In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Our understanding of rivers has evolved over the past five decades to include not simply the flow of water through a channel, but the flow of life associated with a river. "What is a river?" Scott asks. Then he helps us think about that question in the broadest possible sense. A river, he suggests, is its main channel, its many and varying other channels, its associated wetlands and riverine forests and the entire span of life forms encompassed within the river's widest range of moving water. The science behind this book has been years in the making, and scientists by the hundreds (or maybe by the thousands) have been thinking about this very question. Now this master historian has explained in a small and succinct book why what the scientists have been doing is important. Yet the book is more than accessible to the lay reader. If you care about, enjoy and use rivers, you'll find this book worth reading.