Mastering the Earth

The story of how the Germans attempted to control their environment, told by David Blackbourn in his book The Conquest of Nature, is similar to many other environmental histories that took place in other parts of the globe. Johann Gottfried Tulla, the engineer known as the father of the modern Rhine, reminded me of William Mulholland, chief engineer and general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the man who brought water from the Owens Valley, in California, into Los Angeles, in 1913. It seems to me that human history repeats itself. Owens Valley was once an area filled with orchards and fields and people who live there today still talk about the old days before Mulholland’s project turned their valley into a desert. Similarly, according to Blackbourn’s account, around the 1900, after Tulla had remade the Upper Rhine, one would find the great naturalist Robert Lauterborn deploring the losses of fauna and flora of his beloved river in Germany much like his predecessors, who had told stories about a world which had been lost. These accounts show that there was some longing for the Upper Rhine region prior to Tulla’s project as well as for the Owens Valley prior to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Apparently both, Tulla and Mulholland, had bought into Jeremy Bentham ’s philosophy of utilitarianism at the time. Bentham coined the phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Tulla and Mulholland were most likely thinking of the greatest good for the greatest number of people when they carried out their projects. Utilitarianism was at the forefront of many projects that dealt with natural resources. It is said that Gifford Pinchot, the first man in charge of the newly created Forest Service in the United States, also adhered to this belief. He even added a few words to Bentham’s phrase in his mission statement. He supposedly wrote: “Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.”

Neither Tulla nor Mulholland anticipated the consequences of their projects. They were both attempts to control nature, which had losses and benefits that are hard to unscramble (to use one of Blackbourn’s word). Nature was an adversary that could be tamed and conquered and humans had the ingenuity to do so. They had at their side an extraordinary ally: science. Blackbourn explains that the emphasis on science in the 19th century was typical of the age. The notion of progress was embraced not only by physical and natural sciences, but also by humanities and social sciences. During the 19th century anthropologists were embracing cultural evolutionism. The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) had coined the term “cultural evolutionism”, which envisioned human societies as evolving along a common track from simple to complex. For Spencer, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, evolution pervaded the inorganic as well as the organic realm. In England, Edward Burnett Tylor published Primitive Culture (1871), and, in the United States, Lewis Henry Morgan published Ancient Society (1877), both adopting cultural evolutionism as their theoretical framework. Thus, the taming of the Rhine, the construction of canals, dams, shipyards, harbors, and railways in Germany in the late 19th century and early 20th century took place within a context that favored human beings mastering the Earth and controlling nature. This “outburst of cultural confidence” is what Blackbourn calls “imperialism of imagination” (177). Being intimidated by nature meant going backwards at a time when the notion of progress was interviewed with the belief that human culture was on a path forward (cultural evolution), an ethnocentric framework that most certainly validated all these projects to control nature. The right path to take was to evolve forward, which meant many things, including mastering the Earth.

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Neda Bezerra
Geographically-Integrated History Laboratory
Historical Resources Management
Idaho State University
Pocatello, ID.