Artistic and Scholarly Approaches to Engineered Environments

introduction Manufacturing landscapes: Artistic and scholarly approaches to engineered environments

Helmuth Trischler

ost scholars working in the field of environmental humanities in general and of environmental history in particular agree in understanding large parts of nature as altered by humans. The landscapes that we are faced with today are culturally constructed environments, most often industrialised landscapes, shaped by human interventions in one way or the other over thousands of years. Scientists, who are trained to define human introduction interventionsM into nature in a more rigorous way, have assessed that less than a mere one-quarter of the Earth’s ice-free land masses is still in a more-or-less ‘natural’ state, i.e., largely untouched by human activities. Hence, landscapes are human made, they are manufactured. In his works, the renowned Canadian photographer and filmmak- er Edward Burtynsky* has used the lens of his camera to reveal a nature altered by humans. Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ depict mines and quarries, oil fields and salt pans, factories and shipbreaking yards, railcuts and dams, irrigation schemes and aquacultures, homesteads and urban centres, agricultural fields and river deltas. His connected series of pictures are deeply rooted in the photography tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the industrial landscape reflects the aesthetics of the sublime; at the same time, he has ‘vigorously refo-

* Photographs © Edward Burtynsky, Courtesy Galerie Springer Berlin / Nich- olas Metiver Gallery, Toronto. Figure 1. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Colorado River Delta #2, Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico, 2011’. Due to human interventions the river delta has not seen any water from the river over decades and is now a desert. The photo also serves as the cover image of the multiple award-winning documentary Watermark by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky, released in 2013.

cused and extended’ this tradition by forcefully stressing the human impact upon the environment.1 Burtynsky understands his images as ‘metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attrac-

1 Mark Hayworth-Booth, ‘Edward Burtynsky: Traditions and affinities,’ in: Lori Pauli (ed.), Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada / Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 34–39, here 38. – I’m very grateful to Brenda Black for her comments and her invaluable editorial support. Special thanks go to Don Worster for all his support in making this special issue happen.

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 6 Figure 2. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Oil Fields #27, Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004’. For Burtynsky oil serves ‘as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of our habitat’.

tion and repulsion, seduction and fear’. His artwork points to the uneasy contradiction that we are ‘drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success’.2 In 2006, Burtynsky complemented his numerous photographs of engineered nature with a film that followed him to China as he trav- elled the country documenting the transformation of the environment

2 Edward Burtynsky, ‘Exploring the Residual Landscape’, http://www.edward- burtynsky.com/site_contents/About/introAbout.html GE7 through massive industrialisation.3 The prize-winning documentary, again entitled Manufactured Landscapes, extends the narrative of Bur- tynsky’s photographs into the genre of moving images, making it possible to explore even further the complexity of human interventions into nature by means of technology. China’s oscillation between tradition and rapid industrial modernisation proved to be a perfect case to reflect on the multiple natures of manufactured landscapes. We followed Burtynsky to China and borrowed from his works, although in a slightly modified version, when we held our fourth international environmental history conference on the campus of Renmin University in Beijing in May 2015. Backed with financial support from Renmin’s Center for Ecological History and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, the conference ‘Manufacturing Landscapes – Nature and Technol- ogy in Environmental History’ hosted 25 speakers, about a third of them from China and the others from Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Republic of South Korea, Sweden and the United States, along with moderators and an engaged audience. But if we leaned on Burtynsky for our conference title, we were open to exploring new ways and innovative approaches to better understand the history and presence of engineered environments. The concept proved fruitful for scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines, as the contributions collected in this volume show. Roughly speaking, the types of landscapes explored fall into three main categories, although the boundaries often blur and overlap: agricultural landscapes, in which the needs of particular crops create distinctive ecological systems; chemical landscapes, in which pol- lutants from human activities such as mining and industry leave toxic and lasting traces in the surrounding water, soil and air; and engineered landscapes, in which humans reshape waterways, cut into hills and bridge valleys to build power stations or expand trans- port infrastructure. The contributors draw on insights from genet- ics, ecology, the history of science, economics and politics to shed light on the way these landscapes arise, and more importantly, the

3 Manufactured Landscapes, dir. Jennifer Baichwal (Canada, 2006), 90 mins.

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 8 factors that influence their change over time, whether this is a shift from a predominantly rural society to an industrialised one, or from a planned economy to a market-based one. They also make clear that the role of nature in this process is not necessarily passive – frequently in seeking to control other organisms we find ourselves adapting to their needs, or we discover that natural processes do not function in quite the way we expected. These unanticipated consequences create a tension that runs through this volume. Textile production is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest industries, one that blends plant and animal husbandry with manufacturing in a particularly striking way. Much has been written about the cotton gin and its role in both the Industrial Revolution and the politics and society of the early United States. In China, silk has been no less important and, as Edmund Russell argues in his contribution to this volume, the silk industry is the result of a coevolutionary partner- ship between mulberry trees, silkworms and humans that altered landscapes and enabled people in east Asia to create complex socie- ties marked by gender divisions and social hierarchies. As Russell has shown in earlier publications, by adapting plants and animals to do work for people, breeders have been fashioning biotechnologies for thousands of years.4 Similarly, silkworms and mulberry trees evolved traits that benefited themselves. People capi- talised on those traits, and intensified their expression through do- mestic relationships. People pushed the evolution of silkworms and mulberries in new directions to maximise their economic value. This story demonstrates the fruitfulness of Russell’s concept of evolutionary history, both in a heuristic sense to generate novel questions and in an analytical sense to allow for innovative interpretations. By uniting history and biology, two fields that have long faced in different directions, this approach creates a fuller understanding of the past than either field can produce on its own. The concept acknowledges that humans have become a biological agent shaping evolution, and

4 Edmund Russell, ‘Coevolutionary history’, The American Historical Review 119/5 (2014): 1514–1528; Edmund Russell, ‘Evolutionary history: Prospectus for a new field’,Environmental History 8/2 (2003): 204–228. GE9 human-induced evolution in other species has probably been the most important force shaping human history.5 Here, we learn how silk cultivation led to the creation of a characteristic physical landscape in lowland areas of China: the mulberry and fish pond system. Mulberry trees are planted on embankments surrounding artificial ponds that together form a self-sustaining nutrient cycle: The silkworm waste provides food for the fish, and the nutrient-rich mud at the bottom of the ponds becomes fertiliser for the mulberry trees. China has undergone rapid industrialisation in the last several decades, a process that has disrupted many of the country’s traditional agricultural systems and brought with it significant challenges. Mov- ing inland, Yang Wenjun takes us to northern and eastern China and explores another traditional landscape, one in which straw was once a key element of the rural economy. A by-product of the cultivation of grains such as rice, wheat and maize, straw was valued as a source of fuel, fertiliser and fodder. Straw was also a visually dominant presence in the landscape: it was used for a variety of construction pur- poses, such as fencing and roofing material, as well as various everyday items (woven mats and hats), and it was not uncommon to see heaps of straw mixed with manure to decompose and spread on the fields. Today, however, large-scale urbanisation and rapid industrialisation have drastically changed the energy structure of rural areas. Bio-fuels such as straw have been replaced by fossil fuels, and, likewise, artificial feed and fertilisers have substituted straw. Straw has come to be considered a waste material rather than a resource. Farmers now burn this misplaced resource in order to clear the fields for the next crop. The pervasive open-air burning of straw has in turn manufactured another type of landscape: one dominated by smoke and smog. This air pollution problem affects not only the countryside but also distant cities, leading to new tensions in China’s longstanding fragile balance between the country and the city.6

5 Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Under- stand Life on Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 6 See also the special issue edited by Agnes Kneitz, ‘The Country and the City’. Special issue, Global Environment 9/1 (2016).

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 10 In China, intensive, mechanised agriculture has played a large part in the transformation of straw from a resource to waste. As well as dramatically altering material cycles and farming methods, industrial agriculture has also had significant impacts on the genetic diversity of crops. While human-guided evolutionary selection, as Russell’s article shows, generally involves reduction in the genetic diversity of a cultivated variety in order to select for specific desirable traits, industrial agriculture has greatly accelerated this trend. The Food and Ag- ricultural Organization (FAO) has estimated that three-thirds of the global agricultural crop diversity has already been lost.7 Anyone who has driven across the Great Plains of the western United States is likely to be familiar with the monotony of the flat landscape covered with seemingly endless fields of maize, sunflowers or wheat. The monocropped landscape is also a reflection of a genescape that has been largely altered by human intervention. In her contribution to this volume, Helen Anne Curry explores this genescape and the debate about the loss of local maize varieties that began in the United States as early as the 1930s. In this story, technology plays a truly ambivalent role: high-tech farming based on heavy machinery and refined techno-scientific methods of interventions into nature helped to create engineered environments that left little room for crop diversity. And yet, as Curry points out, industrial agriculture was dependent on the very genetic diversity that it tended to destroy by its mode of production. To solve this problem, scientists turned again to technology: to fight the destruction of living biodiversity they often promoted new technological solutions such as seed banks. Curry portrays these seed banks as modern fortresses built to defend industrial crop varieties from the hazards generated by their own successes. Industrialised farming has also encouraged another practice that has had major effects on ecosystems and the adaptation and survival of organisms: monocropping with largely genetically homogeneous cultivars makes the crops more susceptible to pests and disease, in many cases necessitating the large-scale use of insectides. Frederick R.

7 FAO, Harvesting Nature’s Diversity, chapter 3: ‘Biodiversity to nurture people’, http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/v1430e/V1430E04.htm (accessed 6 Dec. 2016). GE11 Figure 3. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Pivot Irrigation #1, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2011’. Pivot irrigation – a common feature of industrial agriculture in arid and semi- arid regions – creates characteristic circular patterns in the landscape when viewed from above.

Davis’s contribution to this volume traces the engineering labour of agricultural chemists through time, from a reliance on ‘natural’ insecticides derived from plants with phytotoxic properties to a gradual shift to synthetically produced insecticides during the second third of the twentieth century, before starting to switch to biotechnological solutions in the century’s last decades. Revisiting Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring from 1962 and its warning cry about this paradigm shift in chemistry and its fatal consequences for ecosystems and wildlife, humans and nature alike,8 Davis reframes the phenomenon of pesti-

8 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 12 Figure 4. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Densified Oil Drums #4, Ham- ilton, Ontario 1997’. Burtynsky’s photo captures the efforts to cope with the abundance of waste and to turn urban waste back into a resource. Large recycling yards are de- veloping into ever more important secondary mines.

cide use in the larger context of the contemporary debate about the Anthropocene – the proposal that for some time, humans have not just been manufacturing particular landscapes at a superficial level, but leaving their mark on the natural systems of the entire globe and deep within the geological record of our era.9

9 The current debate about the Anthropocene as the ‘age of humans’ started from a different angle. Humans, atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen suggested, have become a powerful geological force, so much so that it is necessary to designate a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in order to accurately describe this development. Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature 415/51 (2002): 23. While the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy is GE13 While Davis’s story focuses on the United States, the so-called Green Revolution was a global transfer of techno-scientific knowledge developed by scientists in industrialised nations. Large-scale farming based on high-tech machines, specially developed cultivars and the ubiquitous use of synthetic insecticides manifested in engineered environments not just in the Global North but also in the Global South, in India and Brasil, China and Kenya, for example. The growth of chemical fertilisers and pesticides likewise accelerated the release of carbon dioxide, phosphorus and methane into the at- mosphere and environment – a global pattern known as the ‘Great Acceleration’. Along with the worldwide loss of biodiversity, synthetic pesticides are thus among the most significant markers that date the beginning of the Anthropocene. It is perhaps unsurprising that Edward Burtynsky, whose work has focused so much on the landscapes created by humans, has also drawn inspiration from the concept of the Anthropocene. Together with filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, he is currently working on a documentary titled Anthropocene that is projected for release in autumn 2018. During its travels around the world, the team is documenting the most profound evidence of humanity’s planetary impact. This is a recurring theme in Burtynsky’s work, which often depicts scenes of the toxic wastelands left by human industry, whether rusting metal parts in landfills, the debris left behind by oil production or landscapes created by mining and chemical manufacturing. One such visible post-industrial landscape can be seen today in the ‘chemical triangle’ formed by the cities Merseburg, Bitterfeld and Halle in Saxony-Anhalt, once infamous as one of the most polluted areas in currently evaluating possible markers and periodisations of the new epoch, scholars from numerous other disciplines have taken up the Anthropocene as a cultural concept. For historians being involved in the Anthropocene debate means nothing less than facing the challenge of critically examining established stories and discourses and scrutinising the theoretical, methodological and conceptual foundations of historical research. See Helmuth Trischler, ‘The Anthropocene – A challenge for the history of science, technology, and the environment’, N.T.M. – Journal of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine 24/3 (2016): 309–335, and Christophe Bon- neuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (London and New York: Verso, 2016).

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 14 Figure 5. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Mines #19, Westar Open Pit Coal Mine. Sparwood, British Columbia, Canada, 1985’. In his series ‘Mines’, Burtynsky documents the insatiable human appetite for the world’s raw materials. The excava- tion machines used to manufacture such landscapes are some of the largest land vehicles in the world, yet here they appear miniscule – a measure of the enormous scale of the mine. The open brown coal pit mines that were operated to serve the Bitterfeld chemistry complex left similar deep wounds in the region’s landscape.

socialist East Germany. Bitterfeld in particular has developed into a lieu de mémoire, an environmental site of memory.10 Sandra Chaney’s contribution to this volume explores how three different political systems brought about transformations of this landscape in the name of modernisation over the course of the twentieth century. The National Social-

10 Cf. Frank Uekötter (ed.), ‘Environment and Memory’. Special issue, Global Environment, no. 11 (old series, 2013). GE15 ist regime had begun to develop this region in order to pursue economic autarchy by fostering synthetic chemistry; this industrial infrastructure proved a boon to the modernisation projects of East Germany and its centrally planned economy. Chaney suggests that a combination of the available natural resources, the socialist government’s lack of funds for investing in more modern (and cleaner) industries and a reliance on existing infrastructure contributed to the massive use of regional brown coal and the emergence of one of the globe’s most deteriorated, toxic and barren landscapes. After reunification, the German government an- swered the failed socialist modernisation with a different modernisation project that aimed to turn the region into an economically competitive but at the same time ecologically healthy landscape. Although the environment is now considerably cleaner, the toxins persist. While the case of Bitterfeld demonstrates the importance of government investment and funds in the success – or failure – of modernisation projects, it also suggests that the particular form of government is less decisive than the resources available to develop the industry. This impression is strengthened by turning our gaze to Russia, a country that shows strong continuities in its engineering programmes from the late Stalin period to the present. Here, the end of communism seems to have created only a temporary rupture, as Paul Josephson reveals in his article. He identifies the continuation of an ideology aimed at industrialising nature in order to safeguard the reigning political power’s superiority, both domestically and abroad. In this view, natural systems and resources are simply goods to be processed; nature is subsumed under an industrial ethos and treated as a commodity. Jo- sephson dates the intellectual roots of this ideology even further back, well into the Tsarist period. In doing so, he resonates with James C. Scott’s idea of an age of high modernism characterised by an unfalter- ing confidence in science and technology as a means of structuring nature and society – a modernist pattern of thinking and acting that originated in the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and became prevalent during the Cold War.11 In Rus-

11 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Scemes to Improve the Hu- man Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 16 Figure 6. Edward Burtynsky, ‘Railcuts #1, C.N. Track, Ski- hist Provincial Park, British Columbia 1985’. As the title of the series ‘Railcuts’ indicates, infrastructures such as railroads often mean deep cuts into landscapes. In con- trast to nineteenth-century railway photography, Burtyn- sky does not aim to present the beauty of the technological sublime but instead emphasises the confrontation between nature and technological infrastructures.

sia, this is characterised by a particular form of technological hubris – namely, a strong belief in the ability to engineer the environment for political and societal ends through brute force technologies. As Jo- sephson observes, today under President Vladimir Putin the managers and directors of Russian engineering, construction and resource ex- traction firms still believe in the importance of centralised state power to industrialise nature on a grand scale. The grand development schemes in Russian history such as Lenin’s (in)famous GOELRO plan for electrification from 1920 or the Stalin- GE17 ist project to redirect the Siberian rivers were large-scale infrastructure programmes. This connection between the construction of infrastructures such as waterways and ideas of social engineering are not unu- sual, as Thomas Zeller points out in his article. The push for expert planning in infrastructure often goes hand-in-hand with a desire to redesign the social world by means of technology. In melding environments and technologies, infrastructures are manufactured landscapes. Scholars working at the intersection of environmental history and history of technology have developed the conceptual approach of envirotechnical analysis to better understand the formation of manufactured landsacpes and engineered environments.12 In a case study of parkways, Zeller also points out how the early US highway system was designed with a view towards the scenic aspects of the landscape. Parkways were not initially built to manage the flow of large numbers of vehicles as efficiently and speedily as possible, but rather to support driving as a leisurely recreational activity. Thus, parkways not only physically structured the landscape in the form of the road network, they also manufactured a particular experience of nature as mediated through the windshield of one’s car. While governments have often played a major role in promoting the development of industry, infrastructure and large-scale engineering projects, government bodies have also frequently taken action to prevent or remediate environmental damages, whether in the form of restoration projects or environmental legislation. But this always oc- curs as part of a complex interplay between scientists, representatives of industry and political decision-making, as Craig Colten reveals in his paper. Taking the example of groundwater pollution resulting from industrial waste disposal, Colten uses this case study to develop a deeper understanding of the transformative process in which business managers developed their place in industrialised ecosystems and negotiated the use of resources. Colten reviews heterogeneous bodies of scientific, technical, legal and economic literature to ex-

12 See Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe (eds),The Illusory Boundary: En- vironment and Technology in History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 18 plore the prevailing knowledge about the environmental processes that operated in waste disposal settings. He identifies a significant change in the 1980s, when experts on industrial waste management expanded and refined their understanding of the effects of chemical wastes in the subterranean environment. The paper shows how historically informed studies on scientific, political, economic and cultural patterns to cope with waste are able to offer deep insights into past and present transformations in environment and society.13 This special issue starts with two articles on manufactured landscapes in Chinese history. It comes full circle by closing with Mao Da’s article on engineered environments in present day China, or to be more precise, in Beijing, one of the largest megacities in the world and home of Renmin University, where the conference took place. People in Beijing are well aware of the heavy air pollution from which they suffer, particularly during the many days of the year when skies are invisible because of smog from traffic and heavy industry. What urban dwellers and tourists are usually less aware of is another threat to their health: the dioxin pollution resulting from municipal solid waste incineration. While Colten traced a story of government regulation and industries gradually taking on responsibility for the waste and pollution they create, in other cases grassroots activism and public discussion have impelled industries to change their practices. And sometimes, the attempt to deal with waste has itself created new challenges and new forms of toxic landscapes. When solid waste incineration became a novel technological solution to the expanding waste problem in Eu- rope during the 1970s and 1980s, city authorities experienced heated controversies. An unexpectedly well-informed public asked critical questions about issues which seemed to be relevant for scientific ex-

13 See Christof Mauch (ed.), ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Politics and Cul- ture of Waste’, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, no. 1; Christof Mauch (ed.), ‘A Future without Waste? Zero Waste in Theory and Practice’, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, no. 3; Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler (eds), Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2016); Jens Kersten (ed.), Inwastement: Abfall in Umwelt und Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016). GE19 perts only, such as on the toxicity of substances like polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin (PCDD) or dibenzofuran (PCDF). The controversy over dioxin marks the formation of a knowledge society in which science and the public have become ever more tightly connected. Today, in mainland China of the early twenty-first century, a similar process is happening as this urbanising nation turns increasingly to municipal waste incineration as an answer to both its garbage and its energy needs. As Mao Da shows, government officials and industrial managers have been surprised to encounter opposition from an attentive public that supports its arguments with the help of a well-informed scientific baseline. The debate is taking place in many arenas, including the mass media, and it involves numerous citizen groups, environmental NGOs and independent experts from China as well as abroad. The anti-incineration movement in China her- alds the rise of a relatively new phenomenon in the construction of knowledge called ‘citizen science’. Aided by critical scientific experts, citizens inform themselves about the inherent risks of large technological systems such as waste incineration and become specialists in scientific issues such as dioxin pollution. As they do so, they create another kind of manufactured landscape: one that is constructed, experienced, and negotiated by means of knowledge and ideas, and is as much a cultural entity as it is a physical one. To conclude: The contributions in this special issue offer a broad spectrum of approaches that allows us to better understand the formation and change of manufactured landscapes. The articles show- case how merging concepts from environmental history and history of technology allows us to ask new questions and offers novel ways of understanding the complex connections between environment and society. The picture provided here is far from complete; however, it does point to a dynamically evolving field of scholarship that will hopefully help us to understand the world around us – a world in which human-made technologies to manipulate nature and manufacture landscapes continue to grow rapidly.

INTRODUCTION / TRISCHLER 20