Technologies like the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad and the dam were instruments for the second creation. Each tool was featured in a narrative of possibilities that supported the nation’s growth, development and expansion. The inevitability of waste, greed, sin and suffering that made Europeans sadder and wiser, less hopeful, more cynical and perhaps more realistic were ignored in the creation narratives that flourished in the vast continent of limitless possibilities. (The unlikely alternative for a nation of immigrants might have been hesitancy and fear in dealing with the unknown hinterland.) Creation narratives were strong but not all consuming and did not preclude alternative views. Nye finds that each second creation narrative had a counter narrative which revolved around the negative aspects of technology and its impact on nature and humans.

Both narrative and counter narrative were attempts not only to explain and understand events but also to persuade and win support. From Nye’s point of view, the two kinds of narratives were virtually opposed to one another. The creation narrative is an optimistic story of expansion and growth, the counter narrative is a pessimistic tale of waste, abuse of resources, and neglect of the concerns of those who were harmed by or missed out on the advantages of the technology. The creation narrative is primarily the story of the white man. The Native Americans story would be a counter narrative. Often the creation narrative rested on an economic foundation and is supported and propagated by those who would benefit. Implicit in Nye’s discussion is the view that the more pessimistic view is more realistic. There were suffering and problems that were affected by the use of the technologies just as there was growth and expansion from wilderness to world leader, economic and political power. America’s rapid and amazing expansion is a fact and not just happenstance. The second creation narrative has a grain of truth in describing how and why Americans were motivated to expand and how they rationalized the expansion.

Nye’s work sometimes reads like a literary or psychological study of aspects of the American psyche. In his discussion of each technology, he reinforces his assessment of the narratives with examples from the press, literature and art. Nye devotes an entire chapter to the views of Henry Adams who was ‘filled with a sense of doom’ (273) and concerned about the dissipation of energy and the end of life on earth as Americans exploited technology.

Nye contends these narratives began after independence. He focuses on technologies associated with geography, settlement, movement and expansion. The axe and the mill were stories associated primarily with the region east of the Mississippi. The canal and the railroad enabled movement across the entire country and irrigation and the dam enabled growth and settlement of the West. The axe was the tool of individuals, the mill narrative describes the emergence of communities and the canal, railroads and dams affected entire regions.

Nye ignores other major technologies like the telegraph, electricity, the telephone and radio perhaps because those narratives do not fit his concern with land, landscape and the environment. A case could be made that technologies that shrank the perception of space like the telegraph did not fit with Nye’s expansionist and growth themes.

One of Nye’s more interesting themes concerns the ‘four shifts in perception’ after the American Revolution. These were the foundation aspects of the technological creation story. These are the change to an ‘abstract grid’ to divide land-holdings, a movement to a free-market ideology, a belief in natural abundance and a belief in a ‘Newtonian universe of clear, quantifiable causes and effects.’ This change in perception occurred at the same time that the first technological creation stories were emerging (p. 20).

Nye considers second creation narratives as primarily concerned with nineteenth century America. Nye describes a nostalgia narrative that appears after the tool or machine becomes obsolete or outmoded. Thus Americans restore charming old mills and railroad buffs collect train memorabilia and ride on old train routes. Nostalgia narratives are closely related to the foundation narratives as they take a positive view of a technology that was once important to the nation’s progress. There are nostalgia narratives for technologies that did not have an indispensable impact on the nation like the clipper ship and the pony express. Nye uses the label ‘narrative’ to describe other ways of looking at events. In recent times, he finds Americans have three ‘interlocking stories’ (p. 299), a wilderness tale, the second-creation story, and the recovery narrative. He also discovered a counter-narrative called eco-feminism espousing a ‘partnership’ between man and nature. (p. 301).

Nye’s construct of the creation narrative fits with our experience of commonly held opinions. Yet the simultaneous existence of both the foundation and counter-narratives weakens the construct. A middle-range analysis of the type suggested by Thomas Misa might have led Nye to a more balanced and synthesized view of the two lines of thought.