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they have been empowered . . . to take control of ecologically imperilled rivers
that have been harnessed for decades to stop floods, irrigate farms and gener-
ate power. Instead of demolishing dams, they are using them to manipulate
river flows in a way that mimics the seasonal heartbeat of a natural water-
way. Scientists have discovered that a spring rise and a summer ebb can give
endangered fish, birds and vegetation a chance to survive in a mechanized
river.” Here, then, we have a recognition within science and engineering that
domination and enframing is not the one best way of proceeding, that we
have other options, that it can be better to go with the flow—of water, time,
and the seasons. Much of the Midwest of the United States was under water
a hundred years ago. It was drained and converted to farmland by straighten-
ing the rivers and digging ditches to feed them. Now there is a “movement
afoot to undo some of draining's damage,” damage which includes wrecking
entire ecosystems and wiping out enormous populations of fish and birds.
“Even letting a short section of a ditch or channelized stream 'do what occurs
naturally' and not maintain it can be very beneficial to fish and other wildlife.”
“This is science in its infancy,” a geography professor is quoted as saying. “It's
a mixture of science and trial-and-error. We're good in ways we can command
and control a stream. We're not good at figuring out ways to make it a complex
system in which nature can function” (Pringle 2002).
More positively, if the Army Corps of Engineers acts in a command-and-
control mode, there also exists a field called adaptive environmental manage-
ment which aims instead to explore and pay attention to the performative
potential of rivers. Its stance toward nature, as in the above quotation, is ex-
perimental. Asplen (2008) gives the example of experimental floods staged
on the Colorado River, in which scientists monitor the ecological transforma-
tions that occur when large quantities of water are released from an upstream
dam—as a way of exploring the
possibilities
for environmental management,
rather than trying simply to dictate to nature what it will look like.
12
Here in
the heartland of modern engineering, then, we find emerging a nonmodern
stance of revealing rather than enframing, which we can assimilate to the
overall nonmodern assemblage that I have been sketching out.
13
Where does this leave us? This latest list is another way of trying to foster
the idea that modernity is not compulsory, that there are other ways of go-
ing on that make sense and are worth taking seriously—an attempt to put
together a more encompassing gestalt than that assembled in earlier chapters,
which can offer a bigger “quantitative” challenge to the hegemony of moder-
nity (Pickering 2009). This in turn, of course, raises the question of why we
should start with cybernetics in the first place? Two answers are possible. One
