| The Mississippi River Delta emerged out of the Gulf of Mexico over the last 8,000 years as the river mouth meandered along an ancient inland coast, depositing sediments that eventually accumulated into more or less solid terrain. This place---spanning much of southern Louisiana---embodies some of the youngest, most dynamic, and persistently soggy land in North America, a place where the boundaries between land and water have often been porous and uncertain.;Euro-Americans arrived in this vast watery environment in the early 1700s, and soon after began a centuries-long struggle to bring order to the sodden landscape. Those efforts almost always backfired. Using levees, canals, roads, property lines, and much, much more, people struggled to impose physical and conceptual boundaries on the landscape. But although these boundaries were intended to clarify and stabilize the distinctions between land and water, they routinely proved unstable and provisional: levees crevassed, canals clogged, roads sank, property lines faded from view. Perhaps most tragically, attempts to carve stable territory from the delta often resulted in even more pronounced instability. For example: since the 1930s, almost 2,000 square miles of Louisiana wetlands have eroded into the Gulf. Those wetlands disappeared largely thanks to canals originally intended to fix the arrangement of water and land along the coast.;But while coastal land loss is an increasingly visible problem afflicting the Mississippi River Delta, it is not the only important story that has emerged from three centuries of Euro-American boundary-making in the region. Beginning with European arrival and continuing through the years following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation follows the work of sugar and rice planters, cypress lumbermen, petroleum producers, petrochemical manufacturers, and coastal restoration professionals to show that people's efforts to organize nature in the delta were almost always far more provisional and precarious than they imagined. Bounding nature in the Mississippi River Delta left people mired in unintended consequences. |
