Böcker av Craig E. Colten

Explores Louisiana's protracted efforts to restore and protect its coastal marshes, nearly always with minimal regard for the people displaced by those efforts. As Craig Colten shows, the state's coastal restoration plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices the coastal dwellers who have occupied this perilous place for centuries.

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first "impossible but inevitable city." How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis.

The hurricane protection systems that failed New Orleans when Katrina roared on shore in 2005 were the product of four decades of engineering hubris, delays, and social conflict. Craig Colten traces the protracted process of erecting massive structures designed to fend off tropical storms and examines how human actions and inactions left the system incomplete on the eve of its greatest challenge.

This book examines industrial waste disposal before the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.