Dan’s Comments (group member since Dec 12, 2014)

Dan’s comments from the Environmental History group.

Looking for readers for the group, so I'm posting a book review and a more topical piece today (which still mentions a book), to see what people might be interested in. Here's the topical piece:

The argument about energy independence, renewability, and ethanol isn’t new: it has been going on for nearly a century. Samuel Morey’s 1826 internal combustion engine burned ethyl alcohol because it was readily available. Henry Ford and Charles Kettering both expected their future cars would burn alcohol fuels. Ford saw ethanol as a way to support American farmers and use grain surpluses that were depressing prices. Kettering’s statement that alcohol was the best way to convert solar energy to fuel reflected a belief that it was better to live on annual solar “income” than to become dependent on drawing down fossil fuel “capital.” And both men worried that gasoline would involve the United States in the affairs of faraway regions. A speaker at a 1936 conference sponsored by Ford remarked that the biggest known oil reserves were “in Persia…and in Russia. Do you think that is much defense for your children?”

Since energy is such an important and contentious issue today, why aren’t we more aware that these debates are not new? General-purpose American History textbooks have a lot to cover, it’s true. They can’t go into detail on every issue. Checking the indexes of several popular textbooks reveals that if they address the petroleum industry at all, it’s usually just to mention that Standard Oil pioneered horizontal business integration and that John D. Rockefeller eventually controlled 90% of the industry. But even respected histories of technology like Vaclav Smil’s 2005 book, Creating the Twentieth Century ( by ), tell the story of early internal combustion as if gasoline was the only fuel used until the end of World War I, when diesel trucks began entering the market. In Smil’s history, there was no solution to the “violent knocking that came with higher compression. That is why all pre-WWI engines worked with compression ratios no higher than 4.3-1 and why the ratio began to rise to modern levels (between 8 and 10) only after the introduction of leaded gasoline.” This is simply not true, so why doesn’t an expert like Smil know the facts?

Ethyl alcohol fuels were already widely used before the beginning of the kerosene and petroleum boom dominated by Standard Oil. Engineers at both Ford and General Motors were aware that ethyl alcohol ran at high compression ratios without knocking. So how is it possible that historians, even historians of technology, seem to be unaware of the battles fought in the early years of the twentieth century over what American drivers would put in their tanks?

Part of the answer, I think, is that the winners of those battles left more records for historians than the losers. History depends on evidence. A seemingly comprehensive history of the petroleum industry can be written, based on mountains of documents in academic libraries and corporate archives. Books about companies like DuPont and Standard Oil, written by both supporters and opponents, could fill a library. Anyone who undertakes a new history of these subjects must read all this material, which leaves little time to dig for other perspectives.

The makers of ethanol in the early twentieth century, unlike the corporations, left few documents. And finding the story of alcohol in the archives of Ford or General Motors requires dedication and persistence. A good percentage of the records left by these companies, after all, are not objective accounts at all. They’re advertisements, public relations statements, and internal documents arguing not about what could be done, but about what they wanted to do.

As a result, the history we read tells the story of an apparently inevitable, unstoppable journey toward the petroleum-powered world we live in today. This type of history celebrates the winners while at the same time excusing them. When we assume the outcome was inevitable, we conclude that if it hadn’t been Rockefeller, it would just have been somebody else. And that’s the biggest problem. When we believe the present was inevitable, we lose the ability to imagine alternatives. In the past, and also in the present and the future.

More info about ethanol's history at Bill Kovarik's excellent website, environmentalhistory.org.

by Ted Steinberg no photo

One of the key texts in the young field of Environmental History, this was originally Ted Steinberg’s dissertation. His advisors were David Hackett Fischer, Morton Horwitz, and Donald Worster (nice committee!). Steinberg’s thesis is that “industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well” (11). This idea goes beyond the obvious (but important) recognition that the environment influences social and economic choices, toward a more subtle discussion of how “the natural world came to represent new sources of energy and raw materials [that were] perceived more and more as a set of inputs.” Steinberg mentions Environmental Historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant in this context, but the thrust of his argument develops Horwitz’s theme of “an instrumental conception” of both resources and the “law that sanctioned the maximization of economic growth” (16). Basically, Steinberg takes Horwitz’s argument that the law became a servant of economic progress and extends it to the natural world, which also became an “instrument” of particular human designs rather than a common ground shared equally by all.

I assigned Steinberg’s Introduction to my American Environmental History class last semester, and incorporated much of the story Steinberg tells of the takeover of the Charles and Merrimack Rivers by textile industrialists, and the associated shift in social ideas of the public good and the changing role of incorporated organizations from providers of public services to private, for-profit business. A key issue in Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law, (The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860) which Steinberg picks up, is that this sneaky hijacking of common law and attitudes toward ownership, along with the confusion of public and private sectors that springs from it — all these changes have distributional and social justice consequences. So the point is not only that over time it became “commonly assumed, even expected, that water should be tapped, controlled, and dominated in the name of progress,” but that the rewards of this control legitimately belonged to the few, to the exclusion of the many. This was a big change, and it opened the door for the modern world.

Steinberg’s story of the beginning of textile milling in Massachusetts calls attention to the contested nature of all the changes the mills tried to make to the flow and control of rivers like the Charles. How and why people reacted to these sneaky changes in the social contract was the element missing from Horwitz’s story (why we don't remember these challenges better in US History is a question yet to be addressed). Steinberg begins filling in the details, including the story of how the Boston Manufacturing Company used the legal system to settle what amounted to a class-action lawsuit in 1848, by paying just $26,000 to get permanent uncontested control of the Merrimack River. In 1850, as a consequence of their uncontested control of what had once been a common resource, the BMC made $14 million. I stressed this moment in my lecture, because it seemed so typical: a corporation (which is technically immortal) uses the courts to buy off the people it has injured with a pile of cash that seems significant to them, but is actually minuscule in comparison to the damage the corporation has evaded responsibility for. How many superfund sites, oil spills, and industrial accidents have been bailed out over the years by this trick, I wonder?

Like Horwitz, Steinberg also shows how much the changes in our society’s understanding of property rights and commons owed not to free competition in the market, but to government interference on behalf of the rich, through the courts. This is another important thing for students to understand, I think. Current debates about the relationship between businesses and the environment are too often framed as a sort of Atlas Shrugged (Atlas Shrugged) episode, with “statist” environmentalists trying to infringe on the rights of “individualist” businesses. Steinberg’s story of the textile industry helps explain that building corporate power was a social process — the BMC was given power in the elaborate set of choices Steinberg describes. And some people objected, but the changes went ahead despite the regular complaints of area farmers and upstream fishermen. This led many people in places like the Charles River valley in the early 1790s to believe “their natural rights [had been] stolen from them, and their best property at the mercy of one or two Millers, still the lucky favorites & likely to remain, so long as the rage for Factory at every place, whether others sink or swim, continues the rage of Government” (37). Interesting that these complaints were made early in the story, when Massachusetts residents were still filled with the “Spirit of ’76” and the populist understanding of natural rights that led to the Revolution. By the end of the story in the middle of the 19th century, the language of resistance had been forced to change because the things people were resisting hadn’t even been dreamed of in the Revolutionary era.

Steinberg describes the Boston Associates’ campaign to control Lake Winnepissiogee, the destruction of fisheries and then the capitalists’ attempts to reintroduce fish and manage what was formerly a common good, and the problem of industrial and urban pollution in rivers controlled by the industrialists. Each of these topics have been expanded by others, along the lines Steinberg suggests. The only flaw in the book, for me, is the Thoreau-ian wrapper Steinberg adds at the beginning and end. As recorded in the 1849 classic, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, (Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A) Henry David Thoreau was horrified by what he saw happening in New England, but I don’t think Steinberg shows how Thoreau represents any type of viable alternative. Of course, Thoreau is familiar to most students from High School, and my students got a bit caught up in the Thoreau thing -- so it works. At the conclusion of the book, Steinberg admits that “greater command over…nature in general, had its positive points.” But, he concludes, “this aggressive, manipulative posture toward the natural world [is] a problem that penetrates to the core of modern American culture” (271). Like Thoreau, this sentiment is easy to agree with but difficult to act on. In addition to the sneakiness of the legal and social changes, our inability to see how things might have gone leads to a sense of inevitability. So when I taught this segment last semester, I tried to frame the story with Robert Owen. At the beginning of the story, Nathan Appleton and Francis Cabot Lowell went to Scotland to visit Owen’s mill city New Lanarck. By the end of the story, the BMC had built cities on the Merrimack, made millions, polluted the water, and then took their money and left when the industry went into decline, leaving behind permanent social and environmental problems. Owen, on the other hand, had left industry to found the cooperative community New Harmony in America and became the father of the Cooperative movement in Britain. It’s not a perfect counterpoint, but Owen’s story compared to Appleton’s and Lowell’s at least suggests that things could have gone differently in Lawrence and Lowell.

I've been away from Goodreads for a while, but still active reading and reviewing things on my blog. I was reposting a lot of my blog material to Reddit, where to be honest, only one or two people seemed interested. While it's possible that my stuff just isn't that interesting, I'm hoping that's not the case and Reddit just wasn't an appropriate venue for that material.

So I'll start reposting my stuff here, and see how it does. Several of the people already in this group are also seeing my stuff on Twitter and my blog. Sorry for the duplication -- I'm hoping that in addition to the folks already interested in EnvHist, we might find some new people. So I'm going to put up some content, and see if it attracts anyone.

I'm also going to throw a couple of EnvHist posts up on the big History group, although they'll be going into the Environmental Sciences bucket -- so I'm really not sure if anyone will ever see them. It's all a big experiment. Suggestions are welcome.

--Dan

Although I teach American Environmental History at UMass, my EH interest is global. And anyway, I like to think of America as including both the continents of the western hemisphere. I did an MA in Latin American History and didn’t run across much EH, so I was happy to find Shawn Miller’s book. Miller begins by noting that although “Ideas matter,” history shows that “regardless of a culture’s religious or scientific views of nature, we of the human race have joined hands in reshaping and devastating the earth.” (4) I suspect Miller’s intention was to begin the book with a challenge to the “Pristine Myth,” which he takes on directly a few pages later. But I think he gives too much of a pass to Europe’s dominant religion and its ideas about nature. Also Miller, like Steinberg in Down to Earth (which I’ll review soon), uses sustainability as a measure of cultural success although he is critical of its anthropocentricity. But like Steinberg, Miller does not offer a solid alternative criterion that balances human and non-human values.

The Pristine Myth, that “depicts precontact America as an unspoiled, lightly peopled wilderness in environmental harmony and ecological balance, is an image that manages to remain standing,” Miller says, “even though recent scholarship has cut off its legs.” (9) Miller cites recent estimates of American population in 1492 that range from 40 to 70 million, with a high of 115 million. All but 2 to 3 million of these pre-Columbian people lived in Central and South America. Even an EH textbook like Down to Earth proves Miller’s point that “the story has been too often told from a North American perspective,” although to his credit Steinberg tries to correct the typical “late beginning” that has American History begin with British colonization in 1607 or 1620. (10)

Miller also stresses the urbanity of pre-Columbian natives. The Aztec capitals of “Tenochtitlán and Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico, each had more than 200,000 inhabitants, larger than contemporary Paris, London, or Lisbon…In 1492, the Valley of Mexico had 1 million inhabitants, to use the more conservative estimate.” Mexico City was America’s largest city in 1600, 1800, and 2000 (10). Jungle people planted trees they valued, and managed the forest (18). Urban Mexicans used intensive gardening techniques in raised Chinampas to “support 15 people per hectare in the fifteenth century. Chinese agriculture, one of Eurasia’s most successful…supported fewer than three people per hectare in the same century” (21). And the natives substantially changed the landscapes surrounding their cities. “In Peru alone there are some 6,000 square kilometers of terraces, and in the region of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia there are another 5,000…many of the Andes jungled, eastern slopes, such as those of Machu Picchu, were also terraced but have been covered and torn apart by rainforest trees over the last centuries” (23). I use all of this information in my second lecture, and students’ typical reaction is, “Why have I never heard any of this before?”

The Incas mined guano for fertilizer off the coast of Peru, and “passed harsh laws to protect it,” suggesting they may have been the first people to adopt soil amendment techniques beyond the use of animal and human manures (25). Although guano was recognizably manure, which may have provided a conceptual framework for its use, techniques of acquiring, distributing, and using guano would have been completely different from those used with fresh manure. The organizational skills the Incas developed to take advantage of guano also helped them compensate for wide swings in crop yields by “storing large quantities of surplus food, by working collectively in the construction of their fabulous infrastructure and their fields, and by distributing their communities and their kin across an unusually broad range of altitudes and microclimates” (26). This last element is especially interesting, and has been overlooked, I think, in North American rural history as well as South American.

In a controversial turn, Miller suggests there was a fairly high amount of cannibalism, especially among the Tupi in Brazil and the Aztecs. The Tupi, he says, had abundant sources of protein, and ate their enemies for cultural reasons. The Aztecs ate everything, MIller says, “including snakes, lizards, wasps, flying ants, and insect larvae,” as well as dogs, roasted red worms called ezcahuitli, and tecuitatl, the dried algae spirulina, which “looked like bread and tasted like cheese” (38). Since they had none of the European food taboos that inform our thinking, and since they probably killed over 20,000 people a year in religious sacrifices (136,000 skulls were counted at Tenochtitlán’s main temple), Miller suggests eating the victims was the most practical way of disposing with the bodies (39, 40). Native cannibalism continues to be a hotly contested issue, not least because the invading Europeans used it as evidence of the savagery of the inhabitants, whom they concluded clearly needed to be conquered, Christianized, and put to work.

Unfortunately for the conquerors, most of the natives were never available for labor. “In the century after 1492,” Miller says, “some 50 million Indians vanished, more than 90 percent of America’s once vigorous populations…In the Caribbean, a region that held as many as 7 million Indians, mortalities reached 99 percent…fully 100 percent on many smaller islands. On the Mexican mainland, deaths exceeded 99 percent along the main arteries…The city of Zempoala, formerly housing some 100,000 citizens, had only 25 native inhabitants by 1550” (50). But in spite of the human tragedy, Miller suggests that the introduction of European species and the decreased human load on the environment might be seen as a net gain to the Americas, at least in terms of biodiversity (although I think others would argue that the new species crowded out many older American plants and animals, 61).

Miller tells the stories of colonial sugar and silver, mentioning that Potosí, the “world’s highest city,” had a 1660 population of 160,000, larger than Seville, Madrid, or Rome. Nearly all of Potosí’s agricultural, timber, and other needs were provided by imports from other colonies like Chile. Miller describes the patio process of refining silver and gold using mercury, and notes that due to mercury’s deadliness, “indigenous mothers were reported to have crippled their children to disqualify them from work at Huancavelica” (90). As we reach the modern era, Miller describes hookworm, vulcanization of rubber, and the Gran Canal of Mexico City (which it’s very hard to find a photo of on the web!). He tells a really interesting story of children marking their heights on steel well-casings, and returning years later to find “the landscape was sinking faster than Mexico City’s children were growing” (147). Miller also mentions that of the sixty islands claimed under the US Guano Act, “nine of them remain U.S. attachments” (149).

Miller provides several interesting perspectives on northern hemisphere history, as well. “The intensification of world trade contacts with Peru, the home of the potato and all its endemic pathogens,” Miller suggests, “explains the coincidence of the simultaneous opening of the guano trade and the outbreak of the potato famine in guano’s primary destinations” such as Ireland (154). He also points out that the Haber-Bosch process for producing synthetic nitrogen is incredibly dependent on fossil fuels (the hydrogen the reactors bonded with atmospheric nitrogen came from coal), and that Nobel Prize winner Fritz Haber also invented chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gases for Germany’s war effort, causing his wife Clara to kill herself “within days of his return from directing the world’s first gas attack at the battle of Ypres in April 1915” (155). In the modern era, Miller notes that “Chile relies on falling water for 60 percent of her electricity, Colombia 75 percent, and Brazil 95 percent. By contrast, the United States…gets only 13 percent of its electrical generation from dams” (160). He says most of the projects were built to create rather than satisfy demand, which I think is a weaker criticism than “the disastrous cultural and environmental consequences” of the 1984 Tucuruí dam on the Tocantins River in Brazil. “The dam’s primary beneficiary is Alcoa…which receives two thirds of the plant’s generating capacity and employs very few people [and spends the profits it makes on the aluminum produced there outside of Brazil]. The dam’s reservoir [1100 square miles, bigger than Rhode Island] displaced 35,000 people in 17 towns and villages…all of whom lived by flood agriculture” (162-3). This type of information has a place in any story about US EH, because it illustrates how the US exports its externalities to its “less developed” neighbors.

Modern Latin America matches the urban density of the US and Europe, with 75% of its people living in cities. (168). But interestingly, “already in 1600, 48 percent of those in Spain’s American colonies lived in cities,” before there ever were any British colonists (169). Urban spaces are imagined differently by Latin Americans, and have grown at alarming rates. “In its 50-year growth spurt (1850-1900) London grew from 2.6 to 6.6 million, about 2.5 times. Mexico city, a century later but in the same length of time (1940-1990) grew from 1.5 to 15 million, a factor of ten” (173). Urbanity, Miller says, leads to lower family sizes and reduced national fertility rates. “Brazil’s total fertility rate is 2.3, slightly above the long-term replacement rate of 2.1…Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, are essentially [at zero population growth]; and a few, such as Cuba, Barbados, and Chile, are already well below it” (190).

But this does not mean these nations are out of trouble, Miller says, because “while the city inhibits family fertility, it breeds household consumption” (191). Consumerism and emulation of North American lifestyles threaten Latin American economies and environments. In a very interesting passage that would make a good short reading assignment in any survey class, Miller describes “Cuba’s Latest Revolution,” the “Special Period” in Cuban history that began in 1989 when Russian subsidy inputs abruptly ceased. With massive Soviet aid in the previous decades, Cuba had “developed one of the most mechanized and chemical-intensive agricultural systems” in Latin America (230). “Before 1989,” Miller says, “Cuba imported nearly 60 percent of its food, and its citizens consumed an average of 2,800 calories per day. By 1993, average caloric intake had fallen to 1,800” (231). Cuban agriculture, institutional gardens, and 100,000 family farmers (many of them urban) went organic, and “by the late 1990s, no longer were Cubans going hungry, they were eating better food and a greater variety of it than they had in 30 years” (233). The big question, Miler suggests, is what will happen when Fidel dies and the blockade comes off? Whatever happens, Cuban history has been cited by a number of “energy descent” authors as a blueprint of our future.

It's interesting that "Columbian Exchange " is now shorthand for the series of unintended consequences of the early European voyages of discovery -- especially the diseases that killed something like 90% of the American natives. I had a chance to converse with Alfred Crosby by email a couple years ago, and his most vivid recollections of his career were the difficulty he had finding a published for this book. His manuscript was rejected by a dozen reputable publishers, and finally printed by a small house specializing in short-run antiquarian monographs. Were lucky Crosby was as tenacious as he was -- maybe there's a lesson in this for authors and also for readers.

Last time I taught, rather than assigning a chapter from The Columbian Exchange, I used the journal article that led up to it. Crosby wrote "Conquistadores y Pestilencia" in 1969, and it covers the gist of his argument in the book, but slightly more economically. Even this, however, is an academic article, and part of my focus this semester is on the interface between Environmental and popular history. So I'm thinking this time I'll find an excerpt in Charles Mann's 1491. This will give me an opportunity to write a short piece about the way Mann has popularized Crosby's ideas, and how he has added to them.

I think when I rework the EnvHist textbook project, the chapters are going to include short essays about the big books of the field. This will fill the hole left open by not being able to include long passages of these texts -- as you can when you're assigning readings in a University class. The "how have our ideas about the environment changed over time" element of the course can be partly illustrated by this, what would you call it? Popular historiography?

My full review of Crosby's book is up on the book's own page, and also at my own "EnvHist Library" page, until I decide what to do about that website (http://www.environmentalhistory.us/li...).

Changes in the Land is the book that introduces many readers to the field of Environmental History. It was the first book I read on the subject in grad school, and it's one of the first readings I assign to my undergrad class (Chapter 3, not the whole book). In discussion, the students seemed particularly interested in the seasonal change, migration, and low population density Cronon describes. The idea of living light on the land seemed particularly attractive to many students, especially when compared with the ordered, settled lifestyle of the Europeans. Cronon's descriptions of these differences, and the students' reactions to them, show more than a bit of romance (remember, he was about 27 years old when he wrote this book). But part of my EnvHist course involves looking at the ways people's thoughts about the environment change over time, so it all fits together.

I posted my review of the book on its page, so I won't reprint it all here. I'm curious what people think of this book, and of the idea of using a part of it to start a conversation about both early American history, and also about our changing ideas about the subject?