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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.
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| 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. |
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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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Two chapters explain how the coal and chemical industries boosted regional prosperity but incrementally compromised the Rhine and its tributaries by installing more dams on these rivers and dumping effluents into them with impunity. Weak laws, cooperatives that placed water management in the hands of the most powerful and often rapacious users, the belief that the Rhine could digest pollutants, and the view that "sacrificed stretches" (most notably the Emscher River) were an acceptable price to pay for "progress," accelerated the expansion of industry but ultimately endangered the river basin that was so vital to production and profit. As chemical industries found alternatives to coal, they and the hydroelectric, petroleum, and nuclear companies they came to rely on "colonized" additional sections of the river, using their economic and political might to overpower opponents. By the mid-1970s, the Rhine was "one long 'sacrificed stretch'" (p. 143), unable to meet the many uses assigned to it. |
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A chapter on the Rhine's biodiversity painstakingly reconstructs the river's former wealth of flora and fauna (implying an ecological golden age that a few readers might quibble over) and thoroughly describes the drop in species variety because of pollution and severe floodplain loss (approximately 90 percent). The study concludes with a captivating, even-handed assessment of recent efforts by riparian states to improve water quality, restore habitats (for salmon and black stork, for instance), and reclaim limited parts of the floodplain. Occasionally Cioc faults people in the past for lacking an ecological consciousness ahead of their time (pp. 105, 112, 128, 175), but their failure to intentionally protect the Rhine's biological habitat should not be a surprise. As the author explains, "a more holistic approach to river management" (p. 195) emerged only in the 1990s. |
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Sometimes ironic and humorous, consistently clear and persuasive, Cioc's "life story" of the Rhine deftly weaves together politics, economics, and river ecology. This compelling study makes a significant contribution to European environmental history and will be of interest to specialists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in diverse fields. |
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Sandra Chaney teaches European, environmental, and women's history at Erskine College. She has written on the Moselle River and is completing a study of nature protection in West Germany. |
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