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Do Humans Really Understand the World’s Disorderly Rivers? 

In James C. Scott’s last book, In Praise of Floods, he questions the limits of human hegemony and our misplaced sense that we have any control over the Earth’s depleted watershed.

The Deluge towards Its Close, Joshua Shaw, 1813.

At the very beginning of his final book, completed shortly before his death last year, James C. Scott issues an apology. He had intended to write about rivers, and one river in particular: the Ayeyarwady, whose watershed delimits the nation of Burma. The book would have moved from an ethnographic and ecological account of the river and its people to a meditation on freedom and control—on what happens when a human civilization attempts to dominate a nonhuman system that it does not, and perhaps cannot, understand.

In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings

But between 2020 and 2021, the Tatmadaw—the insular junta that has plagued Burmese society for half a century—annulled the election it had lost and seized absolute power, reestablishing what is arguably the purest, most nakedly authoritarian military dictatorship in the world. Scott, a public supporter of the democratic opposition, was barred from the country, and with it access to the river.

That the writing of this particular book was truncated by a fascist coup furnishes the reader with an insight as rich as any contained in its pages. This is a book about blunt attempts to control subtle systems. About the point at which a pulsing river hits a concrete dam; a teeming marsh gets drained and cropped; a lazy oxbow is straitjacketed into a canal.

Seen through Scott’s lens, the junta’s attempts to dominate the Burmese people are not a simile but an extension of the same metaphysical violence: wrought by the simple on the complex, the finite on the unlimited, the profane on the divine. All rivers, he would argue, suffer from and dissent against this violence.

One imagines the blithe Potomac—its mud and its eddies, its frogs and larvae—coursing past Trump’s military parade. It’s a ripple beneath the boots. A seditious, hidden army. A timeless joke we can’t quite grasp.

In Praise of Floods, the book that emerged despite all of this, feels, per Scott’s caveat, like something that has spilled through the cracks in a dam. There are many powerful currents, but they don’t always converge—a geomorphological history of rivers; an exegesis on the role of floods in riparian ecology; a participatory ethnography on spirit worship along the Ayeyarwady River; an imagined parliamentary debate among the plants and animals that live in its watershed.

Scott succeeds most where he upends the received wisdom on what a river is. A river is not, as he convincingly argues, a single, set channel through a landscape. It is a shifting web of capillary detail, composed of tributaries, and tributaries to those tributaries, and innumerable amphibious zones where water and land sponge together in patternless complexity. Our cartographic representations of rivers—blue lines cutting across brown land—are both hopelessly oversimplified and inevitably out of date. Lulled by the easily thinkable scale of days and weeks, we assume we know where a river runs. But on the scale of years and decades, as Scott explains, a natural river is like a loose hose, the main channel whipping wildly around its basin. In this more protean conception of a river, a flood is less a disaster than it is a natural expansion and contraction of the water, a process analogous to breathing.

Left to their own devices, all rivers flood periodically, taking up some greater or lesser portion of their floodplain. The pulse of water gives life to the surrounding ecosystems, drawing in “an entire cavalcade of creatures and flora” for a semi-regular, multi-species feast. When the water recedes, it draws with it the organic nutrients without which the river “could sustain but little life.” Scott lavishes particular attention on the “vast in-between landscape that is transitional, periodically inundated, periodically dry, and periodically damp.” These “backwaters, ponds, marshes, swamps”—formed and sustained by flooding—often host the highest density of life, species adapted to their “periodicity and fluctuations.”

Homo sapiens is not one of those species. Rather than adapt to the river, we have tried to bend it to our will. Scott traces the history of this struggle to the dawn of sedentary agriculture. Attracted to the nutrient-rich soil, early agriculturalists settled on fertile floodplains to grow their crops. The crops grew well, but the settlements got destroyed by the very floods that brought the nutrients. The rivers shifted course frequently and suddenly, leaving a bog where there had been a planted field, or an empty bed where there had been a........

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