FreeLists / birdky / [birdky] RIVERS UNDER SIEGE

["Ken Leggett" <kcleggett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  I posted this summary of Jim's new book on TN-Birds.  Many Kentucky birders 
may be interested in it also.


  Jim Johnson's new book Rivers Under Siege 
  The Troubled Saga of West Tennessee's Wetlands 

  is now available.

  From the University of Tennessee Press web site the following is an overview 
of the book.

  "Rivers under Siege is a wrenching firsthand account of how human 
interventions, often well intentioned, have wreaked havoc on West Tennessee's 
fragile wetlands. For more than a century, farmers and developers tried to tame 
the rivers as they became clogged with sand and debris, thereby increasing 
flooding. Building levees and changing the course of the rivers from meandering 
streams to straight-line channels, developers only made matters worse. Yet the 
response to failure was always to try to subdue nature, to dig even bigger 
channels and construct even more levees-an effort that reached its sorry 
culmination in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' massive West Tennessee 
Tributaries Project during the 1960s. As a result, the rivers' natural 
hydrology descended into chaos, devastating the plant and animal ecology of the 
region's wetlands. Crops and trees died from summer flooding, as much of the 
land turned into useless, stagnant swamps."

  The author, Jim Johnson, now retired and living on Reelfoot Lake was a land 
management biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency who oversaw 
thirteen wildlife management areas in West Tennessee.  He tells the story of 
this sad saga from the beginning and relates his personal experiences of seeing 
it happen and later as a land management biologist trying to do what he could 
to correct it.

  This book is must reading for all serious birders. We all need to be aware of 
the terrible mess created by the Corps of Engineers and  the state of Tennessee 
on the five rivers (Obion, Forked Deer, Loosahatchie, Wolf and the Hatchie) and 
Reelfoot Lake. Unlike the other four rivers the Hatchie was not channelized but 
all of its tributaries were.

  The book can be purchased at Amazon.com and the University of Tennessee Press 
as well as many local stores.


  For those of you who did not know I moved from Dyersburg to Eddyville in 
March.

  Ken Leggett
  Eddyville, Kentucky