Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (review)

Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change. Edited by Craig E. Colten. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Pp. x+272. $45/$17.95.

A fundamental premise of Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs is that one cannot separate the environmental history of New Orleans from either the history of its hinterland or from ongoing efforts to control and manage the Mississippi River. Hence, the twelve essays in Craig Colten's book focus on changes and conflicts throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, a stretch of land that runs approximately from Baton Rouge to the Delta. The first set of essays cover human-induced changes before urbanization, and includes chapters on Native American modifications to the land and French efforts to adapt to the land. Next we turn to nineteenth-century efforts to place the Mississippi at the service of the city, and then to twentieth-century efforts to displace hazards associated with those changes. The last set of essays focuses on industrial pollution, its effect on human health and the river, and the responses of various actors to pollution-related concerns.

A major part of the story told in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs involves the effort to isolate valuable land along the river from potential flooding. The essays that develop this theme are nicely coordinated, far more than one might expect in an edited volume. They examine the role of steamboats in the transformation of the river, gradual developments in the employment of levees, a debate over whether to preserve outlets to floodplains, and the increasing priority of protecting New Orleans at the expense of rural areas. In using levees to cut the river off from its floodplain, engineers essentially confined the river to a single channel. High flows then placed the land behind the weakest and lowest levees at risk. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ability of a community to defend itself from floods seems to have been a reflection of both its economic strength and political power.

Channeling the river also had other effects, such as cutting off much of the Delta from its needed supply of sediment and encouraging development in riskier and riskier areas. By the end of the twentieth century, serious "natural" disasters caused by hurricanes and massive erosion had become less and less natural. Instead, human actions had magnified dangers associated with natural events, transforming them into disasters. Indirectly, the volume also raises questions about whether ongoing efforts to manage the river represent technological fixes that merely delay and transform problems or whether they encourage changes that gradually make human uses of the environment more compatible with natural ecosystems.

The chapters on the use of the river as a sink for industrial pollution, while insightful, are less coordinated with one another than those having to do with river management. One focuses on the consequences of poor land-use planning. Another has to do with the gradual realization that even the Mississippi has limits in its ability to absorb contaminants. A third considers the dramatic growth of the petrochemical industry in the 1960s and points to the importance of community-situated science in responding to health concerns from such industrial clusters. The final essay examines the effect of industrial pollution and the channeling of the river on fish populations.

Many of the essays in this volume were originally prepared for a conference that Colten organized with Edwin Lyon of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which may explain the effective coordination of themes tied to management of the river. In addition, the general format of the book benefits from a recent environmental history of St. Louis (Andrew Hurley, ed., Common Fields, 1997), a format that can be modified and fruitfully applied to other urban regions as well. Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs has potential as a text, and I plan to use it in an undergraduate environmental history course, both...