Introductory comments and study questions for Richard White, The Organic Machine,
Chapter 3: “The Power of the River”
Early on in Richard White’s The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the
Columbia River, he lays out his general theory of understanding the relationship between
humans and nature generally, and humans and the Columbia River specifically when he
writes:
“Like us, rivers work. They absorb and emit energy; they rearrange the world. The
Columbia has been working for millennia….For much of human history, work and
energy have linked humans and rivers, humans and nature. But today, except when
disaster strikes, when a hurricane hits, or earthquakes topple our creations, or when a
river unexpectedly rises and sweeps away the results of our effort and labor, we forget the
awesome power—the energy—of nature. There is little in our day-to-day life to preserve
the connection. Machines do most of our work; we disparage physical labor and laborers.
The link between our work and nature’s work has weakened. We no longer understand
the world through labor. Once the energy of the Columbia River was felt in human bones
and sinews; human beings knew the river through the work the river demanded of them”
(4).
White is most concerned about the relationship between the river and humans, the way
their work and energy have worked against and worked for each others’ purpose—thus
the book’s title. As “an organic machine,” White presents the Columbia “as an energy
system which, although modified by human interventions, maintains its natural, its
‘unmade’ qualities” (ix). At the same time, he wants us to view humans as more a part of
nature—our “work,” our expending of energy, using the same general principles as the
river’s work.
White defines the river’s work as “erosion, transportation, and deposition of
matter.” Human work with, on and against the river has changed over time as the
individuals and cultures who interacted with the river have changed. The first two
chapter titles convey a clear sense of these different work relationships: Chapter 1,
“Knowing Nature through Labor: Energy, Salmon Society on the Columbia”; and
Chapter 2, “Putting the River to Work.” In the first chapter, White argues that early
white settlers and the existing Native tribes had to work with the river, to “know” it
thoroughly, especially the way it sought to expend energy in the most efficient way
possible. The new settlers, including the famed Lewis and Clark expedition and the
Astorian trading company men, had to learn to respect the river’s power or risk being
overwhelmed by it. Native tribes, with their centuries of experience on the river, knew it
intimately and shaped their cultures so that their energy expenditures and the river’s were
in sync. Thus the tremendous energy of the Columbia could be turned into a continual
bounty, especially by harvesting the salmon that grew fat off the energy of the sun in the
ocean before expending it in the river. Native tribes created complex sets of rituals and
practices to manage the bounty and work with the river’s energy and the spirits they
believed ultimately determined the fate of that bounty. When settler and Native cultures
came into contact in the nineteenth century, they began to contest each other about who
would control the energy and its benefits. This struggle was over power, which White
carefully separates from energy, while noting how the two are intertwined. But the most
important causative factor in the cultural exchange was not direct human energy,
intentional or otherwise, but disease microbes that Europeans had built some immunity
against but Native people had not. Most were wiped out because of the epidemics,
changing the mix of human cultures and how they interacted with the river.
The second chapter demonstrates how the new American culture organized
energy in different ways, especially using steam and coal power, which changed the
human-river relationship that had been established for centuries. In “putting the river to
work,” American entrepreneurs were not so much working with the river as directing it,
forcing it to yield the products of its energy in a manner that fit their needs. These new
machines “masked human labor as thoroughly as they masked nature.” At the same time,
they “created new opportunities for labor” (32). These new opportunities also lead to
divisions by race, class, and gender as different workers—Chinese, white laborers,
women domestic laborers and prostitutes, etc.—were given different places on the river
and differing access to power. Locomotives, canneries and steam ships greatly expanded
the capacity to use the river’s salmon, creating waves of workers from different cultures
using a variety of ever-more sophisticated means of catching fish. Soon, they were
taking more fish then the river could sustain, severely impacting the salmon populations.
Logging and grazing practices further damaged the salmon’s habitat and health. Again,
an unequal struggle for power to control the river’s bounty between different cultures,
different technologies, different classes took place—the ultimate losers were the salmon
and the river, and then of course the fishermen and canneries themselves. A final attempt
to save the fisheries through the application of science, technology and management by
developing hatcheries —thought to be “superior” to nature—actually caused more
damage to the fish because of their lack of understanding of the river’s ways. White
contrasts this complete lack of understanding with the Native people’s intimate
understanding of the river that had sustained them for generations.
The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “amazingly facile reading of the natural
world” enabled many Americans to embrace progress and mechanization without
consciously rejecting their connection to nature. Emerson, who White labels “American
capitalism’s poet/philosopher,” argued that nature consisted of “enduring spiritual facts”
that connected what was best in the American spirit to Americans’ “natural” expression
of optimism—the machine. In Emerson’s view, the machine was not nature enemy but
its natural extension, transforming what was possible in nature into the reality of
improving human existence. White argues that capitalists embraced this view but
rejected the connection to work that Emerson urged; instead, “capitalism could easily
embrace an Emersonionism in which the machine put nature to work and reduced human
labor (35).”
The final stage of Americans’ disconnection with this intimate knowledge came
with the damming of the river. As inventors came to understand how to harness and store
electricity, some entrepreneurs looked to the vast energy in rivers like the Columbia to
supply massive amounts of power. After World War I, industrialists and government
planners created a system of moving large quantities of electricity through high voltage
transmission lines. The system then fed the growing industrialization and urban
populations. This time the power struggle was first between the capitalists who wanted
to control the energy to maximize profits and reform-minded “Progressive” politicians
and planners who argued for the “public good,” and also between a range of interests—
farmers, city boosters, and shipping companies—who saw a variety of uses for the water,
including irrigation, transportation and land reclamation. Then with the Great Depression
in the 1930s, the Progressives got the upper hand, guided by the work of the philosopher
Lewis Mumford, who saw in the public control of energy the triumph of “independence
and decentralization” over “monopoly and concentration” (56). Progressives, aided by
local boosters who hoped for an economic renaissance in the Grand Coulee district,
helped launch the Grand Coulee Dam project, which is the focus on Chapter Three, “The
Power of the River.”
Study Questions for Chapter Three
White argues, “we have not killed the river…we have not raped the river…we have
disappointed ourselves.” What does he mean by this? Do you agree with his analysis?
Who is “we” and why does he use this pronoun?
On what basis did people and groups considering the Grand Coulee Dam project make
connections between the project and nature? What were the metaphors and images they
used? How accurate did they turn out to be?
White claims that Mumford’s vision of harnessing the Columbia’s energy to create a
better world “seems naïve and circular” (68). Describe the basic contradiction that White
sees in Mumford’s thinking. Do you agree? What is missing in Mumford’s plans?
How did the Columbia Basin Project eventually conform more to the capitalists’
Emersonian perspective than to Mumford’s utopian vision of “decentralization and
independence?” What groups were able to gain power so that they determined where the
Columbia’s energy would be utilized. Who gained and who lost?
White claims, “aluminum hijacked the river” (73). What does he mean by this statement?
What or who is “aluminum” and who/what did it hijack the river from? What might have
been some alternative uses of the river if it had not been “hijacked” in this way?
How did the BPA’s estimates for the perceived energy needs of the Northwest shape the
transformation of the Columbia and its tributaries? How did the logic of energy needs
and revenue generation extend the impact of the project beyond the American Northwest
into Canada and California? How did the natural capacities of the river interact with this
logic and cause further change on the Columbia? Does White present the possibility that
any of these choices might have been challenged, or does it appear inevitable? How
would you assess his argument?
White writes that Hanford “created then blurred distinctions between the natural and
unnatural” (84). At the same time, he sees the nuclear reservation and its interaction with
the river as fundamental break from the Emersonian understanding of the machine as an
extension of nature. How was nuclear power on the Columbia both natural and
unnatural? What were the continuities and what had changed in the human relationship
with the river? Who gained and who lost, and who was responsible for the gains and
losses? Do you think it was worth it?