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The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina de Christopher Morris

The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina

Autor Christopher Morris
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 13 apr 2017

Evoluția istoriografiei mediului a trecut în ultimele decenii de la cronici punctuale ale dezastrelor la analize complexe de tip „longue durée”, care privesc peisajul nu ca pe un fundal static, ci ca pe un participant activ la istoria umană. The Big Muddy reprezintă o materializare exemplară a acestei schimbări de paradigmă, fiind prima istorie ecologică pe termen lung a fluviului Mississippi. Christopher Morris ne propune o incursiune de cinci secole care începe cu explorările lui Hernando de Soto în mlaștinile vaste ale Americii de Nord și culminează cu realitățile post-industriale marcate de uraganul Katrina.

Reținem din această lucrare publicată de Oxford University Press o critică nuanțată a „reconstrucției” fluviului. Autorul demonstrează cum eforturile monumentale de a disciplina natura, gestionate în mare parte de Army Corps of Engineers, au transformat o zonă umedă bogată într-un teritoriu vulnerabil la secetă și inundații artificiale. Această abordare acoperă aceeași arie tematică precum Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, dar cu o perspectivă mult mai extinsă cronologic, depășind cadrul urban pentru a analiza întreaga vale a fluviului. Dacă Mississippi River Tragedies – A Century of Unnatural Disaster se concentrează pe intersecția dintre inginerie și cadrul legal, Christopher Morris adaugă dimensiunea biologică și socială, discutând inclusiv despre impactul speciilor invazive și despre noile industrii de acvacultură.

Deși autorul a explorat anterior teme muzicale în The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems, prezenta lucrare marchează o specializare profundă în istoria regională americană. Textul evită capcanele unui ton alarmist, preferând o densitate academică susținută de cercetări interdisciplinare, oferind o explicație structurală pentru dezastrele contemporane.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780190610760
ISBN-10: 019061076X
Pagini: 320
Ilustrații: 40 halftones
Dimensiuni: 231 x 155 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

De ce să citești această carte

Această carte este esențială pentru cititorii interesați de istoria Americii și de ecologie politică. Christopher Morris oferă o perspectivă clară asupra modului în care intervenția umană a remodelat cel mai mare sistem fluvial din America de Nord. Veți câștiga o înțelegere profundă a cauzelor din spatele dezastrelor naturale moderne, învățând totodată despre reziliența comunităților care încearcă să restabilească echilibrul cu un mediu transformat radical.

Despre autor

Christopher Morris este profesor de filosofie la Bowling Green State University, manifestând un interes academic vast care se extinde de la istoria ideilor până la istoria ecologică regională. În lucrarea The Big Muddy, el își aplică rigoarea analitică pentru a examina relația complexă dintre societate și mediul înconjurător în valea fluviului Mississippi. Deși portofoliul său include lucrări diverse, cum este coordonarea volumului The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems pentru Oxford University Press, contribuția sa în domeniul istoriei mediului rămâne o referință pentru studiul transformărilor peisajului american sub impactul activității umane.

Descriere

In The Big Muddy, the first long-term environmental history of the Mississippi, Christopher Morris offers a brilliant tour across five centuries as he illuminates the interaction between people and the landscape, from early hunter-gatherer bands to present-day industrial and post-industrial society. Morris shows that when Hernando de Soto arrived at the lower Mississippi Valley, he found an incredibly vast wetland, forty thousand square miles of some of the richest, wettest land in North America, deposited there by the big muddy river that ran through it. But since then much has changed, for the river and for the surrounding valley. Indeed, by the 1890s, the valley was rapidly drying. Morris shows how centuries of increasingly intensified human meddling--including deforestation, swamp drainage, and levee construction--led to drought, disease, and severe flooding. He outlines the damage done by the introduction of foreign species, such as the Argentine nutria, which escaped into the wild and are now busy eating up Louisiana's wetlands. And he critiques the most monumental change in the lower Mississippi Valley--the reconstruction of the river itself, largely under the direction of the Army Corps of Engineers. Valley residents have been paying the price for these human interventions, most visibly with the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina. Morris also describes how valley residents have been struggling to reinvigorate the valley environment in recent years--such as with the burgeoning catfish and crawfish industries--so that they may once again live off its natural abundance.Morris concludes that the problem with Katrina is the problem with the Amazon Rainforest, drought and famine in Africa, and fires and mudslides in California--it is the end result of the ill-considered bending of natural environments to human purposes.

Recenzii

[An] ambitious and cleanly argued environmental history of the lower Mississippi Valley....
The history of the Mississippi valley is the story of a constant tug-of-war between water and land. Morris has aptly told the stories that are often on the margin of the river, and have been on the margin of histories of the valley. In doing this, he has provided much-needed contexts for our endless fascination with the Mississippi River.
Christopher Morris has molded a thoroughly researched, smartly organized, and thoughtfully argued book. ... Morris deploys human stories and graceful prose to maintain the flow, making his an accessible study... The Big Muddy also comes in a compact size, ideal for adopting for a course, as this reviewer has done.
Christopher Morris has written an important book that is both history and advocacy. There is much to praise in this book, and it is certain to win acclaim and recognition for its author.
Elegantly written, The Big Muddy is a sweeping environmental history of a famous river told with an eye toward the relationship between water and land.
This environmental history of the Mississippi River Valley has a thesis that Morris explores as it relates to different peoples and their technologies, ranging from Native Americans and Spanish and French explorers to current residents in post-Hurrican Katrina times. This is a a multidisciplinary history; the extensive endnotes show that Morris did his homework thoroughly. Highly recommended.
Impressive in its chronological scope, thoughtfully covering five centuries of interactions between people and water, Morris's skilled and subtle work of environmental history shows how river-based ecological systems embed, underwrite, and challenge shore-bound human institutions. Demonstrating the possibility of writing a history of transnational scope while staying in the same place, The Big Muddy follows Spanish, French, and U.S. actors.
The Big Muddy makes a powerful argument that nature is trying to tell us 'something about the way we understand the natural environment and our place within it.'
A story as sprawling and powerful as the river it describes. In the wake of 2011's epic flooding, this volume could not be more timely.
Thoroughly researche, tightly written, and uncommonly well illustrated... Morris is at his best here.
Few authors have so elegantly and succinctly merged human history and natural history as Christopher Morris does in The Big Muddy, his environmental history of the Mississippi River. Eschewing easy answers and simple explanations, he makes clear what is at stake in how humans live in nature.
Chris Morris has written a thoroughly engaging account of human encounters with the Mississippi River. He penetrates and clarifies the complex environmental history of this murky torrent while offering up a flood of fresh insights. As much as any recent history I've seen, this work not only narrates the past, but speaks with a powerful voice to the future of the lower river valley and its inhabitants.
More than any other book written so far, The Big Muddy forces us to understand how stubborn efforts to dry wetlands in the Mississippi Valley not only caused vexing environmental problems but also shaped social and economic relationships in troublesome ways. A society plagued by inequality and instability can learn plenty from Christopher Morris's skillful documentation of why we must more wisely adapt to nature's irrepressible mixing of land and water.
Christopher Morris's The Big Muddy is an extremely important new addition to our ever growing environmental history library. It's a tragic story about how the Mississippi River has been abused for centuries. Morris is a superb researcher and talented writer. Highly recommended!
What is remarkable and fresh about this scholarly study of the Mississippi in the longue duree is its comprehensiveness, density, and nuance, as well as the fresh research upon which it is based. It is a sturdy, grand, and at times stunning achievement, deeply rooted in substantial interdisciplinary research and brimming with insight.

Notă biografică

Christopher Morris is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Vicksburg and Warren County, Mississippi, 1770-1860.