The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Hill and Wang Critical Issues)

White wants this book to represent a new approach to ecological history, one built not around humans or the environment, but about relationships - - between humans and the river, between salmon and the river, between humans and salmon, and so forth. To focus on relationships, he develops themes of energy and work.It's a good idea, but he doesn't pull it off. The first half of the book starts out promisingly enough, telling an ecological story in which humans appear but are not the only actors. White builds the narrative around the concepts of work and energy. The river can do work through mills and dams, humans work, salmon move energy from ocean upstream to bears and eagles, and so forth. Human relationships with the river's energy have changed from Native Americans to European settlers and then through industrialization.Unfortunately, White is too much a historian to be able to do this right. Telling a story about work would be very interesting, but that involves getting the data and making some calculations - - for example, how much energy do salmon move upstream, how much potential energy lies in the river downstream, how much of the energy do humans appropriate, and how much energy do humans apply? How has the human-river relationship transformed the energy system of the Columbia? White is simply not equipped to follow through on his own ideas, and remains too limited by standard historical methods and narrative structures.These limitations become particularly visible by the second half of the book. Beginning with the 1930s, White tells the same story as other historians, about the New Deal and dams, about World War II and nuclear power, about the death of salmon runs. He discusses political controversies, such as WPPSS scandal, even when they don't work in the narrative. All too quickly, then, White's narrative has become much more conventional.In short, White is too much the historian to be able to execute his own vision for this work. Historians read documents in archives, and clearly White has done a lot of this. In that sense, he knows his stuff. But to write a new kind of narrative really requires someone with the eye of a natural scientist, someone who can estimate the amount of energy the rivers does as it flows to the sea, the amount of energy the salmon bring up from the ocean, the amount of energy humans - - and bears, and eagles, and everyone else - - siphon off from the ocean. While White understands basic ecological relationships, he lacks an ecologist's deeper understanding of multiple relationships, feedback systems, and energy cycling. A coauthor would probably have served this project very well.

The Organic Machine is an ideal example of what great scholarship should produce. It's a short, beautifully written, passionate history of what we human beings have made of the Columbia River in the time since white people came to the Northwest. It is driven by an environmentalism founded on the understanding that man is not separate from nature and never can be. The protagonist of this book is the salmon -- a creature to whom we have done no favors by transforming the Columbia -- yet man is not the villain of the piece. This book is written, as White says, "to understand rather than denounce." The profound depth of White's scholarship is made clear in the bibliographic essay that follows the text; the text itself makes use of massive learning in a graceful and accessible style. Anyone who cares about our relationship with the natural world, and who wants to think about it with some subtlety and historical grounding, should read this book. They don't come any better.

Fantastic scholarly work on Environmental History. Richard White electrified the field of EH history with his demonstration that man knows nature through work. Highly recommended for any comps reading list.

I like Richard White and how he writes his environmental history. I thought it was not like your typical historical environmental history because he tries to put it into perspectives . One is through the colonists and the other history of the Native American and how the river is ultimately we shaped by laws in people and traditions.

I read this book a few years ago for a course and greatly enjoyed it. I highly recommend it. Since I had used a library copy at that time, I decided to finally add a copy to my own personal collection. Unfortunately the copy I received through Amazon had a peculiar cover. The graphics had jpeg compression artifacts. I believe I was sent a counterfeit. I have returned this book and will be purchasing it elsewhere, not on Amazon.

Interesting concept, kind of dry

Richard White paints the Columbia as the ultimate example of the natural world coming in contact with the mechanical world. The perspectives in this book will change the way you see modern river systems and the history is so thoroughly researched it's astounding.

It's an interesting book that looks at nature and man in a different way. The highlighting of salmon and the Columbia River illustrate the relationship of nature and man in a clear and concise way. Without these concrete elements the reader could get lost in the theory of an organic machine.

I knew already that this is a key work in the field of environmental history when I read it recently. It did not disappoint!