The Green Cathedral: Sustainable Development of Amazonia.

• Author: Rose, Carol M.

From the titles of these books, you might not guess that they are both about rivers. The first, not surprisingly, is about the Amazon. The second is about the Merrimack.

The what? Yes, that's right, the Merrimack, and an important river it was, too, in its day. Theodore Steinberg's(1) fascinating new book is one of a growing number of environmental histories, following the trail marked out in such wonderful studies as William Cronon's Changes in the Land(2) about the New England colonies' evolving environment, or Arthur McEvoy's The Fisherman's Problem(3) on the succession of fishing ecologies of California. In the Merrimack, Steinberg has located exactly the right river to take up the environmental issues lurking behind early nineteenth-century industrial development.

For infrastructure fans like this reviewer, Nature Incorporated will be a tremendously exciting book, full of news about such things as flashboards and fishladders and water company organization. Even to less fervid devourers of this kind of information, the book will clearly send a message about why the Merrimack is still important: it provides an objective lesson on what can happen to the surrounding environment when people set out to develop just one natural resource and do not think about the others. In the case of the Merrimack, that resource was water power.

Most of Steinberg's book concerns the way the Merrimack was effectively colonized by a group of New England entrepreneurs known collectively as Boston Associates, who were primarily interested in the river's ability to supply power to textile mills. They first learned a few lessons from the early industrialization along the Charles River, in what is now the Boston suburb of Waltham. Then, in the 1820s they moved north to the Merrimack, embarking on the ambitious project that would eventually become a complex network of dams, canals, and mills at Lowell, Massachusetts (pp. 59-69). With Lowell well underway, they moved upstream on the Merrimack to Manchester, New Hampshire, and then downstream to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where their affiliates built still more mills and more massive river "improvements" (pp. 82-84). Finally, recognizing the Merrimack mills' vulnerability to potential disruptions on the waters upstream, in the 1840s and the following years they and their affiliated water companies gradually took over the key points along the river all the way to its sources in New Hampshire, building dams to store water and hence power for the downstream operations (pp. 107-13). The result of all these waterworks was a controlled flow from top to bottom, from the Merrimack's mountain headwaters down to the sea, sufficiently rationalized so that the Boston Associates and their affiliates could precisely specify the units of water power that they used themselves, or that they leased to other mills along the route (pp. 85-86).

But there were some other results as well, results that figured rather less prominently in the Boston Associates' balance sheets: their dams and mills flooded pasturage lands (pp. 114-15, 126); decimated fish populations (pp. 172-74); slowed logging transport (p. 121); attracted urban growth that polluted the river waters (pp. 232-39); and, incidentally, fueled the fires of local resentment, particularly among the New Hampshire residents far upstream from the Boston Associates' big Massachusetts textile factories (pp. 99-102).

What was the reason for this heedless devastation of environmental resources? Though he doesn't beat the reader to death with these matters, Steinberg alludes constantly to a major theme, accompanied by a minor theme. The major theme is that the Merrimack's developers adopted an aggressively instrumental attitude about nature,(4) an attitude that by the end of the century had been adopted even by the opponents to their river projects (p. 267). The minor (and related) theme is that all this instrumentalism was encapsulated in too great a reliance on private property.(5)

Let me say this again: I loved this book, as only one who pours over old pictures of milldams and waterwheels can love such a book. But I do not think that Steinberg's explanatory themes advance his otherwise entirely absorbing account, and I wish he had let them go, so to speak, as water over the dam. I am going to turn to those themes, and what I regard as their flaws, with the caveat that readers should not be deterred from reading this fine book by the nitpicking that follows.

To start with the major theme, all that aggressive instrumentalism: well, who wasn't instrumental? Steinberg begins his narrative well after various settlers had already headed up the Merrimack. Who among them had thought about nature as a Ding an sich? Nobody, that's who.

Before the dam builders were the loggers and farmers. Forget about the loggers; their environmental lapses make them too easy a target. How about the farmers? Well, farms may look nice and green but, as our contemporaries in Brazil are learning right now (of which more shortly), farmers are not necessarily the friends of the environment. In fact, from the point of view of the native flora and fauna, farmers might as well have turned Massachusetts and New Hampshire - and now Brazil - into a big parking lot. Farmers chop down trees. They disrupt water flows. They plow up the soil and let it blow away as dust or run off into the rivers, where it kills both plant and animal marine life. They sow nonnative plants that escape and grow like crazy in the absence of natural predators. They bring in exotic animals like pigs, who root around and destroy what is left of the native habitat. Then, for fun, they go hunting and blow away any remaining "varmints" like wild turkeys, wolves, foxes, and bears.

Yes, yes, I exaggerate. But consider an example: in wetlands preservation, a modern ecological icon, farmers are not the environmental good guys. They line up alongside the condominium developers, oil developers, and the old Army Corps of Engineers as diggers, plowers-under, and general shock troops of ecological sterility.(6) Or consider another example: in states that care about prairie restoration, the sites for new prairies may well be located on places with names like Shoe Factory Road,(7) and they may take their native grass seeds from - guess what - old industrial locations, rather like the ones that Steinberg discusses. Some of those places went from boom to bust without ever getting around to plowing under the native vegetation - unlike their farmer neighbors, who could not wait to bust that sod.(8)

So much for farmers. Who was there before the farmers? What about the Native Americans? Well, a certain cheerful practicality is starting to filter into our picture of the environmental consciousness of these indigenous peoples. From other environmental historians, we know that Eastern Native Americans did some farming, though not so intensively as the European settlers.(9) We also know that they used fire extensively to manage forest and grassland growth, particularly to attract wildlife.(10) Out West they started fires among the tall evergreens just to watch the trees explode, like giant natural fireworks.(11) We can take a good guess that, like other indigenous peoples, they exterminated a number of animal species, particularly the large, dangerous predators.(12) Under the circumstances, this must have seemed like the reasonable thing to do, just as it did to more modern Bengali forest-dwellers, who had lots of experience with elephants that trampled their crops and man-eating tigers that occasionally ripped down huts to get at the nice juicy people inside.(131) I daresay, dear reader, that after following the trail of clothing shreds, bones, and blood to retrieve the carcass of your spouse or your child, you too would have exterminated those animals, just as soon as you could.

In any event, we know that American indigenous peoples, however comfortably they settled into some kind of equilibrium with the surrounding wildfife, and however many truly poetic emotions they expressed about the land and its creatures,(14) had some pretty unsentimental and instrumental attitudes about nature too. Some seemed quite willing to turn "nature" to commercial purposes - for instance, to hunt beaver for the European fur trade, in exchange for firearms, cutting implements, and other objects they thought useful.(15) Out in California, indigenous tribes fell into...