Download or read book Atchafalaya Houseboat written by Gwen Roland and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1970s, two idealistic young people—Gwen Carpenter Roland and Calvin Voisin—decided to leave civilization and re-create the vanished simple life of their great-grandparents in the heart of Louisiana's million-acre Atchafalaya River Basin Swamp. Armed with a box of crayons and a book called How to Build Your Home in the Woods, they drew up plans to recycle a slave-built structure into a houseboat. Without power tools or building experience they constructed a floating dwelling complete with a brick fireplace. Towed deep into the sleepy waters of Bloody Bayou, it was their home for eight years. This is the tale of the not-so-simple life they made together—days spent fishing, trading, making wine, growing food, and growing up—told by Gwen with grace, economy, and eloquence. Not long after they took up swamp living, Gwen and Calvin met a young photographer named C. C. Lockwood, who shared their "back to the earth" values. His photographs of the couple going about their daily routine were published in National Geographic magazine, bringing them unexpected fame. More than a quarter of a century later, after Gwen and Calvin had long since parted, one of Lockwood's photos of them appeared in a National Geographic collector's edition entitled 100 Best Pictures Unpublished—and kindled the interest of a new generation. With quiet wisdom, Gwen recounts her eight-year voyage of discovery—about swamp life, wildlife, and herself. A keen observer of both the natural world and the ways of human beings, she transports readers to an unfamiliar and exotic place.
Download or read book The Atchafalaya River Basin written by Bryan P. Piazza and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive, one-volume reference, Nature Conservancy scientist Bryan P. Piazza poses five key questions: —What is the Atchafalaya River Basin? —Why is it important? —How have its hydrology and natural habitats been managed? —What is its current state? —How do we ensure its survival? For more than five centuries, the Atchafalaya River Basin has captured the flow of the Mississippi River, becoming its main distributary as it reaches the Gulf of Mexico in south Louisiana. This dynamic environment, comprising almost a million acres of the lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and Mississippi River Deltaic Plain, is perhaps best known for its expansive swamp environments dominated by baldcypress, water tupelo, and alligators. But the Atchafalaya River Basin contains a wide range of habitats and one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the North American continent. Piazza has compiled and synthesized the body of scientific knowledge for the Atchafalaya River Basin, documenting the ecological state of the basin and providing a baseline of understanding. His research provides a crucial resource for future planning. He evaluates some common themes that have emerged from the research and identifies important scientific questions that remain unexplored.
Download or read book Inherit the Atchafalaya written by Greg Guirard and published by University of Louisiana. This book was released on 2007 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction to the culture, history, and folklife of the Atchafalaya with 150 new images.
Download or read book C C Lockwood s Atchafalaya written by C. C. Lockwood and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At nearly 1.4 million acres, the Atchafalaya Basin in south central Louisiana comprises America's largest swamp wilderness. Award-winning nature photographer C. C. Lockwood is the foremost chronicler of this natural treasure. What began as a curious side-trip in 1973 became a decades-long love affair, and for more than thirty years, Lockwood has explored the Atchafalaya's waters and captured its haunting beauty on film. Now, twenty-five years after the publication of his first book, he returns to his favorite subject in C. C. Lockwood's Atchafalaya. His passion for the Atchafalaya as expressed in his photographs can be compared to John James Audubon's exuberant appreciation for the state's abundant bird life as depicted in his prints more than 150 years ago. The art of both exalts Louisiana's wildlife -- and cautions against taking it for granted. Lockwood revisits and reflects on the places he has frequented most in the swamp, recalling his escapades both long past and recent among gators and skeeters. He shares the thoughts of basin residents about how the Atchafalaya has changed over time, for better and for worse. Increases and decreases in various bird and other animal populations, changes in water levels and consistency, flora mainstays and trees gone missing, burgeoning aquatic vegetation -- all are keenly observed by this explorer. Lockwood finds undiminished the seductive seasonal and diurnal moods of the swamp: autumn and spring, sunset and moonrise, as breathtaking now as in the past. In nearly one-hundred dazzling color photographs, Lockwood brilliantly documents the Atchafalaya's timeless beauty. He shows amazingly diverse and abundant wildlife, rookeries with thousands of egrets and herons, waters with billions of crawfish, and ridges with deer, squirrel, and woodcock. Waters run deep in Lockwood's soul, as evidenced in his intimate treatment of the meandering bayous fringed with bald cypress trees, the many glassy lakes reflecting vegetation into double images, and the mighty Atchafalaya River -- the lifeline of the swamp."No place in the world gives me such a feeling of peace as America's largest river basin swamp," writes Lockwood. In these pages, he pays homage to the queen of U.S. wetlands.
Download or read book River Music written by Ann McCutchan and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Louisiana?s Atchafalaya River Basin, the heart and soul of Acadiana, or Cajun country, is the focus of this compelling narrative by Ann McCutchan. A masterful weaving of cultural and environmental history, River Music also tells the life story of Louisiana musician, naturalist, and sound documentarian Earl Robicheaux. With Robicheaux as her guide, McCutchan embarks on a musical, visual, literary, and historical tour of the Atchafalaya, where bayous, swamps, marshes, and river delta country have long sustained nature and culture, even as industry has changed both the landscape and the people. Along the way, she and Robicheaux pay homage to distinctive voices of the region?s singular soundscape, including Acadian and Native American elders, birds, frogs, alligators, wind, water, and weather, which Robicheaux chronicles in archival recordings and musical compositions for museum exhibits, radio programs, and repositories such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. A CD of Robicheaux's soundscapes is included with the book"--Dust jacket flap.
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book Designing the Bayous written by Martin Reuss and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: :This history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation.
Download or read book La Bayou Pigeon written by Clifford LeGrange and published by . This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Atchafalaya Autumn written by Greg Guirard and published by . This book was released on 1995-10-01 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: journal entries from camping in the Atchafalaya Basin of Mississippi and Red Rivers.
Download or read book West Atchafalaya Floodway written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Rivers and Bayous of Louisiana written by Edwin Adams Davis and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1999-12-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long ago, someone wrote that the rivers and bayous were the great architects of Louisiana. Certainly the statement has major elements of truth; for the waterways, which today total almost as many miles as there are miles of highways, have in eons past aided in shaping the face of the Land of Louis, and in historic times have determined many of the patterns of the State's development. To the Indians these rivers and bayous offered sites for villages and places to fish and were roads of easy travel. To Spanish explorers they were hindrances to movement, hazards to be crossed. To French pioneers they offered locations for settlement and were highways for coureurs de bois , trappers, Indian traders and voyagers of commerce. To the British and Americans they were international boundaries and were barriers to be forded or ferried or bridged in the development of farmland and timberland and other natural resources. Throughout the years, they were determining factors in international diplomacy and played major roles in the rise of economic empires. And all of the men who traveled these streams developed a strong desire to possess and to live upon the lands through which they passed. . . . Here then, along the banks of the rivers and bayous of Louisiana, is found the stuff of which legends and tall tales and dreams and romances are fashioned-and where, also-matter of fact, magnificent history has been and is still being made. Here are the heartlands of Louisiana. -Edwin Adams Davis from the Foreword
Download or read book The Mississippi written by Quinta Scott and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A photographic documentation of the Mississippi River, illustrating the geographical and botanical features of the river and its wetlands. Using 200 color photographs and accompanying vignettes, Scott explains how we have changed each site depicted, howwe try to manage and restore it, and the wildlife that occupies it"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Discovering Louisiana written by C. C. Lockwood and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1986-07-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovering Louisiana is a beautiful paean to the state's diverse natural habitats, from the hills and piney woods in the north to the thousands of miles of shoreline in the south. As the book's 150 color photographs reveal, Louisiana is much more than the swamps and marshes with which it is most often associated. C. C. Lockwood, one of the nation's outstanding nature and wildlife photographers and the premier chronicler of the natural wonders of Louisiana and the Gulf region, captures splendid views -- both panoramic and intimate: the jagged bluffs of the Tunica Hills in West Feliciana Parish; cascading waterfalls and winding creeks in the Kisatchie National Forest in central Louisiana; and unobstructed autumnal vistas from the summit of Bates Mountain, near Shreveport. Lockwood travels along many of the state's scenic rivers and lakes, photographing the mist-shrouded Bogue Chitto River at dawn; the steep, sandy banks of Saline Bayou, which is bordered by towering hardwood trees; and the vast, blue expanse of Lake Pontchartrain, the state's largest lake. He returns to his beloved Atchafalaya, the swamp area that is home to a teeming abundance of wildlife, including raccoons, nutria, alligators, snakes, turtles, egrets, herons, owls, and eagles. He travels to the state's prairies, bogs, and cheniers, which, though small in size, nonetheless are very important for the state's wildlife community. Finally, he visits the coast, where he photographs an amazing array of birds on the barrier islands. Lockwood augments his breathtaking photographs with an engaging first-person narrative account of his adventures. He describes the idyllic pleasures of a hundred-mile, five-day canoe trip down the Bogue Chitto and West Pearl rivers, the anticipation of climbing the state's highest peak, Driskill Mountain, and the dangers of trying to navigate five-foot swells in Terrebonne Bay. Throughout the book, Lockwood skillfully conveys the magic that he finds in all of Louisiana and the concern he feels for the state's fragile ecosystem.
Download or read book Postmark Bayou Chene written by Gwen Roland and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the heart of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin, a letter sent from an isolated settlement, addressed to Hautes-Pyrénées, France, and marked undeliverable, shows up at the Bayou Chene post office. That same day locals find a dog, nearly dead and tethered to an empty skiff. Odd yet seemingly trivial, the arrival of a masterless dog and a returned letter triggers a series of events that will dramatically change the lives of three friends and affect all of the residents of Bayou Chene. Gwen Roland's debut novel, set in 1907 in a secluded part of Louisiana, follows young adults Loyce Snellgrove, her cousin Lafayette "Fate" Landry, and his friend Valzine Broussard as they navigate between revelations about the past and tensions in the present. Forces large and small—the tragedies of the Civil War, the hardships of swamp life, family secrets, as well as unfailing humor—create a prismatic depiction of Louisiana folklife at the turn of the twentieth century and provide a realistic setting for this enchanting drama. Roland anchors her work in historical fact and weaves a superb tale of vivid characters. In Postmark Bayou Chene, she uses the captivating voice that described the beauty and challenges of the swamp to legions of readers in her autobiographical Atchafalaya Houseboat. Her ear for dialogue and eye for detail bring the now-vanished community of Bayou Chene and the realities of love and loss on the river back to life in a well-crafted, bittersweet tribute.
Download or read book Beyond Control written by James F. Barnett, Jr. and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed chronicle of how the wild Mississippi will eventually deliver a cataclysm
Download or read book Plaquemine Archaeology written by Mark A. Rees and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First major work to deal solely with the Plaquemine societies. Plaquemine, Louisiana, about 10 miles south of Baton Rouge on the banks of the Mississippi River, seems an unassuming southern community for which to designate an entire culture. Archaeological research conducted in the region between 1938 and 1941, however, revealed distinctive cultural materials that provided the basis for distinguishing a unique cultural manifestation in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Plaquemine was first cited in the archaeological literature by James Ford and Gordon Willey in their 1941 synthesis of eastern U.S. prehistory. Lower Valley researchers have subsequently grappled with where to place this culture in the local chronology based on its ceramics, earthen mounds, and habitations. Plaquemine cultural materials share some characteristics with other local cultures but differ significantly from Coles Creek and Mississippian cultures of the Southeast. Plaquemine has consequently received the dubious distinction of being defined by the characteristics it lacks, rather than by those it possesses. The current volume brings together eleven leading scholars devoted to shedding new light on Plaquemine and providing a clearer understanding of its relationship to other Native American cultures. The authors provide a thorough yet focused review of previous research, recent revelations, and directions for future research. They present pertinent new data on cultural variability and connections in the Lower Mississippi Valley and interpret the implications for similar cultures and cultural relationships. This volume finally places Plaquemine on the map, incontrovertibly demonstrating the accomplishments and importance of Plaquemine peoples in the long history of native North America.
Download or read book Light List written by and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
