In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300278491)

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

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change and 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.

Author: James C. Scott
ISBN-10: 0300278497
ISBN-13: 9780300278491
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/25/2025
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover