Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

Holding back the river, the struggle against nature on America's waterways, Tyler J. Kelley

eng

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Holding back the river

Tyler J. Kelley

the struggle against nature on America's waterways

In the tradition of John McPhee's classics about where nature and mankind meet, Holding Back the River introduces readers to the Americans who carry on the eternal battle against the savage appetites of our great rivers. The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America's great rivers are as integral to this country as the many states named after them. We depend on rivers for drinking water; for nourishing our crops; for cheap bulk transportation; for hydroelectric power and more. But these benefits don't come freely-Americans have labored for generations to tame the forces of nature, and we still haven't won. The real story of the country's waterways is the story of the men and women fighting to harness them. Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling across America's heartland, getting to know the citizens of so-called "fly over country" whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. In Holding Back the River, Kelley follows government employees as they brave safety hazards at crumbling locks and dams to keep enormous volumes of shipping traffic moving. He brings to life the farmers who depend on rivers to enrich their soil and provide cheap transportation for their crops, yet dread the worsening flooding that could destroy what they've built in an instant. And he takes us behind closed doors at the US Army Corps of Engineers, where generals and scientists are struggling to manage flooding that grows more extreme with every season. In the first half of the 20th century our nation spent trillions of dollars building structures to control these rivers. Two generations have passed, and now much of what's been built is falling apart. Sixty-percent of US farm exports travel along our 12,000 miles of inland waterways, where many locks and dams are one gate, one piston, one concrete wall away from catastrophic failure. Such failure could mean sky-high grain prices, no heating oil for Cincinnati, diminished access to drinking water in Kentucky, or a crippling blow to domestic steel. America's infrastructure has been underfunded for decades, and the situation is dire. Yet to fix what's wrong will require more than money-it will require an act of imagination, as the economy, society, and the climate have all changed, while these levees, locks, and dams have not. If we want to maintain our way of life, we may need to give up some of the ground won in this two-century battle with nature. Meticulously researched and as lively as it is informative, Holding Back the River is a significant work of reporting on one of our country's most vital natural resources

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