Rivers on the Move: Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene

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Rivers on the Move: Waterways in Human Life from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene

edited by Bathsheba Demuth, Mark A. Healey, Giacomo Parrinello and Laurence C. Smith

Duke University Press, 2027

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-4780-3456-8

Paper: 978-1-4780-3960-0

eISBN: 978-1-4780-9472-2 (OA)

eISBN: 978-1-4780-6315-5 (standard)

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“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