#Boyce Upholt

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this review of the book, "The Great River," from Grist:

In his new fascinating book The Great River, the writer Boyce Upholt tells the story of the Mississippi through the men who have sought to master the river for well over two centuries. Ranging across thousands of miles, he demonstrates how the United States has deformed and manipulated one of the world’s largest watersheds in the short-sighted service of economic development, often with catastrophic consequences.  Since the 19th century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent untold billions of dollars to dredge, levee, dam, undam, channelize, divert, reroute, and re-reroute the river, attempting to control flooding and facilitate navigation for freight. The squabbling engineers who have led the Corps are the closest that Upholt gets to main characters, and their stories function as parables about the relationship between the U.S. and the environment it sought to colonize and reshape.  The most famous of these stories was the contest between James Buchanan Eads, a brilliant civil engineer who advocated making space along the river’s banks for its water to flow and flood, and Andrew Humphreys, an Army general who advocated sealing most of the river off with man-made levees. Humphreys won the debate, with catastrophic results: In 1927, as the Corps was finalizing its levees along the lower river, a massive flood burst through them and inundated much of Louisiana and Arkansas, killing 500 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.  The pinnacle of the book is when Upholt visits the Old River control system, which was designed to hold the Mississippi in place. As he approaches the site, Upholt sees “concrete wing walls flare outward, funneling water toward a series of five steel gates” held in place by giant beams, and then “just upstream a second line of gates, six times longer, looms over a patch of batture…from a concrete catwalk built along the confluence, the river looked like a varicose vein…so swollen that it was ready to pop.”  It’s hard to comprehend the modern Mississippi until you’ve seen this structure. Its hubris typifies the destructive human effort Upholt is trying to depict throughout the book, and holds a lesson for regions and nations attempting to tackle the threat of climate change. If the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation struggled to tame nature before the earth warmed by a degree and a half, it does not bode well for its efforts to fend off sea-level rise with concrete walls or solve drought problems by constructing more dams.  As Upholt makes clear in the end, the solution isn’t just to tear everything down. Rather, he points us back to the Indigenous earthworks that preceded colonization, relics of a society that tried to live with the rhythms of a flood-prone river rather than change those rhythms to suit human needs.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi

By Boyce Upholt.

[ponydanza-in-a-canza]

"They shot LaSalle in the head, stripped him naked, and left him in a field" the way I LAUGHED

[newhistorybooks]

"With tributaries of history, geography, engineering, and environmental science, Boyce Upholt’s The Great River brings clarity and cohesion to a topic that intermixes complex stories across, quite literally, a million square miles. Using elements of travelogue and including fine maps, this compelling book takes readers through the making and unmaking of the Mississippi River, and leaves them with a hunch that, in the end, the river will remake itself."

[blsm-m]

One oft-quoted passage from his memoirs reads: Life on the MississippiMark Twain described how his perception of the river changed after months of steamboat travel up and down the muddy Mississippi: "The surface of the water became a great book," he said, and he could read the meanderings and eddies of the river that meant nothing to the passengers. But the tragedy of this "priceless acquisition" was that "all romance and beauty had vanished from the river." "To me, its only value was in how useful it was in guiding the safe operation of a steamship," he wrote. Even for those of us who never pilot a steamboat, this passage holds a vestigial lesson for how we perceive and talk about the environment. A body of water like the Mississippi is something we experience with our eyes, ears, and noses, and it is primarily because of its beauty that we want to protect it. But the Mississippi also has a particular human history, flowing between artificial levees, carrying ships carrying oil, and discharging toxic runoff from factory farms. In his fascinating new book, Great RiverAuthor Boyce Upholt tells the story of the Mississippi River not through the whirlpools and tidal flats that Twain traversed on his steamboat, but through the stories of the men who have sought to control the river for more than two centuries. Through thousands of miles of travel, he demonstrates how the United States has warped and manipulated one of the world's greatest watersheds for the shortsighted purposes of economic development, often with disastrous unintended consequences. Whereas Twain read the river as a book, Upholt reads it more specifically as a tragedy brought about by colonial arrogance. By focusing on the people who cut and dredged the river for their own purposes, rather than the river wilderness itself, a story is created that has profound lessons for the people who live in the river’s great basin, as well as coastal cities and the desert west. Upholt argues that the most interesting question is not how the Mississippi will respond to climate change, but what the river's history can teach us about how the rest of us will respond. Reflecting on how "engineers have tried to tame the god," he warns against other efforts to control nature's flows. He argues that for all our expertise and capabilities, we are less powerful than the boat passengers whom Twain mocked for their ignorance of the river's behavior. The book's first section looks back to the centuries preceding this attempt at domination. Upholt examines accumulating archaeological research on several Native American societies that rose and fell along the Mississippi River hundreds of years before European settlers arrived, including Cahokia, a city in present-day Illinois where more than 10,000 people lived around a central pyramid more than 100 feet tall. He ponders the cosmic purpose of earthworks like those at Poverty Point, Louisiana, which represent "Native American knowledge inscribed in the land" and tell a story in which "floods are an asset, not a catastrophe." As settlers arrived and President Thomas Jefferson launched them into a rampage across the Midwest, Upholt travels up and down the river main and its major tributaries, the Missouri and Ohio, describing fur traders plunging downstream in "keelboats." [that] "We followed the inside bend of the river," fortified by "whisky chased with a glass of river water." Upholt declares at the beginning of the book that he will not proceed in strictly chronological order, which is understandable since his is not a traditional history book. But his attempts to jump back and forth in time and between various tributaries can often leave the reader confused. But the book really picks up steam the moment Upholt introduces us to the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that has managed the river for nearly two centuries. Since the 19th century, the Corps has spent billions of dollars dredging, levees, damming,

damming, channeling, diverting, rerouting, and rerouting the river to control flooding and make it easier for cargo to pass. This bold effort to subjugate Mother Nature has met with what can most generously be described as moderate success, but some of the best parts of the book are when Upholt describes the many levees and dredging projects the Corps built against the better judgment of river experts and common sense. The Corps' bickering engineers, often hapless but always self-conscious, are the closest thing Upholt has to protagonists in his stories, which function as allegories for America's relationship to the environment it colonized and reshaped. The most famous is the dispute between James Buchanan Eads, a brilliant civil engineer who wanted to create space for the river's banks to flood, and Army General Andrew Humphreys, who wanted to block off much of the river with an artificial levee. Humphreys won the argument, but with disastrous results: in 1927, as the Corps was completing the lower levees, a massive flood breached them, inundating much of Louisiana and Arkansas, killing 500 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate. A more sympathetic character was a cartographer for the Army Corps of Engineers. Beautiful maps Fisk traced the Mississippi's tracks, producing maps that show how it had meandered through the heartland for centuries before the Marines walled it in; one of those maps adorns the cover of Upholt's book. Fisk's now-legendary ribbon maps "enhanced, rather than concealed, the wildness of the Mississippi," and in the process, he discovered that the river had crested its banks in Louisiana and was on its way to flowing southwest away from New Orleans, which would have left the city dry. The Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carre Floodway in southern Louisiana to divert floodwaters away from New Orleans, and has built numerous levees and control structures along the Mississippi River. Mario Tama/Getty Images The book climaxes with Upholt's visit to the Old River Control System, designed to stem the flow of the river and prevent Fisk's prophecy from coming true. Approaching the site, Upholt sees "concrete wing walls splaying outward, directing the water toward a series of five steel gates secured by huge beams," and "just upstream, a second row of gates six times longer loomed over the full bank... From the concrete walkway along the confluence, the river looked like a varicose vein... so swollen it looked like it might burst." It's hard to understand the Mississippi River today without seeing this structure. Its hubris is typical of the destructive human efforts that Upholt tries to portray throughout his book, and it offers a cautionary tale for regions and countries trying to grapple with the threat of climate change. If the world's richest and most powerful nation struggled to control nature before the planet warmed 1.5 degrees, it doesn't bode well for efforts to stop sea levels rising with concrete walls or solve drought problems with more dams. But as Upholt makes clear at the end, the solution isn’t to destroy everything and insist on seeing the river as a pure manifestation of nature. Rather, he calls us back to pre-colonial Native American engineering, a vestige of a society that sought to live with the rhythms of the flooding river rather than transforming them to suit human needs, and finds a harmony between Twain’s two views of the Mississippi. "The river has never been lonely," Upholt writes of viewing the earthworks near the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha village of Grand Bayou, Louisiana. He goes on to describe the half-submerged earthworks as "a monument not to the beauty of deserted nature but to the possibility of human connection." Rather than a "celebratory" structure, he sees the earthworks as "an insurance policy, an anchor in the chaos" that can teach us how to respect nature without viewing it as separate from human life. When it comes to the

issue of climate change, politicians often appeal to the forces of nature and humans' ability to correct the planet's own course, but this point is well-made: To truly achieve sustainability, whether on the Mississippi or anywhere else, we will likely need to relinquish some control. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments); if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '542017519474115'); fbq('track', 'PageView');

[beanhotpots]

Recent reads: Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez; The Great River by Boyce Upholt; The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos

[fatehbaz]

In 1982, a man named David Grundman shot a twenty-seven-foot-tall saguaro cactus. His reason remains unarticulated in the Arizona Republic article that recounts the crime, but we know that Grundman managed to get off two blasts from his sixteen-gauge shotgun before the cactus enacted its revenge: twenty-three feet of its central column -- thousands of pounds of cactus flesh -- fell atop his body. According to witnesses, he had only gotten halfway through the word “timber!” Grundman was dead before authorities arrived on the scene, though he lives on now as the subject of a sardonic country ballad: “Saguaro / A menace to the west,” as the chorus goes. [...] Nonhuman entities have long been involved in lawsuits. In 1403, for example, a pig was put on trial in France for murder. In 1545, wine growers in Saint-Julien sued weevils for attacking their vines. In 1659, an Italian politician sued the region’s caterpillars, which, per the complaint, had engaged in trespass as they gorged on local gardens. Note that these lawsuits targeted animals. The idea that some nonhuman entity might do the suing is much more recent. [...] Last April [2021] five waterways in Florida became the first natural entities to sue in US court to enforce their legal rights. This string of lakes had been granted legal personhood through an amendment [...] approved in November 2020. [...] In an Indigenous context, the idea that nature has rights is not odd at all. [...] This is not to suggest that the rights-of-nature concept is supported by every Indigenous thinker. The idea raises thorny spiritual and cultural questions, to say nothing of legal complications. [...] Still, Indigenous leadership has been key in many rights-of-nature breakthroughs. Several US tribes (the Ponca of Oklahoma, Yurok, and Menominee) have passed rights-of-nature laws, including a 2018 resolution in which the White Earth Band of Ojibwe granted legal personhood to manoomin, or wild rice, a sacred food. Last August [2021], manoomin sued Minnesota’s department of natural resources, objecting to the construction of an oil pipeline [...]. The greatest successes [...] [include] notably a provision in the 2008 Ecuador Constitution that granted rights to nature broadly, invoking the Indigenous Andean concept of “Pachamama.” Late last year [2021], Ecuador’s highest court ruled that the provision forbids mining and other extractive activities in a protected forest ecosystem.

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Text by: Boyce Upholt. “Saguaro, Free of the Earth.” Emergence. 31 March 2022.

[noladrinks]

On this installment of The #NOLADrinks Show, we discuss the realities of food halls including the economics involved for vendors and many other factors and challenges you might not know. We welcome independent journalist Boyce Upholt who has been reporting on the topic. We chat about his recent piece on Heated by @medium where he looks at the issues with a particular focus on New Orleans' St. Roch Market. We also chat about some of his other current and future work, including exploring the world of cocktails. To learn more about this episode and get the podcast from your favorite network, please check out the link in our bio. Thanks to @tujagues_restaurant for hosting us! Cheers, You All! . . . . . . #podcast #NOLA #foodhall #foodhalls #chef #streetfood #foodmarket #eatnola #drinknola #nolaphotoguild #iheartnola #nolaphotoguild #diningout #restaurant #dinner #foodie #foodporn #instafood #foodeconomics #igersnola #cocktail #cocktails #drinkstagram #imbibegram (at New Orleans, Louisiana) https://www.instagram.com/p/B3sFatnlGhK/?igshid=cja8m8hp7fyt

[mmwm]

LINK FEST: 23 AUGUST 2022

LINK FEST: 23 AUGUST 2022

Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses. essay: Down to the Tide Line (Bitter Southerner/Boyce Upholt & Ben Galland). A lovely essay drawing on Rachel Carson’s writing (her Sea Trilogy), earth science, and the accompanying sumptuous photos, including of so-called Driftwood Beach on…

[mybookof-you]

"...As the heat spreads across the desert, the saguaro bursts into broad white flowers at the tips of its arms. Over several weeks, new flowers emerge in the evenings, and by the next afternoon each flower will fold shut, its short life already complete. Slowly, the closed pods blush into a pinkish-red fruit, ready for harvest. The gatherers depart from camp as the sun lifts above the horizon, carrying baskets and long poles made from a saguaro rib—the kuipad, as the tool is known—which they use to knock the fruit free. The red pulp of the first fruit to fall is used to paint the shape of a cross atop each participant’s heart, indicating the four directions; an empty pod placed at the foot of the cactus offers a message of thanksgiving and a request for rain."

[msamba]

Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

by Boyce Upholt Photos by Bear Guerra In this essay from Boyce Upholt, a coalition of Indigenous voices speak on behalf of the rooted beings of the desert as legal protections for the saguaro cactus come up against the push to build a border wall. March 31, 2022 The O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert have long revered the saguaro cactus as a being with personhood—a belief that is congruous…

[wolfnowl]

Saguaro, Free of the Earth – Boyce Upholt

🌵

[outsidetheknow]

Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt

Truly Seeing the River: An Interview with Writer Boyce Upholt

The Mississippi Delta is the name of the vast swampy bottomland that runs for 200 miles between Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Mississippi, North America’s second-longest river, mostly created this alluvial landscape. Dense forests covered it. White money, forced Black labor, and government engineering seized, farmed, and tried to control it. For many people, the name evokes…

[maiddegree71-blog]

Here Is the Full List of 2019 James Beard Foundation Media Award Winners

Tonight the James Beard Foundation announced its Media Awards winners for 2019. Formerly known as the Book, Broadcast, and Journalism Awards, the ceremony in New York City honored work created in 2018 across these same categories.

The memory of Jonathan Gold and Anthony Bourdain loomed over the awards, the first since the deaths of both food world legends last summer. Gold, the only food writer to win a Pulitzer, was celebrated with a tribute by Ruth Reichl as she introduced the first-ever Jonathan Gold Local Voice award, which went to Nola.com’s Brett Anderson. Gold was also honored with a posthumous Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award for his reviews at the LA Times. Bourdain’s show CNN show Parts Unknown, which had two nominations this year, won for visual and technical excellence; accepting the award, the Parts Unknown team thanked Bourdain, the show’s “misfit-in-chief.”

Also in the broadcast categories, David Chang took home a medal for outstanding reporting for his work for NBC covering the Olympics; Salt Fat Acid Heat won for television program (on location); Pati’s Mexican Table won for television program (in studio or fixed location), and Marcus Samuelsson won for outstanding personality.

In the books category, tonight’s festivities saw wins for Chicken and Charcoal by Yard Bird’s Matt Abergel in the restaurant and professional category, Between Harlem and Heaven by Eater Young Gun JJ Johnson (‘14) and Alexander Smalls in the American category, and Cocktail Codex was named book of the year.

Restaurant and chef awards categories will be announced from at the James Beard Awards gala in Chicago on Monday, May 6.

2019 James Beard Foundation Book Awards

For books published in English in 2018.

American

Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights, and Every Day JJ Johnson and Alexander Smalls (Flatiron Books)

Baking and Desserts

SUQAR: Desserts & Sweets from the Modern Middle East Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf (Hardie Grant Books)

Beverage

Wine Folly Madeline Puckette and Justin Hammack (Avery)

General

Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Christopher Kimball (Little, Brown and Company)

Health and Special Diets

Eat a Little Better Sam Kass (Clarkson Potter)

International

Feast: Food of the Islamic World Anissa Helou (Ecco)

Photography

Tokyo New Wave Andrea Fazzari (Ten Speed Press)

Reference, History, and Scholarship

Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry Anna Zeide (University of California Press)

Restaurant and Professional

Chicken and Charcoal: Yakitori, Yardbird, Hong Kong Matt Abergel (Phaidon Press)

Single Subject

Goat: Cooking and Eating James Whetlor (Quadrille Publishing)

Vegetable-Focused Cooking

Saladish Ilene Rosen (Artisan Books)

Writing

Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine Edward Lee (Artisan Books)

Book of the Year Award: Cocktail Codex

Cookbook Hall of Fame inductee: Jessica B. Harris

2019 James Beard Foundation Broadcast Media Awards

For radio, television broadcasts, podcasts, webcasts, and documentaries appearing in 2018.

Documentary

Modified Airs on: Film festivals and Vimeo

Online Video, Fixed Location and/or Instructional

MasterClass – Dominique Ansel Teaches French Pastry Fundamentals Airs on: MasterClass

Online Video, on Location

First We Feast’s Food Skills – Mozzarella Kings of New York Airs on: YouTube

Outstanding Personality

Marcus Samuelsson, No Passport Required Airs on: PBS

Outstanding Reporting

Deep Dive and Food for Thought, 2018 Pyeong Chang Winter Olympics Reporter: David Chang Airs on: NBC, NBCSN

Podcast

Copper & Heat – Be a Girl Airs on: Copper & Heat, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher

Radio Show

The Food Chain – Raw Grief and Widowed Airs on: BBC World Service

Special (on TV or Online)

Spencer’s BIG Holiday Airs on: Gusto

Television Program, in Studio or Fixed Location

Pati’s Mexican Table – Tijuana: Stories from the Border Airs on: WETA Washington; Distributed Nationally by American Public Television

Television Program, on Location

Salt Fat Acid Heat – Salt Airs on: Netflix

Visual and Technical Excellence

Anthony Bourdain: Explore Parts Unknown, Yuki Aizawa, Sarah Hagey, Nathalie Karouni, Kate Kunath and August Thurmer Airs on: CNN, Explore Parts Unknown, Roads & Kingdoms

2019 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards

For articles published in English in 2018.

Columns

What We Talk About When We Talk About American Food: “The Pickled Cucumbers That Survived the 1980s AIDS Epidemic”; “A Second Look at the Tuna Sandwich’s All-American History”; and “Freedom and Borscht for Ukrainian-Jewish Émigrés” Mari Uyehara Taste

Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award

Counter Intelligence: “The Hearth & Hound, April Bloomfield’s New Los Angeles Restaurant, Is Nothing Like a Gastropub”; “There’s Crocodile and Hog Stomach, but Jonathan Gold Is All About the Crusty Rice at Nature Pagoda”; and “At Middle Eastern Restaurants, It All Starts with Hummus. Jonathan Gold says Bavel’s Is Magnificent” Jonathan Gold Los Angeles Times

Dining and Travel

“Many Chinas, Many Tables” Jonathan Kauffman and Team San Francisco Chronicle

Feature Reporting

“A Kingdom from Dust” Mark Arax The California Sunday Magazine

Food Coverage in a General Interest Publication

New York Magazine Robin Raisfeld, Rob Patronite, Maggie Bullock, and the Staff of New York Magazine

Foodways

“A Hunger for Tomatoes” Shane Mitchell The Bitter Southerner

Health and Wellness

“Clean Label’s Dirty Little Secret” Nadia Berenstein The New Food Economy

Home Cooking

“The Subtle Thrills of Cold Chicken Salad” Cathy Erway Taste

Innovative Storytelling

“In Search of Water-Boiled Fish” Angie Wang Eater

Investigative Reporting

“A Killing Season” Boyce Upholt The New Republic

Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award

“Yes Indeed, Lord: Queen’s Cuisine, Where Everything Comes from the Heart”; “Top 10 New Orleans Restaurants for 2019”; and “Sexual Harassment Allegations Preceded Sucré Co-Founder Tariq Hanna’s Departure” Brett Anderson Nola.com | The Times-Picayune

M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award

“What is Northern Food?” Steve Hoffman Artful Living

Personal Essay, Long Form

“I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter” Geraldine DeRuiter Everywhereist.com

Personal Essay, Short Form

“I’m a Chef with Terminal Cancer. This Is What I’m Doing with the Time I Have Left” Fatima Ali Bon Appétit

Profile

“The Short and Brilliant Life of Ernest Matthew Mickler” Michael Adno The Bitter Southerner

Wine, Spirits, and Other Beverages

“‘Welch’s Grape Jelly with Alcohol’: How Trump’s Horrific Wine Became the Ultimate Metaphor for His Presidency” Corby Kummer Vanity Fair

Publication of the Year: New York Times food section

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Foundation Awards.

• All James Beard Awards Coverage [E]

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/4/26/18513497/james-beard-foundation-awards-2019-media-winners-cookbooks-journalism