The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000 (review)

Probably no river in the world has engendered such a flood of books, reports, poetry, songs, and works of art as the Rhine. As Western Europe's premier river; as real and imagined frontier between principalities, nations, and empires; as military barrier; and as corridor of civilization and commerce, the Rhine has been a perennial object of mythical, aesthetic, scholarly, and practical reflection since Roman times. It might seem that nothing remains to be said, but Mark Cioc's "eco-biography" of this great river proves otherwise.

This is the first comprehensive account of the fate of the Rhine at the prolix hands of modernity. After an initial chapter describing the physical features of the Rhine watershed and the river's annual flow-regime, Cioc goes on to detail the process by which the river has been gradually transformed from a braided, island-ridden, flood-prone, fish-rich, biodiverse, marshy, and unpredictable natural stream into a straightened, confined, controlled, polluted, bridged, dammed, urbanized, and industrialized corridor of modernity. He takes a generous view of environmental history and in successive chapters shows how river engineering, coal and steel production, and finally the chemical and hydroelectric industries all contributed to destroying the Rhine as past generations knew it. The final two chapters are devoted to making up the ecological balance in terms of the loss of biodiversity and to an account of efforts undertaken since the 1970s to restore the Rhine to a semblance of its preindustrial self.

This is an impressive book. Cioc provides rich technical and historical detail on all facets of the Rhine's ecological demise: river engineering, flood control, shipping, coal mining, steelmaking, the chemical industry and its effluents, sewage treatment, riverine ecosystems, hydroelectricity, and even fish ladders. The third and fourth chapters are especially compelling, perhaps because the focus on specific projects and geographical sites allows for a more narrative style. In chapter 3 Cioc describes the nineteenth-century reengineering of the river at the behest of different German riparian powers: first Johann Gottfried Tulla's "improvement" of the upper Rhine for purposes of flood control and land reclamation, then Eduard Adolph Nobiling's projects on the middle Rhine aimed at facilitating navigation, especially through the "romantic" Rhine gorge between Mainz and Bonn. Chapter 4 is about the advent of coal mining and steel production on the Rhine and its ramified environmental effects. Here, in a pathbreaking account, Cioc zooms in on the hydrological reconstruction of the Westphalian coal and steel region by coalitions of industry and local government. The requirements of industries and municipalities were met by dint of a constructed division of labor among the three Rhine tributaries flowing through the region: the Ruhr became a freshwater conduit, the Lippe a feeder for canals, and the Emscher was transformed into the common sewer. Though this solved the problems of water supply and disposal in the Ruhr region it did nothing for pollution on the lower Rhine, which was regarded by German industrialists (wrongly, as the downstream Dutch ceaselessly insisted) as an inexhaustible "ultimate sink."

The enormity of Cioc's topic—spanning nearly two hundred years of very eventful European history, more than 700 miles of river, and four riparian nations—has inevitably entailed some serious corner-cutting. One of the less felicitous shortcuts is the unreflexive use of an assumed "natural state" of the river as a benchmark for calibrating degrees of ecological damage, a strategy questioned by Richard White in his influential book on the Columbia River. This recourse to "nature" is well institutionalized in environmentalist politics and management, but it fails to do justice to the Rhine's protean history as a true "organic machine," or even to the "ecological" aspects of that history. The upshot is that Cioc's account, especially in its later chapters, sometimes reverts to inventories of injuries done to the river and their effects on its biological communities and the chemistry of its waters, as if these were self...