Customer Reviews

The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

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Richard White's "Organic Machine" is a neat display of erudition and intelligence. Through the prism of the Columbia river, the book delves into the difficult relations between native Americans and white settlers. It shows the stronghold an aluminum multinational on local economy and politics. It informs us about the megalomania of giant state bureaucracies. It analyses the emergence and subsequent (enormously expensive) blunders in managing nuclear reactors, followed by the immense human and economic costs. It explores the society's attitudes to endangered species such as salmon, threatened with extinction because of technical progress. It shows us the power and resilience of a large river, unwilling to yield to the numerous dams built during the last 100 years.

The Organic Machine compares to John Barry's "Rising Tide", which treated the Mississippi's history as a classic epic in 400+ pages. "Rising Tide" is a compelling page-turner, not at all times sharp in its analysis, but centered around brilliantly narrated biographies and societal sketches. The Columbia's history has been just as rich, but Richard White took a totally different approach to explain the river. All elements which made Rising Tide such a fun read are there, and more. But Richard White chose to strip the story to the bone. What remains is 112 pages of crisp, flawless analysis. "Organic Machine" is very smart, but I thought the author was too dispassionate. Every page in this book screams for more illustrative anecdotes, it should have been at least three times its actual size.

Hands down the best history book written in English on a river. It rivals William Cronon's "Nature's Metropolis" as the best environmental history book I've read. Anyone who spends time near/on rivers (especially the Columbia) will appreciate this book. White tells a fascinating, compact story (~100 pages) that will force the consciencious reader to rethink his/her relationship with rivers as a source of energy. The book is also a lesson in form and style.

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.

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.

White says he "will measure the book's success by the extent to which is surprises its readers, catches them offguard, and forces them to think about new ways not merely about the Columbia but about nature and its relation to human beings and human history."

Well if this is his standard he failed miserably. The book is an absolute bore because it focuses so much on ancient history. White tries to bring in Native Americans and salmon as a way of bridging the gap between nature and humans - it does so, but it is painfully slow, dull and uninteresting. The book changes a little as it moves into more modern times, but his ending thesis would have been just as strong had he not tortured the reader with a 50 page history lesson.

The last chapter also includes the term "Organic Machine" about a dozen too many times. We figured out from the title what the term meant, rampant repetition doesn't bring out his meaning any more.