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Rivers on the Move

Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene

Cover of Rivers on the Move features an aerial, map-like image of a winding blue and white river against a navy background. The river branches off into waterways resembling veins.

Book

Pages: 308

Illustrations: 43 illustrations

Release Date: February 09, 2027

Editors: Bathsheba Demuth, Mark A. Healey, Giacomo Parrinello, and Laurence C. Smith

Contributors: Santiago Gorostiza, Caroline Gottschalk, Mark A. Healey, J. Marty Holtgren, Sandy Hunter, Hong Jiang, Douglas McRae, Frank Magilligan, Valeria Mantilla Morales, Andreas Mentrup-Womelsdorf, Summer Praetorius, Katherine Russell, Ian Rutherford, Sarah Sears, Laurence C. Smith, Elaine Stokes, and Anjuli Webster

Ever-moving rivers create landscapes and sustain life, yet their variability can also bring disaster to human communities that do not adapt to that movement. Furthermore, in an era of climate instability, river movements are increasingly harder to deny, suppress, or harness. Rivers on the Move collects essays across disciplines to explore the tension between rivers’ movements and economic, social, and political desires for ecological stability. Contributors, hailing from a wide range of humanities and scientific fields alike, examine river movements as both physical and cultural phenomena that shape environments across the world and across all ages. Together, their essays analyze how rivers move, what counts as movement, how human societies try to control those movements, and how we can imagine new ways of coexisting with rivers.

Praise

“There are books that discuss the environmental history of individual river basins and there are books that discuss multiple river basins from a specific disciplinary perspective, but there is nothing quite like this book. From Pleistocene-age glacier outburst floods through pre-history to the most pressing contemporary issues, this book covers the gamut of how people and rivers interact. It provides an important resource for anyone interested in Earth’s dynamic rivers.” - Ellen Wohl, author of Following the Bend: How to Read a River and Understand Its Nature

“Coupling global and interdisciplinary breadth with a clear conceptual framework, Rivers on the Move redefines what we mean by ‘river.’ Some of its waterways no longer exist; others are atmospheric rather than terrestrial, or flow only intermittently. Linking deep geologic time to our unsettled present, the book makes a persuasive case: rivers—and the states and empires that have sought to control them—were never fixed in place.” - Ruth Mostern, author of The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information Funding Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Mark A. Healey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Giacomo Parrinello is Associate Professor of Environmental History at the Centre for History of the Sciences Po Paris.

Laurence C. Smith is John Atwater and Diana Nelson University Professor of Environmental Studies in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society at Brown University.

Table Of Contents

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Introduction. Rivers on the Move / Bathsheba Demuth and Giacomo Parrinello  1
Part I. Restless Pasts
1. Ripples of the Missoula Megafloods / Summer Praetorius  21
2. Six Centuries of Polders: Transforming the Jianghan Plain in China / Hong Jiang and Ian Rutherford  41
3. Tracing the Urubamba: An Archaeohistory of and Andean River / R. Alexander Hunter  71
4. The Lower Mississippi River and the Novelty of Its Future Geology / Catherine Russell  89
Part II. Fixing Rivers
5. Fixing the Rio Grande at the US-Mexico Border / Sarah Sears  109
6. Salmon, Imperial Formation, and the Creation of the Yukon River Border Zone, ca. 1900–1930  127
7. The Politics of Sediment in the Nile’s Aswan High Dam / Giacomo Parrinello and Santiago Gorostiza  151
Part III. Beyond Water
8. The Flying Rivers of Brazil / Douglas McRae  171
9. Colombia’s Magdalena and the River as Labor / Valeria Mantilla Morales  189
10. Rivers Without Water and the Colonization of Southern Africa / Anjuli Webster  207
Part IV. Unfixing Rivers
11. The Dammed Landscapes of Wild Rice Country on the Upper Mississippi / Elaine Stokes  225
12. The Island That Isn’t an Island / J. Marty Holtgren and Caroline Gottschalk  245
13. River Restoration in Times of Climate Change / Francis J. Magilligan  263
Conclusion. Reimagining Rivers / Mark Healey and Laurence C. Smith  277
Acknowledgments  281
Contributors  283
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3960-0 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3456-8 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6315-5 /

Funding Information

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The open access publication of this book has been aided by funds from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society Catalyst Grant and the City of Paris Emergences Programme.