In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings
By James C. Scott
Yale University Press
In Praise of Floods, the final published work by the late Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, is a fleet, searching book, with the laudable ambition to change people’s minds about how they relate to the rivers around them, in the hopes of creating a more sustainable future for all plants and animals. It’s built on a lifetime of experience, a strong sense of accumulated wisdom, laced with a sly sense of humor that often aids its goals.
And yet none of that prevented me from putting the book face-down on the table when I was reading it in a barbecue joint in western North Carolina, a place still struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which wrought havoc on the region in September 2024. People in the booths around me could have lost families and friends, homes and jobs. If the title of the book made them angry, I wouldn’t have blamed them. And if they’d gotten past the title and asked me what the book was about, I couldn’t have brought myself to defend it.
Floods have shaped all of our lives in ways large and small. A town in central New York near where I grew up was devastated by a historic flood in 1935, and in some ways can be said to have never recovered. Hurricanes Irene and Sandy destroyed roads and houses across New England. In August last year, flooding from severe rain in Oxford made 12 roads impassable, destroyed six bridges, and damaged homes and businesses. In some ways, New Haven lives constantly in the shadow of a possible flood; it worries the minds of city planners, even as they expand Tweed and prepare Long Wharf for possible larger-scale development, and it looms in the background as the wastewater treatment plant gets ready for the future. Environmental advocates worry about what will happen if a big enough flood cracks open English Station, unleashing the pollutants it contains.
In Praise of Floods has an important message to deliver about these worries, and where they come from. To deliver this message, Scott starts at the beginning. Using the Ayeyarwady River in Burma as his principal subject — but with generalizations to rivers around the world, from the Yellow River in China to the Mississippi River in the United States — Scott points out that, before human cultivation and settlement, rivers flooded, and in fact, changed course, fairly often. The Yellow River, Scott tells us, changed course 26 times by 800 kilometers in the past 3,000 years. Rivers have deltas for a reason; before humans, the beds of rivers could shift and meander, often by miles, as floods shaped and reshaped them season after season. In the process, they replenished the soils of the deltas, making them fertile ground for rich biodiversity, and in the early stages of human development, food production. Early humans, records show, lived with rivers as other living things did. They adapted to the changing courses of rivers, cultivating food on newly replenished land and moving when necessary. In return, they were granted abundant crops, vital fisheries, and a healthy environment for hunting and gathering.
The trouble started when humans decided to settle down. Suddenly a river jumping its bank could mean the destruction of a town, the decimation of a city. In response, humans began to build walls to contain rivers and keep their settlements safe, a process that accelerated first slowly, for thousands of years, and then quickly, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Today, human hydraulic engineering, complete with dams, causeways, and gates, can contain the largest rivers in the world and keep them in specific places — until a big enough flood comes. Human efforts to tame rivers, in short, have depleted the land, decimated plant and animal populations, and created conditions for less frequent — but, when it comes, truly catastrophic — flooding.
“Unknowable thresholds of uncontrollable effects makes for a future of hyper-radical uncertainty,” Scott writes. We’ve put ourselves in a race with nature, and we’re likely to lose. What do we do about that?
For Scott, the beginning of the answer lies in changing the way we think. He urges us to think less from the perspective of humans and more from the perspective of other animals and plants, and deeper still, from the perspective of the river itself. Scott, as he puts it, seeks to “reject … anthropomorphic tunnel vision in favor of a more capacious understanding of what a river is.”
Scott’s evocation of the mindset can be quite beautiful. His prose seeks sometimes to alter our perception of time, zooming it out far beyond the scale of a human lifetime, from which we can understand that “everything, literally everything, moves. Nothing, literally nothing, is stationary.” We learn about the ways Burmese people who live on the shores of the Ayeyarwady have a cosmology that invites them to live more in harmony, and humility, with the natural forces around them. Scott even devotes a chapter, written sometimes humorously and sometimes angrily, with the voices of riverine wildlife who make their claims and bear witness to the damage humans have done to them.
Throughout, Scott writes with the breezy confidence of an academic at the top of his game, which he certainly was when he died last July at the age of 87. By then his reputation had been cemented, perhaps most by his 1998 book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. To cram a large argument into a small nutshell, Seeing Like a State is primarily about the folly of large-scale governments to shape the societies they govern. Looking at cases as diverse as the Soviet Union and the construction of Brasilia, he argues that, in some sense, the bigger the social engineering project, the more likely it is not to work, in large part because it doesn’t reflect or account for local knowledge and social structures. In plainer English, people know more about where they live than outside officials do, and have a way of doing what they want; if a plan comes down the pike they don’t like, or that conflicts too much with their way of life, they might fight back, or undermine the plan, or simply ignore it, and in the long term, there’s probably not much a government can do to stop them.
Seeing Like a State and other works of Scott’s have shaped not only academic but political and policy thought. Scott and the strain of thinking he’s part of are part of the reason many governments tend not to embark on large-scale social engineering projects any more, and part of the reason progressive policy wonks champion local knowledge as an indispensable ingredient to any successful policy endeavor. The change in policy thinking Scott is a part of can be seen right in New Haven and elsewhere, in the way a previous generation of planners razed neighbors to make way for roadways, and the current generation is now undoing some of that work. Scott’s work has champions on the left and the right of the political spectrum, united by the idea that a leader hoping to make something happen should start by listening to people.
Which makes it a bit ironic that in writing In Praise of Floods, Scott seems to forget to do that.
“Notwithstanding that flooding is, for humans, the damaging of ‘natural’ disasters worldwide, from a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must,” he writes, in a beautiful phrase that already carries a whiff that it will go shortly awry.
“On this view,” he continues, “we would regard the flooding of human settlements on the river’s floodplain as the result of Homo sapiens encroaching on the natural territory of the river, an act of trespass.” Later, writing from the perspective of an animal, he voices a similar statement in angrier terms: “What we have here is a world-historic land and water grab in which a single species has seized an entire landscape from its indigenous inhabitants and unilaterally colonized it. We” — he writes, meaning animals — “are abject colonial subjects just like indigenous people whose land was appropriated by imperial expansion.”
Just like? You can see where his thinking slips. In using the language of human class struggle to describe the relationship between humans and their surroundings, Scott plays too fast and loose with the ideas, and the argument falls apart. Scott himself admits as much a few pages later, after his argument overheats into generalizations about humanity that are all too easy to poke holes in, to find counterarguments for, to dismiss. “In my passion for orienting this book toward the nonhuman creatures so often ignored in the anthropocentric studies of river basins, I may have overlooked that humans are also riverine mammals with their own modest claim to a riverine livelihood.” This admission, 185 pages into a 207-page argument, isn’t a taking of account of a problem; it’s the leading edge of a fatal flaw that, when pressed, cuts the book’s ideas to pieces.
The flaw is that most of the people most hurt by floods aren’t, in human terms, the colonizers. People with vacation homes notwithstanding, many people don’t live in areas prone to flooding entirely by choice. Whether it’s low-income housing built on floodplains, or basement apartments, or farmhouses in steep, isolated valleys at the ends of dirt roads, the people are living there at least partly, if not completely, because it’s cheaper. They are the victims of the systems Scott invokes. In many cases, their ancestors weren’t the invaders or the colonizers; they were the invaded, the colonized, the enslaved.
Thus, with a tone that turns stentorian and increasingly abstract as it goes, In Praise of Floods delivers hard truths in a way that makes them useless. They are cleverly phrased and intended to create a shift in thinking. That shift is only possible if the writer and readers are almost completely removed from the threat of floods; if they know no one and no place that lives under threat, have little emotional connection to the news from all over the world about flood victims, from Pakistan, to Libya, to Asheville.
If you drive through Asheville right now, it’s hard to see evidence of the havoc Helene wrought. Streets are open; businesses are thriving. That’s true in the neighboring town of Black Mountain, too. But leave the orderliness of the towns, and Helene’s marks are all over the land. The banks of rivers and streams are still raw with fresh soil, fields still strewn with debris. Campsites for about an hour around Asheville are closed to campers, because they are housing refugees, people who lost their homes. In the mountains around Asheville, there are still impassable roads, houses cut off, piles of debris. Some small settlements are simply gone. The state confirmed that 104 people died in North Carolina due to Helene. About seven of them are still missing. What does In Praise of Floods have to say about this? What is the policy response to the idea that the victims were invaders, that the survivors were colonizers who didn’t belong there in the first place? That perhaps they’re undeserving of any more relief funds?
In fairness, the problem isn’t Scott’s alone; he’s replicating a problem that has appeared throughout the history of the environmental movement, as advocates, in the rush to be right, forget to also be kind. At its worst, the misanthropy is a shadow of the racist, eugenicist ideas that writhed around the environmental movement in the early 20th century — ideas that more recent developments in the environmental movement, centered on ideas of environmental justice, have worked to correct. At best, it’s just lazy thinking, and in its laziness, most hurtful to the people that, in Seeing Like a State, Scott said we should perhaps listen to the most.
But those hard truths do have something to say about creating a better way forward, before the next flood comes. Humans won’t return to the adaptive lifestyles of hunter-gatherers, for an incredible number of reasons. But perhaps we can let go of our thinking that places prone to flooding can or should be tamed for our purposes. In Praise of Floods also counts as a warning — locally, for instance, to New Haven officials who are pushing for the expensive expansion of Tweed, an airport with a nonzero chance of being wiped out in a flood, when they could instead perhaps build rail to Bradley Airport, which rests safely on higher ground. It suggests also that Long Wharf, if anything, should be undeveloped. Would it be so bad to tear it all down and instead have an even longer seaside park?
These sound like pipe dreams, of course. But the state has seen examples of that adaptive thinking already. After Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, a couple dozen homeowners in West Haven entered a FEMA program in which the government bought their homes at market price so they could relocate, then knocked the houses down and replanted the properties. Today, those lots are becoming more natural, and more resilient places. Way back in 1955, flooding from Hurricane Diane that destroyed 75 houses on the Milford shoreline led not to reconstruction, but to the creation of Silver Sands State Park. The beach and its marsh are now a thriving ecosystem and a well-loved gem of the state park system. We have adapted before. And as In Praise of Floods suggests, we still can now, before it’s too late, and Scott, posthumously, comes around to say he told you so.
