Book ID: CBB941060458

Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment (2018)

unapi

Platt, Harold L. (Author)


Temple University Press


Publication Date: 2018
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.

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Reviewed By

Review Colin Fisher (2020) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". Journal of American History (pp. 1077-1078). unapi

Review Joshua Salzmann (2019) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". American Historical Review (pp. 1096-1097). unapi

Review Benjamin Lieberman (July 2019) Review of "Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment". Environmental History (pp. 626-627). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB941060458/

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Authors & Contributors
Skelton, Leona J.
Bickers, Margaret A.
Hearty, Ryan
Clifford, Jim
Salzmann, Joshua A. T.
Velayutham Saravanan
Concepts
Rivers
Water pollution
Water supply
Flood control
Environmental history
Dams
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
United States
Chicago (Illinois, U.S.)
England
Canada
Muskingum River
Butte, Montana
Institutions
Anaconda Copper Mining Company
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia
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