Review of Richard White's 'The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River'

The Organic Machine: The Making of the Columbia RiverBy Richard WhiteHarper Collins Publishers, 125 PagesWhat happens when human and natural energy unite? When the ultimately organic doubles as the manmade? When nature and the individual, which share the capacity for both energy and work, are manipulated to produce power? This linkage is the focus of Richard White’s Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. The Columbia River has been a source of power and energy since its very creation: it was power that created the basalt layer in the Columbia plain millennia ago; it was caloric energy found in salmon that fed Native American fisherman; and it is power now, upon human modification, that churns out energy in the form of hydroelectricity at the Grand Coulee Dam. Capitalism, as White shows, set the river to work, exploiting Emersonian idealism into the belief that man could rule over and profit from nature. What is left remains today – the human proclivity to break the Columbia down, seeing it merely for its individual and lucrative parts, rather than a river in its entirety, as a piece of nature. What’s left is the American propensity to divest human history from the natural. While maintaining a tenable grasp on a literally uncontainable natural resource, White culls evidence from a variety of sources, confirming the Columbia’s seepage into society. White’s research spans from the men who first tried to navigate the river in the early 1800s to the political wars fought between the gill-netters and the fish-wheel operators to the establishment of canneries and hatchers to the new continental economy of the 190s that would become “’one unified machine, one organic whole.’” With this evidence, White touches upon a multitude of secondary themes, such as the Native American reverence for salmon, for fishing, for the river, and the white colonists’ abortion of that reverence. There is also a theme of reallocation and creation of space along the Columbia where people continue to claim economic and social domain of a piece of nature, of something that isn’t even rightfully theirs. These secondary themes resonate in White’s conclusion that humans are fighting over something “they in part create[d] but which contains within it, at its heart, something they have not made.” White’s writing is clear, pointed and concise and the prose flows freely – one sentence drifts softly into the next. It often seems that White’s writing mimics the beauty of his very subject. Human interaction with the river is presented textually – cause and effect, what was supposed to happen in contrast to what did happen. White’s numerical technique in breaking sections down, however is slightly hypocritical; he spends so much time reminding the reader that the Columbia River should not be seen as a series of parts, yet the author breaks it down in such a way anyway. Evidence and argument are brought full circle through the theoretical framework of energy and power. Physics defines energy as the capacity to do work. Energy becomes at once an abstraction and a creation, the subsistence of every effort that is put into and yielded from the river. As White writes, “The flow of the river is energy, so is the electricity that comes from the dams that black that flow. Human labor is energy, so are the calories stored as fat by salmon for their journey upstream.” To be powerful is to “Turn the energy and work of nature to your own purposes. Even the political and social decisions made regarding the Columbia relate back to power – planers reduced the river to a statistic – 42%. Forty two percent of the country’s total hydroelectric power comes from the Grand Coulee Dam. Undoubtedly, this framework is tied to the beliefs of both Lewis Mumford and R.W. Emerson, beliefs that too have become skewed and thwarted over the ages. Mumford, the creator of the neotechnic saw man becoming more and more in conflict with nature. The origin of the conflict, he believed was where the mechanical and organic met, where h humans “confront complex systems and seek to alter them to produce relatively simple ends.” In our desire to control too much of the uncontrollable, White argues, we have lost sight of nature all together. White’s monograph does not have a happy ending. It does not end with either human’s triumph over nature or nature’s triumph over us. Rather, White reminds us that we have turned natural space into property and salmon into a commodity, we have let go of any semblance of social values and reaped profit instead. In considering the Columbia a “machine” we have divided nature up by its dams, fisheries, canneries, turbines and forgetting it as a while, as a piece of nature that was there before we ever laid eyes on it.