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The Big Muddy - An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,151
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The Big Muddy - An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Paperback)
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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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.
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