{"product_id":"in-praise-of-floods-the-untamed-river-and-the-life-it-brings-by-james-c-scott-9780300292305","title":"In Praise of Floods : The Untamed River and the Life It Brings","description":"\u003cp\u003eJames C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA New Yorker Best Book of the Year\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\"Informative, enjoyable, and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry, clear, and scalding with moral purpose.\" - Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRivers, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eScott 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"James C. Scott","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57176851087733,"sku":"9780300292305","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/sherlockandpages.com\/products\/in-praise-of-floods-the-untamed-river-and-the-life-it-brings-by-james-c-scott-9780300292305","provider":"Sherlock \u0026 Pages","version":"1.0","type":"link"}