The Big Muddy

First long-term environmental history of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Timed to publish on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Puts a U.S. region into a global context, comparing it with other similar environments, from West Africa to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. In 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, the largest in North America, but by the 1890s, the valley was rapidly drying. Morris reveals how centuries of increasingly intensified human meddling--including deforestation, swamp drainage, the introduction of foreign species of animals and plants, and levee construction--led to drought, disease, and severe flooding. Valley residents have been paying the price ever since, most visibly with the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina. 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. Readership: Students and scholars of Environmental history, Southern History, cultural geography