Southern waters: the limits to abundance

Abstract

Southern waters: the to by Craig E. Colten, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2014, xiv + 264 pp., US$79.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4338-1587-4 Southern Waters examines the geographic and historical particularity of human--water relations in the southern United States. One of the central provocations of Southern Waters is to re-locate critical studies of water management and in the U.S.A. away from the drought-prone territory of the West and, instead, examine from the perspective of watery, humid climates. If the southern United States seems like an unlikely place to investigate water and the limits to abundance, Colten makes a strong case for us to think otherwise, demonstrating how the South has been central to federal water management policies since the late nineteenth century. The book is framed historically, tracing the emergence and transformation of understandings of water and water management policy in the South from colonial encounters through flood control, and conservation. The first four chapters of the book, collectively entitled excess, trace different cultural understandings of water and southern wetlands from the perspective of First Nations, European colonizers, and the science of health and sanitation. The first chapter demonstrates how the notion of abundance is tied to the colonial encounter, shaping settlement patterns and, in turn, social relations and encounters between colonizers and Native groups. Particular focus is put on the roots of European ideas of a water commons as a central organizing principle of riparian management policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second chapter traces the history of flood management in wetlands and swamps focusing on the divergent yet at times overlapping processes of draining and controlling the Atchafalaya wetland in Louisiana and the Everglades in South Florida. The third chapter more explicitly traces the emergence of federal flood policy for rivers and subsequently federal hurricane/storm surge protection, specifically how federal policies were guided by a complacency and normalization of flood and storm surge wherein risk is not eliminated but deferred (p. 86). The fourth chapter extends the conversation about and wet places towards the history of confronting water-borne disease in the South and how the South sought to minimize environmental risks by managing water. The second half of the book orients itself towards shortage in terms of water scarcity as well as declining access to shared, common fluvial resources. In the fifth and sixth chapters, Colten tracks the emergence of increased federal control of formerly state/locally governed water practices, reflecting an ideological shift in management practices away from abundance and towards managing limited resources. …