The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

Richard White’s short, powerful, and provocative book challenges readers to understand the Columbia River and the larger environment as products of the interplay between human history and natural history. White organizes his analysis around energy and work, qualities shared by rivers and people across time and cultural divides. Both technology and culture are part and parcel of The Organic Machine. Technology appears as the tools that people employed to extract what they needed or wanted from the river or that they used to transform the river, its valley, and its hinterland. Culture appears as the values and attitudes, the dreams and aspirations, of those who wielded the tools. White’s analysis pays attention to race and gender and to the often conflicting visions of those who sought to make and remake the river in their own image. The Columbia River that emerges from The Organic Machine is a cyborg-like cultural artifact, a blend of the human and the natural, that not only serves and obeys but also confounds and frustrates those who must address the consequences of the process of transformation.

White employs four chapters to carry the story of the Columbia River from the early nineteenth century to the 1990s. Chapter 1, “Knowing Nature through Labor: Energy, Salmon and Society on the Columbia,” examines the social organization of labor among Native Americans and early settlers. It also looks at salmon as part of the energy system of the river. Salmon captured, concentrated, and stored the energy of the sun during the ocean phase of their anadromous existence and brought it with them to the Columbia when they returned to spawn. Fish traps, gillnets, canneries, and hatcheries were among the technologies used by people to divert some of this living stream of energy to their own ends. Chapter 2, “Putting the River to Work,” assesses these and a range of other technologies that people used to enlist the river in the cause of progress. White emphasizes the ability of these people to appreciate both nature and machines. In so doing, he turns for inspiration to Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and philosopher of American capitalism, who “could simultaneously rejoice in the ability of the machine to subjugate and control nature and in the spiritual truth and inspiration that nature provided” (p. 35).

Chapter 3, “The Power of the River,” considers the damming and harnessing of the river to turbines and the transmission and wholesaling of power through a system created and administered by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The chapter explores the BPA’s turn to nuclear power at Hanford, and portrays the resulting Columbia as a fulfillment of Lewis Mumford’s eloquent call for a rational unity of nature and machine. The final chapter, “Salmon,” looks at the impact of hydroelectric dams on fish, using the plight of the salmon as a lens through which to examine a failed relationship between people and the Columbia.

The Organic Machine has much to offer anyone interested in the Columbia River and the complex interaction between technology, culture, energy, and environment. No book is perfect, of course; this one really needed a few good maps to guide the reader around the vast drainage of the Columbia and the power system of the BPA. Readers who want a detailed, monographic analysis of the Columbia might want to look elsewhere. But on balance this is a book with few flaws and a great deal going for it, not the least of which is its use of the details of the story to develop a framework for assessing, understanding, and interpreting the historical interplay between people and place.