An Unnatural Metropolis
Wresting New Orleans from Nature
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An Unnatural Metropolis
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Narrated by:
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Peter Lerman
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By:
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Craig E. Colten
About this listen
Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an "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. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans's natural environment from 1800 to 2000 and demonstrates that, though all cities must contend with their physical settings, New Orleans may be the city most dependent on human-induced transformations of its precarious site. In a new preface, Colten shows how Hurricane Katrina exemplifies the inability of human artifice to exclude nature from cities and he urges city planners to keep the environment in mind as they contemplate New Orleans's future. Urban geographers frequently have portrayed cities as the antithesis of nature, but in An Unnatural Metropolis, Colten introduces a critical environmental perspective to the history of urban areas. His work offers an in-depth look at a city and society uniquely shaped by the natural forces it has sought to harness.
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 171
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 154
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 153
Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also has an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors - the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan - every day.
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3 out of 5 stars
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More water politics story than water technology
- By normal person on 04-12-21
By: Seth M. Siegel
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Crabgrass Frontier
- The Suburbanization of the United States
- By: Kenneth T. Jackson
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 70
This first full-scale history of the development of the American suburb examines how "the good life" in America came to be equated with the a home of one's own surrounded by a grassy yard and located far from the urban workplace. Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day.
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5 out of 5 stars
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There is so much to think about here.
- By Richard McKown on 06-25-23
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The Vertical Farm
- Feeding the World in the 21st Century
- By: Dickson Despommier
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 116
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. The vertical farm has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Brainstorming - Not reality
- By Texas Community Project on 01-25-11
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Trees in Paradise
- A California History
- By: Jared Farmer
- Narrated by: Kevin Scollin
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities.
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5 out of 5 stars
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lovely audiobook
- By Michael M. on 08-02-22
By: Jared Farmer
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 27 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,704
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,471
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,463
In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Jared Diamond Downs You in Explanation
- By Rob on 07-20-18
By: Jared Diamond
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The Road Taken
- The History and Future of America's Infrastructure
- By: Henry Petroski
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4 out of 5 stars 45
Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly 65,000 bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient'. This crisis - and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis - shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Well put
- By Lawrence on 08-10-17
By: Henry Petroski
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Overheated
- How Climate Change Will Cause Floods, Famine, War, and Disease
- By: Andrew T. Guzman
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A must read!
- By Ted on 03-22-15
By: Andrew T. Guzman
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Sustainability
- A History
- By: Jeremy L. Caradonna
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
Caradonna's unique and concise history broadens our understanding of what "sustainability" means, revealing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that shapes everything from individual lifestyles, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy. For anyone seeking understand the history of those striving to make the world a better place to live, here's a place to start.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent
- By marc grub on 03-06-17
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As Long as Grass Grows
- The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
- By: Dina Gilio-Whitaker
- Narrated by: Kyla Garcia
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 168
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 142
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Story5 out of 5 stars 141
The story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions and a call for environmentalists to learn from the indigenous community’s rich history of activism.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Unbalanced Information
- By J. Scott on 08-30-22
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Coal
- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 378
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 185
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Story4 out of 5 stars 191
The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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The Challenge for Africa
- By: Wangari Maathai
- Narrated by: Chinasa Ogbuagu
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai has campaigned for environmental activism and democracy in Africa for more thanthree decades. In The Challenge for Africa, she delivers an insightful call to action, presenting a realistic look at the diverse problems facing Africans today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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10 years later, this is still powerful.
- By Presence on 04-21-18
By: Wangari Maathai
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Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster
- By: Susan Stranahan, David Lochbaum, The Union of Concerned Scientists, and others
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 207
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 189
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 190
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake large enough to knock the earth from its axis sent a massive tsunami speeding toward the Japanese coast and the aging and vulnerable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors. Over the following weeks, the world watched in horror as a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe: fail-safes failed, cooling systems shut down, nuclear rods melted.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Internal workings of the NRC
- By Eduards J. Vucins on 05-11-14
By: Susan Stranahan, and others
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A Revolution Down on the Farm
- The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929
- By: Paul K. Conkin
- Narrated by: Kevin Pierce
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story4 out of 5 stars 98
Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent review of farming history in US
- By Joanne on 01-26-14
By: Paul K. Conkin
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The Color of Law
- A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
- By: Richard Rothstein
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 4,653
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,963
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Story5 out of 5 stars 3,943
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Better suited to print than audio
- By ProfGolf on 02-04-18
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Late Victorian Holocausts
- El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
- By: Mike Davis
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Mike Davis on Audible!
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-02-17
By: Mike Davis
What listeners say about An Unnatural Metropolis
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Book Lover
- 09-23-18
Just terrible!
Just terrible! I was looking for a good non - fiction, factual book about New Orleans. There aren't many on audible. Skip this one...
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