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James Scott's Hirschman Lecture is "In Praise of Floods," promising to take the river's side against a series of state projects to use every last drop of rivers for some human end. @CarwilBJ/1334982200786300928Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: Rivers are living, self-damming, prone to meandering and also abrupt shifts… (image: Mississippi mapped by Army Corps of Engineers and by LIDAR; merge by @geo_coe)On twitter.com
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large share of their changes occur during sudden flood events. (Yellow River, China, in 1979 and 2003 via NASA: earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/36236/yellow-river-delta-china )Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: The life of the river is its flood pulse. "The flood … is just the river breathing deeply, as it must. … "Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: "The periodic flooding of the floodplain is the lifeworld and the condition of existence of all the species that inhabit the river." (image: "Nile Flood plain limits (2009)" CC-BY-SA, Leoboudv at WikiCommons)Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: Floods enable "flood retreat agriculture" on fields that are naturally tilled by the river itself.Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: interventions along rivers are the greatest danger in the river system: simplifying, "rectifying the Rhine," limiting meanders, levees narrow channels. All these speed up the river, turn it into a pipe that shunts silt faster.Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: Yellow River is 33 feet above the surrounding plain: what we have here is not a river, but an aqueduct. An extreme form of technological lock-in.Permalink On twitter.com
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Incidental comment, Scott's argument is anticipated w/r/t to China's massive efforts to control its river systems by Mark Elvin's _The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China_Permalink On twitter.com
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Scott: the impounding of the Missouri led to the devastating Mississippi flood of 1993.Permalink On twitter.com
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Second side point: The "65 years of river engineering" on the Mississippi / Missouri was built atop the Army Corps' dam systems which flooded the agricultural lands of the Lakota and other indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Map by Kees Lokman, scenariojournal.com/article/missouri-river-basin/Permalink On twitter.com
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The damming of the Missouri River directly flooded the lands of thousands of Indigenous people and was paired with attempts to disestablish them as political entities. (sections from @nickwestes's Our History is the Future, versobooks.com/books/2953-our-history-is-the-future )Permalink On twitter.com
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Also, Scott's overall lecture modestly gives way to little credit to his work on river alluvium as a site where states arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. See Against the Grain (2017)…Permalink On twitter.com
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… and The Art of Not Being Governed (2009).Permalink On twitter.com