Platt, Harold L. (Author)
Temple University Press
Physical Details: 342
Language: English
In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region’s waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers’ heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.
...MoreReview Colin Fisher (2020) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". Journal of American History (pp. 1077-1078).
Review Joshua Salzmann (2019) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". American Historical Review (pp. 1096-1097).
Review Benjamin Lieberman (July 2019) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". Environmental History (pp. 626-627).
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