The “air thick with progress” and “water…at the heart of it all”

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In Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England , Theodore Steinberg uses a variety of strong verbs to describe how humans intervened in New England’s waterways. “Compelled by these plans to control the natural world, they developed the water, improved it for sale, and managed it with an eye toward its economic potential” (95). This sentence exhibits many of Steinberg’s verbs: controlled, developed, improved, and managed; others he employed throughout the book include dominated, manipulated, and tapped.

Besides displaying Steinberg’s varied diction, I bring up this issue of verbs because it troubled me. Throughout the book, I kept wondering why Steinberg did not ever write the word ‘used’ to refer to how New Englanders dealt with water. The closest any characters in this history come to just plain old using water are Native Americans, early white settlers who “used rivers at first to mark the periphery and limits of their land” (24), and settlers who established agricultural systems in the region. The compulsion to control marks the rest of the history of New England’s water in Steinberg’s view. I agree with his argument to an extent and see the validity of how industrialization shaped the rivers and streams (and how people thought about water as a resource), but I do wish he would have explicitly stated the difference between ‘using’ and ‘controlling’ water and showed ways in which that was possible.

Steinberg bookends his argument with the case of Henry David Thoreau who acts as a foil to industrializing New Englanders: both interact very differently with the same waterways. Thoreau’s account offers an enlightening cultural/artistic perspective, but does it help Steinberg’s argument? I think it mainly serves to create a dualism between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ uses of nature: one  is appreciative and the other  is exploitative. Neither provide an opportunity for a third way in which humans can use and not abuse the resource of water.

In Manish’s post, I find a similar concern to my own. He writes, “the relationship between man and nature is best when man demonstrates a balance. He can utilize nature as a resource for his own benefit but he must take caution for abuse of the land can lead nature to grave repercussions such as illness.” There probably are examples of ways in which this balance  occurred in nineteenth-century New England, but Steinberg chooses to focus on the transformative effects of industrialization. That is a legitimate focus because change is exciting and maybe history would be terribly boring without it.