Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995 (Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)

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Description

Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin is likely one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation’s last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for plenty of species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a big commercial fisheries industry. Most likely most an important, it remains a number one component of the plan to keep watch over the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley.

The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin used to be converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium.

Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured Most likely more human manipulation than every other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date at the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.

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