| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. By Craig E. Colten (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xiii plus 264 pp. $39.95).
Before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in the summer of 2005, most of us knew a lot less about the Crescent City than we do today. This timely book, which appeared just eight months before storm waves overwhelmed the city's levees, is one of the key works that have enabled us to learn so much so fast. Craig Colten tracks the environmental challenges that the residents of New Orleans have wrestled with for close to three centuries as they have tried to control the water threatening them from the north, south, occasionally the west, and even from the sky above and the ground below. Colten recognizes that such a story is not only about nature but people as well, and he does much to further the ongoing integration of environmental and social history. A geographer with a keen eye for issues of race and class, Colten demonstrates that the natural environment has been one of the most important factors shaping the social and physical development of New Orleans.	1
The alluvial floodplain that became New Orleans was a terrible site for a city. Colten explains that the Mississippi regularly overflowed its banks there, and the elevated water table encouraged a wetland environment that rested on highly compressible subsoils. As a result, river floods and standing water have perennially plagued the city. Residents responded from an early date by building levees to hold back the river and digging canals to drain water into Lake Pontchartrain. In the twentieth century, they began using pumps to dry out wetlands and remove the approximately sixty inches of rain that fell every year. But despite these efforts to control the area's challenging environment, the best that the builders of New Orleans could produce was a city inside a shallow earthen bowl that is difficult to bale out and slowly sinking into the ground.	. . .

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