[TN-Bird] RIVERS UNDER SIEGE
- From: "Ken Leggett" <kcleggett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2007 13:41:37 -0500
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 birders in Tennessee. 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 in March.
Ken Leggett
Eddyville, Kentucky
=================NOTES TO SUBSCRIBER=====================
The TN-Bird Net requires you to SIGN YOUR MESSAGE with
first and last name, CITY (TOWN) and state abbreviation.
You are also required to list the COUNTY in which the birds
you report were seen. The actual DATE OF OBSERVATION should
appear in the first paragraph.
_____________________________________________________________
To post to this mailing list, simply send email to:
tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
_____________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send email to:
tn-bird-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field.
______________________________________________________________
TN-Bird Net is owned by the Tennessee Ornithological Society
Neither the society(TOS) nor its moderator(s)
endorse the views or opinions expressed
by the members of this discussion group.
Moderator: Wallace Coffey, Bristol, TN
wallace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------------------
Assistant Moderator Andy Jones
Cleveland, OH
-------------------------------
Assistant Moderator Dave Worley
Rosedale, VA
__________________________________________________________
Visit the Tennessee Ornithological Society
web site at http://www.tnbirds.org
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
ARCHIVES
TN-Bird Net Archives at //www.freelists.org/archives/tn-bird/
EXCELLENT MAP RESOURCES
Topographical Maps located at http://topozone.com/find.asp
Tenn.Counties Map at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/states/tennessee3.gif
Aerial photos to complement google maps http://local.live.com
_____________________________________________________________
Other related posts:
- » [TN-Bird] RIVERS UNDER SIEGE
