
journals of Lewis and Clark when that intrepid pair
explored the newly acquired Louisiana Territory from 1804
to 1806.
The "lessons" Mr. Botkin draws come from contrasting what
the early explorers found about the natural world with what
exists today. "What we appreciate about environment and
believe to be unaffected by human beings is actually the
product of long, human-induced changes in the landscape,"
Mr. Botkin writes. It is false, he writes, and not
conducive to environmental solutions to maintain that
nature, left to its own devices, represents a classic
balance, and that everything will right itself if only
people get out of the way.
When Mr. Botkin talks about buffalo and salmon, grizzlies
and wolves, his common-sense approach is persuasive. The
goal, he argues, is not to restore a species to its
"natural" population, because there is no such thing. A
realistic goal would be figuring out what is a "minimum
viable population" for each creature. In reality he argues,
"there is no single condition that is best for all of
life," because nature itself is always changing, uncertain,
full of hazards. Some of the lessons Mr. Botkin draws are
less than dazzling. For example, after a generally
interesting chapter on grizzlies, during which he uses the
Lewis and Clark diaries to estimate the grizzly bear
population on the eve of European settlement, he asks "what
the grizzlies tell us." The answer is platitudinous: They
tell us that "our knowledge remains terribly limited" and
that "clear, objective, historical records can be a great
help to us."
Still, by taking the long view of specific problems, and
trying to grasp how each issue has presented itself over
time, Mr. Botkin, like Mr. Smith, introduces a welcome
realism into the debate. There may be fewer people out
there longing for the restoration of Muirian wildness than
these writers believe, but for those who do hold to
simplistic visions of nature-the-pure and man-the-sinful,
these two books will be challenging antidotes.
[End]
