Do Humans Really Understand the World’s Disorderly Rivers?
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Books & the Arts
/ February 24, 2026
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.
Daniel Sherrell
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The Deluge towards Its Close, Joshua Shaw, 1813.
(Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)
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.
Books in review
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
by James C. Scott
Buy this book
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 …
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Current Issue
Environment
/
Books & the Arts
/ February 24, 2026
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.
Daniel Sherrell
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
The Deluge towards Its Close, Joshua Shaw, 1813.
(Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)
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.
Books in review
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
by James C. Scott
Buy this book
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 …
Do Humans Really Understand the World’s Disorderly Rivers?
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
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Do Humans Really Understand the World’s Disorderly Rivers?
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Politics
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Current Issue
Environment
/
Books & the Arts
/ February 24, 2026
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.
Daniel Sherrell
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
The Deluge towards Its Close, Joshua Shaw, 1813.
(Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)
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.
Books in review
In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
by James C. Scott
Buy this book
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 …
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