Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [12]
Furthermore, the knowledge paid dividends. The new turbines that Francis helped design and test roughly doubled the horsepower that could be extracted from the same amount of falling water, which allowed Lowell and other waterpowered mills to remain competitive with the increasingly steam-powered regions of the country.5
It might have been a wonder of the age, but some, like Henry David Thoreau, didn’t find the damming of the river or the clattering of the machines to count much as progress. Thoreau’s 1849 book about a canoe trip he took ten years before on the Merrimack and Concord rivers impugns the Lowell factories for destroying the fisheries: “Salmon, shad, and alewives were formerly abundant here, and taken in weirs by the Indians,” but changes to the river, especially the factories and their waterworks, had destroyed the continuity of its living systems.6
Thus, Lowell’s cleanliness did not come without ecological consequences. The entire Merrimack river system was transformed into a hydraulic machine for the purpose of making cloth. As a result, fish stocks suffered, particularly sturgeon, when spawning runs were obstructed. Unlike older dams, the new industrial ones were much more difficult for fish to navigate: The split between natural and human uses of the waterway tilted precipitously toward the latter.7 In the 1860s and 1870s the Boston Associates even explicitly took on the responsibility of managing the naturalized system they had created, attempting to replenish the fish stocks of the Merrimack.8 Thoreau would deride humans’ attempts to help the fish along as “phil-anthropy,” emphasizing the human-centered framework it implied.9 If Thoreau felt the Lowell factories had destroyed nature, what could he possibly have thought of Etzler’s similar, more grandiose plans?
As luck would have it, Ralph Waldo Emerson recommended that Thoreau review an obscure, almost ten-year-old book by an odd German who was bent on transforming the world with renewable energy. Thoreau titled his review of Etzler’s book, “Paradise (To Be) Regained.” In it, Thoreau immediately attacks Etzler’s desire to make the whole country “a garden,” sensing in the man no sense that the “unimproved” world should be respected. Thoreau then asked,
And it becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content. Could he not heighten the tints of flowers and the melody of birds? Does he perform his duty to the inferior races? Should he not be a god to them?”10
To Thoreau, nature knows best. In comparison, humans are mere dissemblers and bumblers. How could broken people fix nature? In response, contemporary historians Robin Linstromberg and James Ballowe wrote, “The essence of Thoreau’s critique of Etzler’s Utopia was that Etzler put the cart before the horse. Etzler wished to harness nature to man’s work before man had succeeded in harnessing himself.”11
As such, we can see Thoreau laying one of the foundations for the ethic of the environmental movement: It’s people’s relationship to themselves and nature that must change in order to solve environmental problems. Technological fixes are destined to fail because the problem is humans and their social relations; improved means put to unimproved ends yield only mass unimprovement.
In one section, Etzler imagined a proto-food factory in which “one or two persons” cook for the masses with “nothing else to do but to superintend the cookery, and to watch the time