Book review: “Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way” by Maxim Samson

Early on in Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way, Maxim Samson writes, “Every landscape tells a story—the challenge is knowing where to look.”

And, when it comes to Chicago, Samson looks at the dozen or so diagonal roads that not only fail to follow the lockstep street grid covering the map of the city and its suburbs but also are reminders of the Indigenous people who once lived on this land.  He writes:

While their names honoring Midwestern settlements (Milwaukee, Vincennes, Green Bay) and luminaries (Lincoln, Clark, Ogden) may suggest they are little different from other Chicago streets, their unconventional configuration connotes a more distinctive history, rooted in a physical geography refashioned beyond recognition.

These diagonal streets run along ridges that were used for millenniums by Native Americans as highways through wetlands and other low-lying places. They were a key part of the natural landscape that was seized by the new American nation in the early 1800s and turned into something completely foreign to the Indigenous way of thinking—real estate.

Indeed, so total has been the reshaping of this place on the shore of Lake Michigan, Samson writes, that those ridge-running diagonal streets are “a rare glimpse into a past otherwise concealed beneath the city’s systematic and polished veneer.” They “articulate an alternative system of geographical connectivity, in which earth shaping is primarily dictated by the natural environment rather than by human resolve.”

 

Turning land into a commodity

Samson is an adjunct geography professor at DePaul University who specializes in religion and who is a past chair of the American Association of Geographer’s Religions and Belief Systems research specialty group.

His chapter on Chicago in Earth Shapers builds on a great deal of recent scholarly work dealing with the collision of Indigenous and American cultures at the birth of the city, particularly Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage and the Transformation of a Continent by John William Nelson. The new American settlers, Nelson writes, redefined land into a commodity that could be owned and then transformed that land by putting up fences and draining wetlands. “By undermining the local environments of Indigenous power,” Nelson writes, “the United States changed not simply the rules of the game but the board on which the game was played.”

There was, writes Samson, a spiritual aspect to this, a question of bending the environment to human needs or living within it. Rather than shape the land by building farms and cities, Indigenous people saw themselves and all other living beings occupying the same location in a deeply interconnected way, he writes.

Guided by this spiritual understanding of people’s place in the world, while recognizing that the region’s baking hot summers and intensely cold winters obligated more than a small degree of adaptation on humans’ part, the convention was to rotate among various favored locations, hunting, fishing and growing wheat and corn wherever and whenever the conditions were right.

 

Earth-shaping

Samson’s book examines the way humans have shaped the earth through connections over millenniums and focuses on Chicago and seven other examples. In some but not all cases, this earth-shaping has been physical inasmuch as it involved an actual shaping of the earth. But, in all of the eight, it’s had to do with a way of seeing and using the land—and for a particular purpose.

For instance, the Qhapaq Nan was a 25,000-mile road network across the Andes that the Incas created to unify and impose order on their empire in the 1400s. It worked wonderfully well for them—too well, as it turned out. The Spanish employed it to great effect in the mid-1500s to conquer the land.

Then, there’s the map of Mozambique in the mid-1800s under the Portuguese. Samson points out that, if you look at railroad lines, you’ll notice something odd: They all go east and west, bringing mineral wealth from the mines in other African countries across Mozambique to the Indian Ocean ports for shipment to Europe. None go north and south, and, so, none serve to unify the nation, fueling longstanding divisions. Here, the railways only benefit the rich.

Similarly, the Panama Canal was built for the convenience of businesses and national economies across the globe but not at all for the people of Panama. Indeed, as Samson notes, the motto of the Canal Zone was “Panama divided, the world united.”

By contrast, the Great Green Wall is on ongoing effort to restore the Sahel, “a continuous belt of semi-arid land between the dry Sahara to the north and the wetter savannahs to the south.” One thing that’s distinctive about the initiative is that it includes a variety of strategies to bring back to life land that has been parched by climate change. Even more important, it’s directed not by outsiders but by Africans themselves.

 

How ideas shape the earth

To the east, in Saudi Arabia, earth-shaping is only an idea, but a huge one. THE LINE is a planned smart city of nine million people that, its promoters hope, will redefine how the world thinks of Arabian Peninsula nation. Still in the planning stages, it would be made up of two buildings in a single long structure that would be 110 miles long and would be “where the best and brightest live,” according to its promoters. As described by Samson, THE LINE echoes any number of science fiction stories in which the richest of the rich live in luxury while everyone else is stuck outside.

Another big idea, The Baltic Way, also called the Baltic Chain, was brought to life for fifteen minutes in 1989. In a protest against the Soviet Union’s oppression and aggression, some two million people of the small nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania held hands and formed a 430-mile line that connected the three Baltic capitals: Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn. For a quarter of an hour, the landscape of that corner of the earth was shaped by this sinuous line of people acting together, the many becoming the one.

Yet another big idea is the Baekdu-daegan of Korea, a sacred chain of mountains that is a source of pride and religious vitality, shared by “the planet’s least-friendly neighbors.”  Essential throughout Korea’s history, these mountains, half of which lie in the north and half in the south, provide, Samson suggests, a source of hope for future unity.

 

“Just one way”

Chicago, writes Samson, is a synthesis of many of the earth-shaping efforts in the other seven examples.

Akin to the Qhapaq Nan centuries earlier…Chicago’s street configuration and engineering accomplishments demonstrate a very human desire to bring order to a messy world. Like the Panama Canal,…the city’s potential as a convenient nexus has long been appreciated by logistics professionals and vendors alike….

Chicago is unmistakable proof of our ability to reshape our planet in accordance with our cravings and demands: it is a marvel of engineering, a paragon of humans’ ability to surmount the resistance nature poses when we try to fashion more conveniently connective landscapes.

Yet, Samson asserts, Chicago is also a reminder that the earth-shaping that formed the city over the past two centuries wasn’t the only way.

Chicago’s original inhabitants shaped the earth by weaving themselves into the fabric of the landscape rather than ripping and tearing that landscape into a completely different form.  And Samson adds:

The colonial settler belief that land is to be divided, owned and exploited…is just one way of working with and writing ourselves onto the landscape.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.8.25

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 10.13.25.