Technology, Nature, and American Origin Stories

David E. Nye

DURING THE PAST decade, environmental historians have become interested in how narratives express values.1 Increasingly, they have realized that narrative is not merely a literary concern. People tell stories in order to make sense of their world, and some of the most frequently repeated narratives contain a society's basic assumptions about its relationship to the environment. To change our relationship with nature, therefore, we need to change our stories.	1
Carolyn Merchant, for example, has written about "reinventing Eden." Calling for a "partnership ethic" that "would bring humans and nonhuman nature into a dynamically balanced, more nearly equal relationship," she argued that a new ethic required a new narrative. This new story "would not accept the idea of subduing the earth, or even dressing and keeping the garden, since both entail total domestication and control by human beings. Instead, each earthly place would be a home, or community, to be shared with other living and nonliving things."2 Merchant's formulation suggests opposing narratives that express opposing values.	2
From this perspective, environmental history charts oppositions between different ethics, embodied in contrasting narratives that are rooted in incompatible conceptions of space. My own research suggests that one account of how Americans subdued the earth has been so widespread that it can be called a master narrative, which is to say that it defined the white entitlement to the land. White Americans long imagined that their history began in an Edenic new world, yet they charted the national story as continual technological improvement of that initial perfection. The master narrative slowly became widespread after 1776, as the newly independent colonies started to re-imagine themselves as a self-created community. When repudiating the colonial past, Americans wove stories of origin that emphasized particular technologies, notably the ax, the mill, the canal, the steamboat, the railroad, the steel plow, and the irrigation dam. The use of these technologies to reshape the land defined an American story of origins, in which the nation was conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. This essay will focus on this master narrative, analyze its underlying assumptions, and suggest the range of counternarratives that have opposed it.	3
A Master Narrative
EVERY CULTURE has a foundation narrative, but these are by no means the same. Amerindian and white stories of origin are fundamentally different. A first people are sui generis. They may claim emergence out of the local earth or claim the right to a place because of the intervention of spiritual beings. Most if not all Native Americans tell stories that express a sense of primeval oneness with the places they inhabit. While the specific stories vary, some parts of the world are almost invariably seen as sacred spaces.	. . .