| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mining California: An Ecological History. By Andrew C. Isenberg. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. 242 pp. $27.00, ISBN 0-8090-9535-1.)
"Nature is a very careful accountant. Every change in one part of an ecosystem sooner or later has some effect, however minute, on every other part." These words by the environmental historian Arthur McEvoy are quoted approvingly by Andrew C. Isenberg on page 21 of Mining in California. They well could serve as the book's epigraph.	1
The burden of Isenberg's interpretation is to demonstrate the environmental and social costs of economic development in California during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Fundamental to that development was the attempt by Euro-Americans to impose control on the forces of nature, a process Isenberg variously described as an attempt to stabilize, systematize, regularize, order, or pacify the natural environment. Their pursuit exacted devastating costs.	2
In the case of hydraulic mining, those who controlled the requisite technology produced tremendous wealth. But in nature's careful accounting, an equally high cost was borne by the environment. Accelerated silting raised riverbeds and caused the downstream metropolis of Sacramento to suffer periodic flooding. Thus Isenberg identified the human agency in so-called natural disasters, just as Philip L. Fradkin did in his recent book, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 (2005).	. . .

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