In the hopper for some years, Big Muddy has been worth the wait. Christopher Morris has molded a thoroughly researched, smartly organized, and thoughtfully argued book. One of its strengths lies in his effort to make history a subject of contemporary importance.

The Mississippi River – much romanticized in song, poetry, and literature; exalted as the great continental divide and a jewel in international rivalries; functioning as a superhighway of people, cargo, sediment, and pollution – reveals much about the impingement of nature on human history. Technological civilizations insist on defining the limits of wildness. That has been the Mississippi's modern history. Historically, it has rebelled against control with repeated levee breaks and floods. Morris begins his book by introducing the river's willfulness as part of its ecological being, and underscoring the devastating consequences of human manipulation.

He then casts back to the dynamic origins of the river, highlighting aboriginal cultures that lived with the river's vagaries. Not so with Westerners. With much trial and error, the French were the first to chart the river's bewildering mouth. They turned delta marshland – considered wasteland – into rice land, the subject of a fascinating chapter. They also founded New Orleans, an improbable city laid out below the river's mean level, realizing early the need of levees. In keeping out the river, they made the city into a giant clay dish that held rain water – and mosquito larvae and yellow fever.

The river's greatest commercial importance was its capacity for moving goods, first products of nature – pelts and skins – and then those of agriculture and manufacturers. Morris devotes two chapters to the rise and reign of cotton in its true kingdom, the river valley and its fantastically fertile alluvial soil. Planters treated nature similarly to the way they treated labor: with much aggression. The latter cleared forests, drained wetlands, and built levees. “Between the advancing nature of the cotton plantation and the vanishing nature of the wetland forests appeared a third nature,” edge environments (125). Similar to those created by pre-Columbian natives, they allowed the enslaved and latter-day farmworkers access to protein off the plantation and reinforced the cultural and social gap between themselves and planters.

By the early twentieth century, “King Cotton's triumph over Big Muddy was complete” (122). But agriculture had cut itself off from the nature that made it possible. Without the revitalizing spring floods, fertility decreased and the use of inorganic fertilizers (and pollution) increased. Land subsided, raising the stakes for “natural” disasters. The response to killing floods historically has been to out-reengineer the river. On the ostensibly dry side of public-funded levees, agriculture and the human population flourished, and with the aid of FEMA remained intact. By the late twentieth century, soybeans and farm-raised catfish had joined cotton in the valley. Floods still happened.

Thanks in part to John Barry and John McPhee, the folly of the river's control is well known. Morris's work is more than a reprise of existing literature, however. He is as much interested in human interaction with the land and how the land changed as Barry is in engineers. Those changes have all but erased an important historical memory that recalls a vitality of nature, mutually beneficial to humans and wildlife, that has been lost, leaving Americans today more dependent on their mechanized environment and prone to exacerbate existing problems.

One such problem is the disappearing Louisiana coast. Years of implementing water-control devices has reduced sediment flow, and by fixing the river's mouth in place (so New Orleans can remain a port city) rather than letting it jump about, engineers send sediment farther out into the Gulf. Without replenishing mud from the Big Muddy, Louisiana's marshy coast – hurricane buffer to the local population, stopover for millions of migrating birds, nursery for 30 percent of the nation's annual seafood harvest, and homeland of Cajun culture – literally began drowning. Engineers first detected something amiss in the late nineteenth century soon after completing the first levees in the delta. A half-century later, the vulnerable coast became the prize of the oil industry (a subject Morris avoids), which has dominated river politics and, with the aid of human-induced erosions, supplanted the regional fishing culture.

Although packed with technical detail, the book never bogs down in it. Morris deploys human stories and graceful prose to maintain the flow, making his an accessible study, one river managers might heed. The Big Muddy also comes in a compact size, ideal for adopting for a course, as this reviewer has done.