BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
FOUR YEARS AGO, I agreed to serve as book review editor for three reasons: to serve the field I love; to help the field to grow; and to work with Adam Rome. It has been a pleasure doing all three. For this, my last issue, I have selected reviews that highlight a few of my favorite aspects of the job.
Astute readers will have noticed that reviews about global history and regions outside North America led off most issues over the past four years. Our field is becoming more international every year, and encouraging that trend was one of my priorities. A new feature designed to abet that process was the introduction of reviews of books written in languages other than English. This, my final issue as editor, puts an exclamation point on this international effort by including for the first time in a single issue (to my knowledge), reviews of books about all seven continents.
Environmental history is old enough to have a history. The time seemed ripe to introduce another new feature, retrospective reviews. Previous issues featured single reviewers' comments on classics. This issue adds a twist by including three reviews of a single book—Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature. The reviews originated as papers in a panel organized by Jay Taylor at the 2005 meeting of the American Society for Environmental History.
No less pleasure came from seeing waves of new scholarship on the field's traditional strength, North America. Occasionally the timeliness of history is surpassing. This issue features a review of Craig Colten's history of New Orleans's relations with water. Written before Hurricane Katrina filled that "unnatural metropolis" (Colten's phrase) with water, the book reminds us of how deeply the roots of current environmental problems grow.
My job would have been impossible without help. We published several hundred reviews over the past four years. None of them would have appeared without scholars who took time from busy schedules to write the reviews. David Hsiung stepped in as acting book review editor while I was on sabbatical. Steve Anderson and Carol Marochak at the Forest History Society provided critical support. Eve Munson, the journal's managing editor, probably has gray hairs named for every issue's book review section. She amazed me with her unfailing kindness. Adam Rome was a model editor in chief and colleague. My gratitude goes to each and every one.
EDMUND RUSSELL
| An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. By Craig E. Colten. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xiii + 245 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $39.95.
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French settlers looking for a colonial capital location saw that Native Americans used a waterway now called Bayou St. John as the shortest portage between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The area to become New Orleans was at the foot of this bayou. |
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The advantage of controlling a natural gateway to the Mississippi River and the lake won over the enormous disadvantages of this flat, swampy location subject to flooding. |
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Colten's readable book follows approaches to dealing with New Orleans's situation logically from past to present with useful maps showing the city's interactions with its environment over time. Sources are well documented with footnotes. This is an excellent text for environmental studies but is also understandable and interesting for non-technical readers. |
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An excellent introduction describes how the twisting, changing channels of the Mississippi deposited ridges (natural levees) creating a rim around the natural bowl of New Orleans. One rim along the giant crescent that is the river's present location helps keep the river out of the city. Other rims (the Metairie and Gentilly ridges, built by the river in a previous location and time) keep the lake at bay. The ridges that keep lake and river water out keep flood and rain water in, so the eternal problem for New Orleans is one of constantly moving water out of the bowl. The other continuing problem is where to send the bill. |
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By 1727 the French had raised the rim of the bowl. They built a bulwark four feet high stretching about a mile along the river on top of the natural levee; by 1763 levees from a combination of public and private projects extended about fifty miles along the riverfront. |
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Laws of the new U.S. territory of Louisiana in 1807 assigned flood-control authority to the parishes, which made private owners responsible. This spread levees in a piece-meal fashion up and down the river. New Orleans also continued to expand its municipal levees, making the confined water deeper, necessitating higher levees and creating deeper floods. Deeper floods created a need for better drainage and more money. A debate began over levees versus drainage and how to pay the costs: Water-craft were taxed, landowners were given the bill, the state has been asked to pay, and more recently the federal government has been tapped. |
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The book follows the many changes in beliefs leading to new approaches. Forests and swamps have been cleared and drained as health hazards; then re-created as functioning natural systems. The river has been used as a waste dump and as a water supply, leading to changes in laws and changes in engineering. Improved pumping technology has drained new areas, expanding the urban area, leading to the need for more engineered solutions. |
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Colten's book ends with present-day New Orleans still in its natural bowl, surrounded by and potentially filled with water. The levees still slump and rise, the pumps keep pumping and the bills continue to be passed around. |
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Lester DeCoster has participated in the most recent forty-five years of the running debate about environmental solutions: as a forest landowner and forester with a wooded backyard in Virginia and two large tracts in Maine, as a state and national bureaucrat, and most recently as a public relations consultant. He has written more than five hundred articles, books, and publications on forest issues. |