In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings - Hardcover

$28.00

In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings - Hardcover

Name: In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings - Hardcover
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780300278491
Price: 28.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by James C. Scott

$28.00

Format

Hardcover $28.00 Paperback $20.00

Book Overview

James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

"Informative, enjoyable, and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry, clear, and scalding with moral purpose."--Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.

It is the annual flood pulse--the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain--that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.

Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety--tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.

ISBN	9780300278491
Author	James C. Scott
Publisher	Yale University Press
Genre	Hobbies & interests and Education
Format	Hardcover
Published	February 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	248
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print