Ever-moving rivers create landscapes and sustain life, yet their variability can also bring disaster to human communities that do not adapt to that movement. Furthermore, in an era of climate instability, river movements are increasingly harder to deny, suppress, or harness. Rivers on the Move collects essays across disciplines to explore the tension between rivers’ movements and economic, social, and political desires for ecological stability. Contributors, hailing from a wide range of humanities and scientific fields alike, examine river movements as both physical and cultural phenomena that shape environments across the world and across all ages. Together, their essays analyze how rivers move, what counts as movement, how human societies try to control those movements, and how we can imagine new ways of coexisting with rivers.

Bathsheba Demuth is Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Mark A. Healey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Giacomo Parrinello is Associate Professor of Environmental History at the Centre for History of the Sciences Po Paris.

Laurence C. Smith is John Atwater and Diana Nelson University Professor of Environmental Studies in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society at Brown University.

“There are books that discuss the environmental history of individual river basins and there are books that discuss multiple river basins from a specific disciplinary perspective, but there is nothing quite like this book. From Pleistocene-age glacier outburst floods through pre-history to the most pressing contemporary issues, this book covers the gamut of how people and rivers interact. It provides an important resource for anyone interested in Earth’s dynamic rivers.”
-- Ellen Wohl, author of Following the Bend: How to Read a River and Understand Its Nature