The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (review)

This collection of thirteen essays examines the apparent boundary between technology and the environment and argues that no such boundary can be clearly defined—hence the title. In addition to introductory and concluding reflections by the editors, Hugh S. Gorman and Betsy Mendelsohn also provide a historiographic overview of how the fields of history of technology and of environmental history have addressed the intersection between technology and the environment. Urban landscapes, managed rivers, manipulated organisms, and other examples of what William Cronon termed “second nature” are among the topics studied by historians interested in the entanglement of technology with the natural environment.

Essays in part 1 analyze how humans interact with nature through technology—a relationship in which, James C. Williams provocatively argues, both humans and nature have agency, but technology does not (although people sometimes mistakenly attribute agency to it). Joy Parr makes a strong case for the importance of understanding how technologies alter people’s bodily experience of nature, such as through new modes of transportation or the re-creation of landscapes to suit aesthetic and economic preferences. These variations in the sensation of nature, Parr notes, can differ in significant ways based on an actor’s gender or class position. In “Can Nature Improve Technology?” Peter Coates examines inventors’ claims to have modeled new technologies on living organisms (lately termed “biomimicry”), an assertion that has sometimes been overstated—such as in media accounts of the Wright brothers’ avian inspiration.

Part 2 begins with an essay that ably demonstrates the theoretical richness of an “envirotechnical” perspective. Sara B. Pritchard and Thomas Zeller aim to “naturalize” industrialization, emphasizing the intensification of envirotechnical systems that this well-studied historical process entails. Rather than alienating humans from their environments, Pritchard and Zeller argue, industrialized societies remain highly dependent on natural resources, such as fossil fuels or waterways, and humans ignore this dependence at their peril. Subsequent essays in sections 2 and 3 on landscapes, development, and waste analyze urbanization and river-system management as examples of envirotechnical interaction. Peter C. Perdue depicts Chinese bureaucracies, both under the Qing dynasty and during the Maoist revolution, as forms of technology in themselves, ones that often have aimed to manipulate nature, sometimes with disastrous results. William D. Rowley reviews the historiography of U.S. westward expansion, finding that it has shifted from a celebration of progress through technology to a counter-narrative of technologically dominated dystopia. Joel A. Tarr reminds readers of the many environmental challenges that modern cities pose, while Craig E. Colten notes that waste and pollution can be both caused and remedied by novel technologies.

In a final brief section that indicates where the field of envirotech is moving, Ann Vileisis highlights the numerous ways in which human action has altered the world’s tomato population through selective breeding. Even as the industrial tomato’s genetic diversity declined, advertisements by Heinz, Campbell’s, and other purveyors of tomato-based goods persistently emphasized their products’ “natural” origins. Meanwhile, the germ plasm of wilder tomatoes was repeatedly sought to create new varieties better suited to changing consumer expectations or to new production processes. Edmund Russell continues the analysis of organisms as technologies, arguing that humans have influenced the evolution of useful plant and animal species since the Neolithic revolution through taming, breeding, and (most recently) genetic engineering. Biotech is hardly a novel endeavor, in Russell’s view—well-known examples include pack animals, cheese, and silk worms, to name just a few among those he cites.

Overall, this collection provides an excellent resource for undergraduate courses in the history of technology or environmental history, as well as for more advanced scholars familiar with one of those fields who wish to explore the many overlaps between these two areas of scholarship (and to imagine the research possibilities these synergies suggest). A few of the essays are encyclopedic rather than theoretically rich, which makes the collection less useful for scholars familiar with...