In Praise of Floods

Name: In Praise of Floods
Brand: Yale University Press
Price: 52.5 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

By: James C. Scott

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Hardcover | 25 February 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.96

Hardcover

$52.50

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Available: 25th February 2025

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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 and 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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