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The Big Muddy - An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Hardcover)
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The Big Muddy - An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples, from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Hardcover)
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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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