When viewed from a nearby overlook, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State seemingly embodies the technological mastery of the Columbia River. The dam, a spectacular cultural artifact, has permanently altered the Columbia: it has widened and deepened the river, reorganized its ecology; think of the sheer quantity of salmon that used to run up the river to spawn before its damming (or, damning?). Yet, as environmental historian Richard White has intriguingly written, the "Columbia is not just a machine. It is an organic machine." Collapsing categories of analysis--such as the technological and the natural, to name merely one--has been de rigueur among academic historians in recent years. Far from an esoteric academic exercise in intellectual dexterity, Timothy LeCain in Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet demonstrates that rethinking the relationship between technology and the environment, nature and ourselves, matters. More fully valuing the natural inhered in the technological (and the technological in nature), the author maintains, "offers greater insights into preserving the best aspects of both wilderness and civilization" (10). In the process, LeCain has written a provocative and illuminating book that neatly interweaves the mass destruction entailed in the extractive technologies of modern mining in the American West with the ideologies and material practices of consumption and production.
"Mass destruction," LeCain, argues, provides an apt term for describing the impact of open-pit mining on the natural landscape. Rather than simply extraction, mass destruction emphasizes not only the sheer destructiveness of landscapes, but also points to the equally related concepts of mass production and mass consumption. Each of these processes were wholly dependent on the other. Hence, LeCain resists the all too facile argument to place too much blame on the engineers and corporate managers for the advent of this destructive form of resource extraction. "Consumers," LeCain insists, "were deeply dependent on the industrial system of mining" (106). In fact, the growing consumer society of the early- to mid-twentieth century was closely intertwined with the managerial ethos of engineers and corporate managers that sought to rationalize and control the natural world in order to make the extraction of raw materials and the production of goods more efficient. Yet efficiency was only part of this confluence. More important to the adoption of mass destructive techniques, according to LeCain, was simply speed. Speed, enabled by the technologies of open-pit mining such as dynamite, steam shovels, and flotation techniques, made profitability possible in ore-poor rock.
These open-pit mines, LeCain declares, were a kind of hybrid natural-technological "factory." Yet where the typical factory specialized in the efficient production of goods, open-pit mine factories found their greatest effect in doing precisely the opposite: they "took apart the natural world in order to produce raw materials as rapidly and efficiently as possible" (132, emphasis mine). In this sense, LeCain is part of a growing number of environmental historians and historians of technology that have begun to rethink and redefine what it means to be industrial and to delineate the salient features of factories. The natural is as much implicated in the factory as it is in, for example, the Bingham Pit. "Such clear environmental consequences [of the Bingham Pit]," LeCain writes, "were less obvious when adopting mass production in a conventional factory, through the contrast fades if we view urban factories as technological systems deeply linked to the environment" (135). The same is true, LeCain points out, in that symbol of mass consumption, the home.
There is much more to this excellent book than a reviewer can adequately describe in the space given here. Academics and the lay audience will find much to digest in these pages. The book could be read alongside classic popular texts such as Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire or Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. The book's wide ranging, yet focused, themes and arguments will also appeal to historians of science, technology, the U.S. West and environment. It is, in short, a remarkable book and one that will likely spur continued research into this fertile new theoretical ground.
