Environmental Engineering Reference
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contingent and accidental environments complicate our world and blur
even further the lines between the cultural and the natural. 7
There is a truth in the line of thinking (descended from Jefferson and
Emerson and maintained by Mumford) that has refused to draw sharp lines
between the human, the technological, and the natural, but it has not, at
least recently, proved to be a particularly useful truth. It needs rethinking.
Its problems are threefold. The first two are practical. First, in its oldest
forms it sees human technologies as simply natural processes in a new form.
Much has been gained by this refusal to separate the human and the natu-
ral, but it blinded Jefferson and Emerson to environmental damage. Second,
in its more modern statements, this view recognizes environmental damage
from bad human technologies, but it still identifies good human technolo-
gies with nature.They mimic natural processes. But mimicking nature has,
on the Columbia, often produced significant environmental problems.The
last problem is more conceptual. Although this line of thinking refuses to
sever the connections between the human, the technological, and the nat-
ural, it treats technology as a capstone that sits atop the natural world. But
in the modern world, at least at the scales on which historians operate, this
is a difficult thing to do. Good technology is not icing on nature's cake; the
technical has melted and blended down into the cake itself. Separating the
two is not only difficult, it might be undesirable.
I am talking here about an idea that, I must admit, I am getting tired of—
hybridity—but it still has some miles left in it. It is an idea, but not a word,
that I used in my own work on the Columbia River, where the dams, the
irrigation system, and the power networks have become what I call an
organic machine. Machines don't just sit atop natural systems. Machines at
once modify, become part of, and depend upon natural systems. Lines blur.
Similar ideas appear in the work of Bruno Latour, but perhaps the clear-
est expression of what I am after appears in the work of the French geog-
rapher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre, for example, describes a modern house
and its street as a seemingly localized expression of human work and tech-
nical skill. Both have an air of stability and immovability. They would seem
to personify the human and the local. But, Lefebvre writes, “critical analy-
sis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity of this house, strip-
ping it, as it were, of its concrete slabs, and its thin non-load bearing walls,
which are really glorified screens, and uncovering a very different picture.
In the light of this imaginary analysis, our house would emerge as perme-
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