Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time - Softcover

Ross, John E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1621908542 ISBN 13: 9781621908548

Verlag: University of Tennessee Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

WINNER, NORTH CAROLINA SOCIETY OF HISTORIANS AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

Two generations have passed since the publication of Wilma Dykeman’s landmark environmental history, The French Broad. In Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time, John Ross updates that seminal book with groundbreaking new research. More than the story of a single river, Through the Mountains covers the entire watershed from its headwaters in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains to its mouth in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The French Broad watershed has faced new perils and seen new discoveries since 1955, when The French Broad was published. Geologists have learned that the Great Smoky Mountains are not among the world’s oldest as previously thought; climatologists and archaeologists have traced the dramatic effects of global warming and cooling on the flora, fauna, and human habitation in the watershed; and historians have deepened our understanding of enslaved peoples once thought not to be a part of the watershed’s history. Even further, this book documents how the French Broad and its tributaries were abused by industrialists, and how citizens fought to mitigate the pollution.

Through the Mountains also takes readers to notable historic places: the hidden mound just inside the gate of Biltmore where Native Americans celebrated the solstices; the once-secret radio telescope site above Rosman where NASA eavesdropped on Russian satellites; and the tiny hamlet of Gatlinburg where Phi Beta Phi opened its school for mountain women in 1912.

Wilma Dykeman once asked what the river had meant to the people who lived along it. In the close of Through the Mountains, Ross reframes that question: For 14,000 years the French Broad and its tributaries have nurtured human habitation. What must we start doing now to ensure it will continue to nourish future generations? Answering this question requires a knowledge of the French Broad’s history, an understanding of its contemporary importance, and a concern for the watershed’s sustainable future. Through the Mountains fulfills these three criteria, and, in many ways, presents the larger story of America’s freshwater habitats through the incredible history of the French Broad.

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JOHN ROSS, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award, is the author of more than a dozen books exploring the interaction of humans with the natural world, including Rivers of Restoration and, most recently, The Forecast for D-day and the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Cup your hands tightly together and tilt them toward the floor. Imagine the seam where they meet as a river and the lifelines on your palms as tributaries. If someone slowly poured water into your hands, it would run out over the tips of your little fingers like a tiny waterfall. You have just created your own watershed. Geographers define watersheds as basins surrounded by mountains and ridges drained by streams that coalesce in a single river. Social scientists think of watersheds differently, as turning points in one’s life or in human history. Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time presents the inseparable integration of the evolution of place and people in the watershed of the French Broad River, which swings northeast around the Great Smoky Mountains, the most heavily visited national park in America.
            A watershed’s terrain, its rivers, and its climate shape its flora and fauna. Though present in the French Broad watershed for about five milliseconds of the earth’s history, our influence on the course of its waters and weather is far greater in the short run of millennia than its sculpting of us. The impact of our past and future deeds along the French Broad, though varying in specific details, are in aggregate no different from the effects of human habitation along any or all of America’s rivers.
            Every major watershed—from the Kennebec across the country to the Sacramento—has been fashioned by periods of geologic upheaval and subsidence; colonization and settlement by paleo-people arriving from Eurasia; invasion of European immigrants driven west in flight from ravages of the Little Ice Age and in pursuit of dominating wealth; eviction of native Indians; internecine warfare; unfettered industrialized exploitation of natural resources and resulting rampant pollution; of economic depression and pandemic, and, of late, environmental awareness and pockets of restoration. Thus, the story of the French Broad is the large story of all of America’s great rivers, but small enough to tell.
            Rising in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina and passing through Asheville, the French Broad river swings wide to the north around the Great Smokies before breaking out of the mountains near Newport, Tennessee, bound for Knoxville. There it joins the Holston to form the Tennessee. Four smaller rivers feed the French Broad: Swannanoa, Pigeon, Nolichucky, and Little Pigeon. The Pigeon, marks the northern boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Its smaller sibling, the Little Pigeon, carved the valley occupied by the tourist meccas of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg. The Nolichucky drains North Carolina’s rugged mineral district above Spruce Pine. The shortest is the Swannanoa, but in many ways it cradles some of the watershed’s oldest prehistoric Indian sites. The French Broad watershed is the heart of Western North Carolina and the epicenter of tourism in East Tennessee. More than 1 million people make their homes in the French Broad watershed and nearly 16 million visit annually.
            Remember the game: “Rock, Paper, Scissors”? Your parents or grandparents may have played it with you. Paper wraps rock. Scissors cut paper. Rock breaks scissors. Which of the three is most powerful? Now consider this: water or rock? Those clear drops falling from the sky that dampen our gardens feel so benign—except when delivered in deluges that flood our farms and cities, laying waste to much we have built in a river’s path. Rock, on the other hand, appears totally enduring. So utterly permanent the Blue Ridge Mountains seem—but they are not.
 

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Tennessee Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1621908542
• ISBN 13: 9781621908548
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland