Christopher Morris. The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina.

Abstract

For scholars who seek to study place-based environmental relations on a regional scale, no bioregional unit makes as much sense as a watershed. The poet Gary Snyder noted this several decades ago, in A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (1995), where he explained watersheds as a natural “territory” where humans and non-humans most fundamentally interact. Historians and other cultural analysts have long found the history of rivers to be a rich unit of analysis for studying interactions between humans and nature—for example, the Rivers of America series, which ran from 1937 to 1974 and eventually included books about sixty-four American rivers, including Margaret Stoneman Douglas's influential The Everglades: River of Grass (1947). Some of our larger rivers—the Mississippi and Columbia, most prominently—have become iconic for Americans, and are celebrated and discussed in story and song. Environmental historians who have focused on rivers have given more attention than usual to the Mississippi, too: in the last decade, books by Ari Kelman, Craig Colton, and Mikko Saiku have all studied the Lower Mississippi from the perspective of environmental history.