Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

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

Scott, James C.

Hardcover

Series: Yale Agrarian Studies

Environmental StudiesNature Writing

Publisher Price: $28.00

ISBN10: 0300278497
ISBN13: 9780300278491
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Feb 25 2025
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.95
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

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.

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