The Big Muddy

Description 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. Reviews "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." --Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet "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." --Richard White, author of Railroaded "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." --Craig E. Colten, author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature "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."--Daniel Usner, Vanderbilt University "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!" --Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast Product Details 320 pages; 40 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-531691-9ISBN10: 0-19-531691-6

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.