The Rhine
Subtitle: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000 (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: November 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780295982540
Subjects: Conservation of the environment; History of specific subjects; Hydrology (freshwater); Management of land & natural resources; Nature; Nature/Ecology; Europe; Germany; Real Estate - General; Rivers; Environmental Conservation & Protection - General; Western Europe - General; Effect of environment on; Human beings; Rhine River; River engineering; Stream ecology
First sentence: The modern Rhine"Europe's romantic sewer"is an offspring of the French and industrial revolutions.
Description: "The Rhine River is Europe's most important commercial waterway, channeling the flow of trade among Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In this innovative study, Mark Cioc focuses on the river from the moment when the Congress of Vienna established a multinational commission charged with making the river more efficient for purposes of trade and commerce. He examines the engineering and adminstrative decisions of the next century and a half that resulted in rapid industrial growth as well as profound environmental degradation, and highlights the partially successful restoration efforts undertaken from the 1970s to the present."

"Two centuries of nonstop hydraulic tinkering have resulted in a Rhine with a sleek and slender profile. In their quest for a perfect canal-like river, engineers have modified it more than any other large river in the world. As a consequence, between 1815 and 1975, the river lost most of its natural floodplain, riverside vegetation, migratory fish, and biodiversity. Recent efforts to restore that biodiversity, though heartening, can have only limited success because so many of the structural changes to the river are irreversible." "The Rhine: An Eco-Biography 1815-2000 makes clear just how central the river has been to all aspects of European political, economic, and environmental life for the past two hundred years."--Jacket.