Author(s): Scott, James C.,
Binding: Hardback,
Date of Publication: 25/02/2025,
Pagination: 248 pages, 48 b-w illus.,
Series: Yale Agrarian Studies Series,
Imprint: Yale University Press,
Published By: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS ,
Book Classification: Ecological science, the Biosphere
Dimensions: 216 x 140mm
Weight: 0g
ISBN13\EAN\SKU: 9780300278491

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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; 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.