The place with no edge: an intimate history of people, technology, and the Mississippi River Delta

"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, ecolo