Time is running out for the world’s great rivers
That rivers have a life of their own is an ancient idea become current again. Shape-shifting, vital and recognisably capable of being sickened or damaged – as the state of our fragile chalk streams so starkly illustrates – there is good reason why fluvial myths have such historic potency and why the flow of water enjoys so many figurative associations. The late James C. Scott, an amateur hydrologist and professor of anthropology at Yale, who died in July last year, opens his nicely fluent study with an unequivocal assertion – ‘Rivers, on a long view, are alive.’ In Praise of Floods examines the several ways in which homo sapiens have
