Mark Cioc
Autore di The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000
Sull'Autore
Mark Cioc is a professor of history at the university of California, Santa Cruz and the author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000. He is a coeditor of How Green were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich.
Opere di Mark Cioc
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 67
- Popolarità
- #256,179
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 3
- ISBN
- 13
Prior to the 19th century, much of the Rhine was still a wild river following a meandering course through a very wide floodplain while supporting a rich and diverse fish and wildlife population. Things began to change, however, in the early 19th century when engineers undertook to straighten the Rhine and make it easier to navigate. Their work brought improvements: a shorter and more direct channel, a reduction in floods, opening of more land for development, and a reduction in diseases like malaria. Unfortunately, their improvements also brought a number of problems: more flooding downstream, increased pollution and the reduction of the fish and wildlife population. By the 1970s, people were calling the Rhine an canal that was verging on becoming a sewer.
Marc Cioc’s book provides an eco-biography of the Rhine from 1815-2000 that explains in a very readable form the changes introduced to the Rhine during these years and the sources of the problems affecting the Rhine. Chapter two begins with an overview of the Rhine and provides a collection of fascinating facts and figures about the river and its tributaries. The chapter then talks about the multi-national Rhine Commission established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 which focused on modifying the Rhine for economic reasons. Cioc emphasizes the multi-national cooperation needed for agreeing on how to handle the Rhine, cooperation that helped set the stage for further cooperation many years later within the EU.
Chapter three continues with a discussion of the actual modifications made to the river. The key figure driving river modifications on the Upper Rhine was a Herr Tulla and Cioc covers his contributions in depth. On the Middle Rhine, the river engineering was driven by Prussia. The Dutch were active in modifying the Rhine’s path to the sea. Particularly interesting were the explanations of the downsides of these modifications particularly with regard to flooding where improvements on the Upper Rhine led to more floods downstream. Also interesting was how the changes in the navigability of the river and the improved technologies of ships led to an explosion of freight transport on the river.
The fourth chapter then talks about the mining industries that developed along the Rhine and which had the practice of just dumping their wastewater directly in the Rhine or in one of its tributaries. Industry argued that it was economically acceptable to sacrifice small sections of the river in order to allow them to cheaply dispose of wastes. The Rhine was able to survive this until the volume of mining increased so much that the sacrificial stretches of the river covered the greatest part of the river and its tributaries.
The fifth chapter then looks at the chemical industry as well as the paper industry which grew up directly on the banks of the Rhine and its tributaries. Cioc does a particularly good job on this topic. He provides a high-level history of the chemical industry and explains in a very understandable fashion exactly which aspects of each chemical process resulted in what type of pollution. In 1986, the Rhine experienced it’s worst environmental disaster when a Sandoz chemical storage facility in Basel caught on fire. Firefighters were able to put out the fire, but the water from their firehoses drained into the Rhine carrying with them lot of the pesticides and other chemicals that had been in the storage facility. As this chemical mess proceeded downstream it managed to kill off lots of the fish and wildlife population along the river. This disaster at least served as a wake-up call and stimulated people to look at river restoration.
Chapter six then talks about the loss of biodiversity explaining which types of changes in the river impact which species. This sets up the discussion in Chapter seven about the restoration efforts that were started in the 1970s and 1980s.
This book is not for everyone; however, I found it to be fascinating which is one reason my review is so long. It is a book I could recommend to anyone interested in environmental history. European history, and civil/water engineering.… (altro)