Customer Reviews

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings

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This short book showed me a great deal about both U.S. history and environmentalism. The extensive notes and huge bibliography mark the book not just as inviting severe academic scrutiny but as a pithy summary of a lifetime of information. If my library was as large as this bibliography, I'd feel obligated to open it to the public.

The book is organized around technologies that were used in the white settlement of the U.S.: the different and more efficient American axe (and the log cabin), the water powered mill, the canal and the railroad, and irrigation infrastructure such as dams. With these various technogies over time settlers "improved" the land they found. They felt it took both nature's "first creation" and their efforts at "second creation" to complete the work and make the land truly suitable for life. After years of wondering, here finally is an explanation of what early settlers were thinking when they did things that now seem extremely ecologically destructive.

The book calls out four assumptions of second creation: i) grid surveys were a good way to apportion and settle the fairly uniform land ii) free markets allowed individuals to do whatever made most sense without regard to legislative edicts and local monopolies iii) resources --especially land-- were abundant so that population growth didn't have to worry about the downward resource spiral suggested by Malthus and iv) the universe supported changes at no cost rather than levying an entropic tax on every effort at long-term progress. All four were critical to underpinning our foundation story; all four were eventually thrown in the dustbin of history. Those neat squares are a hallmark of flying over the western U.S., but they condemned neighbors to live a half mile apart rather than in towns, and they dismally failed to promote individual ownership of lands that needed to be irrigated. I'll let the book fill out the details of the remaining three assumptions.

I'd wondered casually about but never seriously questioned the emphasis on water power rather than steam power in the early U.S. I learned our thinkers were glad surfeit of rivers and lack of coal leaned this way, because water power was thought to be more natural and hence to have beneficial sociological effects! Many early investors honestly thought that so long as mills used water power rather than steam power, they couldn't create a downtrodden working class like British mills. I also learned that mills were common in the Southern states too; although they arrived there a generation later, they weren't completely absent as I had thought.

Even though I live near historic Lowell Massachusetts ("spindle city") and thought I was quite familiar with the history of mills in the U.S., the book taught me some new local details. It alerted me to the former existence of the Middlesex Canal that extended almost 30 miles from the Merrimack River to Boston, and to the original construction of the Pawtucket Canal not for the mills but for transportation. Once I knew to look for the Middlesex Canal, I found maps, an interpretive museum which I visited, and even remaining bits and pieces explaining odd landscape features that had never made sense before.

I was also alerted to the fact that the old gristmill I'm familiar with near the Wayside Inn in Sudbury Massachusetts was in fact a reconstruction early in the last century.

And the many references led me to 'The Education of Henry Adams', an autobiography that although clearly a century old speaks to our time. My old public library, which has a vault in the basement and some materials that go back to the sixteen hundreds, still had a copy on its open shelves. When checking it out I commented to the librarian I was glad the library had so many "old" books, and she in turn commented that she was glad to see at least one patron using the older book room.

As time passed and as settlement proceeded westward, the necessary technologies expanded from things each individual could manipulate to things that could only be done by huge collectives. One man could make a clearing with an axe. But only the federal government could construct Boulder Dam. The individualism that's so tightly woven into the U.S. persona made less and less sense as settlement proceeded into the high plains and the arid regions. Even in the already settled east, large civil engineering works such as water pumping stations were once highly visible public technology.

As the internet, cell phone and laptop continue to be proclaimed and experienced as uniters of a global social and economic world, David Nye's gathering of the narratives of earlier technologies and their world shaping capacities is both timely and revealing.

From the American axe to irrigation, Nye shows how stories were developed and repeated which portrayed the continent as "in need" of "completion" by human effort. He shows how these narratives replaced the previous generation of "conquest narratives" in which colonists confronted and were confronted by "savages." Now, the "savages" are gone, replaced by an empty landscape awaiting the surveyor's measure, the pioneer's axe, the mill's water power, the railroad's steam and so forth.

Wonderfully, he uncovers some forgotten counter-stories as well. Who knew or remembered that the 1850s included predictions that technological abuse of the earth would result in climate change and species loss? One can hear and see both the story of American triumph over nature and the correlative tragedy of environmental and social destruction that have come in the wake of that "triumph."

Nye's book was a pleasure to read, filled with interesting anecdotes and deeply reflective insights that reveal a sharply defined pattern over two hundred years of American relationship with technology and the earth.

This book is great if you are interested in the history of Americans feeling entitled to everything. Through the use of several historical narratives, the author outlines how manifest destiny was justified and continually affirmed by stories that abandon scarcity and preservation for faith in natural abundance. Nye takes the approach of telling the mainstream foudation story, such as the story of the axe and the mill from the perspective of the settlers/mainstream Americans, and in the following chapter gives the perspective of those not in the mainstream (such as the Native Americans and environmentalists). This approach to writing gives the book a Zinn-like quality; and may have been written in this way to piggy-back on the popularity of "A People's History of the United States," which was originally released in 1980, and enjoyed a popular resurgence in 2003. I enjoyed this book greatly.

This book attempts to make an argument that America is a "second creation" but in the course of the book does not really define what he means by this. It is an interesting recount of American technological history and was fairly well done. The book is written by a scholar in Denmark and the European perspective was the most fascinating part. The book examines the role of environmental history in addition to technology. It argues that mills, grid patterns, dams and resources, as well as an esoteric idea of human entropy. This attempt at science is very weak and does not make a favorable impression. Ruth Cowan's book provides a better example of how technology developed although this is still a good start. It is worth a read but can be trying in its theoretical stance at times.