Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment 1850–1915 by Michael L. Smith

Abstract

498 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment 1850—1915. By Michael L. Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 243; illustrations, notes, index. $26.50. The interaction between technology and nature in America has been a theme of special interest to environmental historians during the last two decades. Hans Huth, Roderick Nash, Donald Worster, Peter J. Schmitt, Barbara Novack, Carolyn Merchant, Nathan Rein­ gold, and others have touched on the subject. But, while the effect of technology and industrial change has been especially profound in the American West, few writers have as yet tackled this enormously com­ plex topic directly. Michael Smith makes a good beginning with his monograph on California scientists and the environment from 1850 to 1915. Smith places his analysis in a broad and suggestive context. He notes that Freud once observed that the most influential contributions of the sciences to human thought were to challenge prevailing anthro­ pocentric myths. In astronomy, the Galilean Revolution banished the Earth as the physical center of the universe. In biology, the Darwinian Revolution dispelled the notion that human beings were the biological center ofcreation. The Freudian Revolution destroyed the myth about the rationality of the human mind. A Geological Revolution revealed the Earth’s vast age and diminished the significance of the recent past. Smith suggests that an Ecological Revolution has been developing in the past few decades that questions “the scientific, economic, and social assumptions underlying extractive capitalism’s definition of nature as a storehouse of commodities to fuel the ever expanding engines of progress” (p. 2). The scientists of post—Gold Rush California were caught up in these revolutions, particularly the Darwinian and Geo­ logical varieties, and stood on the threshold of the Ecological Revo­ lution as they sought to reconcile the patterns of nature they found in their new home with contemporary technological developments. In that effort, Smith notes, they became the West’s “first interpreters of the social implications of ecological thought” (p. 3). Within this broad theme, Smith provides an interesting account of California’s first generation of scientists, almost all working in the northern part of the state. In nine succinct chapters, he describes their initial arrival in the West and the work of prominent figures like Josiah Whitney, Joseph Le Conte, and John Muir in laying the foundations. Their work in deciphering the new environment involved scores of talented scientists and naturalists such as Clarence King, William M. Gabb, William H. Brewer, and George Davidson. Smith also provides a good analysis of emerging scientific institutions and science patrons in California such as the California Academy of Sciences, the State Geological Survey, and the new universities at Berkeley and Palo Alto. Most of the scientists became involved in environmental reform move­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 499 ments, particularly as evidenced by their organization of the Sierra Club in 1892. Smith concludes his monograph with a discussion of the PanamaPacific Exposition of 1916 that celebrated the industrial progress of the Pacific Coast and dramatized the enormous changes that tech­ nology had brought to California’s pristine landscape in little more than half a century. This is a well written and interesting volume that focuses on the human dimensions of the broad changes that swept California. Much of the material presented here is quite familiar to specialists in the Held, but Smith has placed it in a suggestive context. And he raises major questions that invite further exploration in the future. To what degree were science and technology as practiced in California differ­ ent from developments in the East? Historians interested in the effect of technology on the environment of the West will find this a most stimulating work. Gerald D. Nash Dr. Nash is Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. His books include State Government and Economic Development: California, ¡850—1933 (Berke­ ley, 1964) and The American West in the Twentieth Century (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973). His next book, to be published bv the University of Nebraska Press, is World War H and the Wes/: Reshaping the Economy. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth ofAmerican Research Universities, 1900— 1940. By Roger...