The Place with No Edge - (Natural World of the Gulf South) by Adam Mandelman (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The Place with No Edge is the story about three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and profit from some of the youngest, most dynamic, and persistently sodden land in North America: the Mississippi River Delta, that vast watery flatlands in which New Orleans was founded. Little did Euro-American newcomers understand that their struggles to reorganize the Mississippi River Delta with levees, irrigation flumes, dredgers, and other technologies would result not in mastery over nature, but rather increasingly intimate connections with the unruly environment. Far from acting as independent agents, Louisiana's settlers grew more interdependent with the watery world around them. The technologies that transformed the delta, rather than emancipating people from nature, bound them ever closer to it. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina's storm surge invaded New Orleans because people had transformed the landscape without heeding the hydrological, ecological, and geological obligations that their technological interventions entailed. Adam Mandelman demonstrates how technologies thought to facilitate dominion over the nonhuman world have instead often left people more vulnerable and responsible to that world. Spanning the period from the first French fort in the delta in 1700 through the release of Louisiana's 2017 Coastal Master Plan, the book's chapters each use a different technology-levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking-to reveal how people have grown more deeply entangled with nature even as they assumed they were achieving mastery over it. The Place with No Edge moves beyond longstanding discussions of the hubris and tragedy of human manipulations of the environment to show how the work of taming nature through technology is a declaration of dependence rather than independence"--

Book Synopsis

In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people's use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with--rather than independence from--the environment.

Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with--and vulnerable to--it.

The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system's failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming's rising seas and strengthening storms.

The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans' relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment--whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable --inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

Review Quotes

The Place with No Edge documents and interprets the environmental history of the Mississippi Delta in a way that also sheds light on the broader topic of human/environment interaction over time. Mandelman lays out the story of people reorganizing their environment, and in the process succumbing to the erroneous conclusion that they had managed to conquer and control nature in a more or less permanent way.--Philip V. Scarpino, coeditor of Rivers of the Anthropocene and author of Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi River, 1890-1950

About the Author

Adam Mandelman is an environmental historian and experience designer. He earned his PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin--Madison and currently lives in Amsterdam, where he works on user research and experience design in the cultural sector.