| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000. By Mark Cioc. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. xiii+263 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $29.95.
In the tradition established by Richard White's pioneering account of the Columbia River (The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, Hill & Wang, 1996), Mark Cioc's carefully researched study of western Europe's most trafficked river, the 775-mile-long Rhine, describes the unintended consequences of re-engineering a body of water to serve multiple human uses. While detailing how diplomats, engineers, industrialists, biologists, and others shaped the modern Rhine over two hundred years, this engaging "eco-biography" also illustrates the river's ability to adapt to and defy human control.	1
The study begins in 1815, when diplomats at the Congress of Vienna established the Rhine Commission, a body representing riparian states intent on converting the river into a European shipping lane that supported free trade. Two centuries of rectification projects engineered a global transportation route and ensured a steady water supply for farming, settlement, industrial production, and power generation. But by constructing a shorter, straighter, faster-flowing Rhine, "correction" efforts destroyed habitats, reduced the river's self-cleaning capacity, and increased flooding—not in the natural floodplain at the foot of the Alps where dams regulate alpine tributaries, but on the Middle and Lower Rhine, the site of recently recurring "hundred-year floods."	. . .

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