James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic revealing the consequences of treating
them as resources for our profit A New Yorker Best Book of the Year "Informative
enjoyable and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry clear and scalding with moral
purpose."-Becca Rothfeld Washington Post 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.
