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Book Review
| This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain. By Mikko Saikku. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. xvii + 373 pp. Maps, photographs, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $54.95
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| From the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to Catfish Row in Vicksburg, in the heart of the cotton kingdom where spidery tributaries of the Yazoo drain 4.4 million alluvial acres, the ancient "Delta" of the Mississippi is one of the nation's most storied landscapes. Here the canebrakes and bottomland hardwoods have sheltered a succession of civilizations for at least twelve thousand years. Historians have written impressively about the region during slavery and reconstruction, but few have grounded the study in ecological theory or measured the modern Yazoo against the biology of its natural setting. By taking this longer view, and by considering the millennia of human-induced change that predated big engineering, Professor Mikko Saikku of Helsinki promises a deeper understanding of environmental problems today. |
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The strength of the book is its weighty compendium of scientific information about the floodplain's natural setting. Mixing an impressive variety of sources, Saikku studies the soils and shows how plants, animals, and humans coped with the cycle of floods. Pre-Columbian natives experimented with cut and burn agriculture, growing corn, beans, tobacco, and squash. Hunters speared fish, deer, and waterfowl. The fires they probably set thinned and diversified the bottomland hardwoods. After the French built Fort Pierre on the Yazoo in 1719, grasslands and canebrakes sustained horses, cattle, and hogs. King Cotton reached the Delta in the 1820s and quickly became the nation's most valuable export. But the true turning point for the Yazoo-Mississippi floodplain was the New South industrialization that followed the Civil War. In 1884 the Yazoo's ad hoc system of floodworks gave way to a massive federal program of standardized levee construction. The 1880s also brought northern money for southern saw mills, and soon the Mississippi timber barons were logging 100,000 acres a year. Saikku's detailed look at timbering on the Delta's Panther-Burn Plantation is a superb case study of boom-bust industrialization and the most original part of the book. |
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The book's principal failing is wandering argumentation. More descriptive than analytical, This Land, This Delta mostly confirms what we already know. Saikku disconnects the prehistory by endorsing conventional wisdom about the ravages of industrialization. His plea for due attention to "slow [environmental] processes that may take centuries or millennia" is undermined by the claim, twice asserted, that the pre-Columbian floodplain was nature largely "untouched" (pp. 2, 70). Scientific language further confuses. We learn, for example, that the Indians "modified vegetational assemblages" (p. 53). Flooding becomes a "fluctuating hydrologic regime" (p. 34). |
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The key to this mix of history and ecological science may be in the conclusion where Saikku maintains "it was the capitalist world system that ultimately mandated how the Delta was utilized as a pool of natural resources" (p. 254). While capitalism might explain stages of ecological change that transformed many places, it cannot explain the uniqueness that makes the Delta like no other place. |
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Todd Shallat, PhD, directs the Center for Idaho History and Politics at Boise State University. His Mississippi writings include a contract history of environmental engineering for the U.S. Mississippi River Commission. |
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