C E Colten
Biographic Data
| ID | 32402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C E Colten |
| GIVEN NAMES | C E |
| FAMILY NAME | Colten |
| SIGNATURE | COLTEN C E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Louisiana State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9549-3650 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
As Inland Becomes Coastal
Coastal Louisiana is experiencing the most rapid relative sea-level rise in the US due to a combination of a subsiding delta and rising coastal waters. Consequently, the influences of extreme coastal weather are reaching farther inland and impacting urban areas where traditional environmental policy, organised at the parish (county) level, is unable to address this changing flood risks. This situation is most prominent in the metro Baton Rouge re…
A new coast
A new coast: Strategies for responding to devastating storms and rising seas, by Jeffrey Peterson." Journal of Urban Affairs, 44(4-5), pp. 781–782
Shifting Definitions of Hazardous Wastes
This paper addresses the emergence of concern with hazardous wastes and the legal liabilities attached to them long before the first federal legislation in the U.S. explicitly using the term; a simultaneous search for marketable by-products during the first three quarters of the twentieth century as a means to decrease the volume of wastes while also diminishing the perceived threat; and the eventual adoption of a legal tactic that asserted absen…
Redirecting sediment and rearranging social justice
Adaptive Transitions
Adaptation is a key concept in long‐term human adjustments to climate change. Despite the centrality of human decisions and actions in adaptation, much of the climate change literature is thin on humanities and social science which are the primary approaches for understanding human activity. This situation is particularly pronounced in Louisiana's discussions about its disappearing coast line where research has concentrated in understanding bioph…
Industrial ecology and groundwater contamination
This paper reviews the contemporary legal, hydrological, engineering, waste management and water supply literature to illustrate the prevailing knowledge about the environmental processes that operated in waste disposal settings. Framed as a question of past ecological knowledge, it traces the emergence of business managers' conceptualisation of their place in the industrial ecosystem. It also examines the institutionalisation of groundwater poll…
Raising New Orleans
Previous articleNext article FreeReflections CollectionRaising New Orleans: Historical Analogs and Future Environmental RisksCraig E. ColtenCraig E. Colten Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSince 2015, I’ve been involved in a project to formulate an adaptive course of action for New Orleans …
The past is a foreign country revisited
David Lowenthal continues to astound. With wisdom and wit he revisits that foreign country known as the past. Displaying once again an impressive knowledge of Western literature and highly refined
Cities and wetlands
Cities and wetlands: the return of the repressed in nature and culture." Social & Cultural Geography, 18(7), pp. 1059–1060
The Resilience Activation Framework
Oil Spills and Community Resilience
Louisiana's coastal residents have endured centuries of hurricanes and decades of oil spills. Locally based, inherent resilient practices have enabled them to persist in place. This paper documents the evolution of actions taken by Louisiana's coastal residents that constitute effective resilient activities in the aftermath of disruptive events. It compares the efforts that arose from coastal communities that were rooted in local environmental kn…
Reshaping the Riparian
New Orleans, Louisiana USA is on the banks of the massive Mississippi River and its history is inextricably linked to this water that serves as a vital transportation corridor and also presents an ever-present flood hazard. This text examines the use of levees to offset the risk of flooding and how that fixed infrastructure has contributed to population dynamics in the lower river valley. Early efforts to fend off floods focused on the threat of …
Reflections on the American environment
Blowout in the Gulf
Reviewed by: Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America Craig E. Colten (bio) Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America. By William R. Freundenburg and Robert Gramling. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. x+254. $18.95. Anyone familiar with scholarship on Gulf Coast oil production—or destruction as the authors correct us—is familiar with the work of these accompli…
Shrinking New Orleans
International audience
An Incomplete Solution
June 2012 The Journal of American History 91 A series of major calamities in recent years has placed the national spotlight on the lower Mississippi River industrial complex—a sinuous arrangement of petrochemical plants and working-class communities set amid the sugarcane fields on the alluvial floodplain. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged offshore oil rigs and onshore refineries in 2005, caused oil releases, and increased gasoline prices, ther…
Community Resilience and Oil Spills in Coastal Louisiana
The persistence of communities along Louisiana's coast, despite centuries of natural and technological hazard events, suggests an enduring resilience. This paper employs a comparative historical analysis to examine "inherent resilience," i.e., practices that natural resource-dependent residents deploy to cope with disruptions and that are retained in their collective memory. The analysis classifies activities taken in advance of and following a s…
Landscape and Place in the Geographical Review
As part of the 2007 Wrigley-Fairchild award session during the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, former Geographical Review Editor Paul Starrs dramatically unveiled the most influential articles to have appeared in the journal (Starrs 2007) (Table I). Among them are true landmarks; and what caught my attention was the number that touched on the concepts of place and landscape. These topics have been a mainstay of twentiet…
Navigable waters
The 100th Volume
This issue represents a landmark in the American Geographical Society's long history: It is the centennial number of the Geographical Review. First published in 1859, the venerable journal went through a series of name and format changes through the years. With its most recent, and enduring, name change in 1916 it moved forward into the twentieth century and now stands upon a proud publication record (Wright 1952,194-195). (1) We want to pause in…
Perilous Place, Powerful Storms
The hurricane protection systems that failed New Orleans when Katrina roared on shore in 2005 were the product of four decades of engineering hubris, excruciating delays, and social conflict. This book looks at the protracted process of erecting massive structures designed to fend off tropical storms, and examines how human actions and inactions left the system incomplete on the eve of its greatest challenge. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 provided the …
A Tribute to Donald Meinig
Donald Meinig's probing mind, clear prose, and sweeping geographical perspective have enlivened American historical and cultural geography for more than fifty years. His contributions to the discipline span many scales: His ideas on the evolution and meaning of landscape have enriched our regional appreciation for localities across North America; his geopolitical assessments of colonization, imperialism, and globalization still resonate today; an…
Meaning of water in the American south
Water is an essential resource in all societies, but presents some challenges in wetland or riverine settings. Europeans and Africans who settled in the lower Mississippi Valley and across what became the American South encountered indigenous ideas about water that sometimes overlapped with transatlantic notions, but sometimes contrasted their own. Focusing on water as an element of the biophysical environment, the paper examines how indigenous, …
Special Forum
Ellen Wohl
Concrete and Clay
The Sanitary City
Vulnerability and Place
Vulnerability to extreme events is shaped by both physical and social factors, and Hurricane Katrina brutally exposed that fact in New Orleans. Historically, low-income Irish and Italian populations suffered when floods washed over the Crescent City. Modifications in the structural defenses to floods and shifting demographics since 1950 altered the geography of vulnerability. In recent years, both blacks and whites have occupied below-sea-level s…
An Incomplete Solution
June 2012 The Journal of American History 91 A series of major calamities in recent years has placed the national spotlight on the lower Mississippi River industrial complex—a sinuous arrangement of petrochemical plants and working-class communities set amid the sugarcane fields on the alluvial floodplain. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged offshore oil rigs and onshore refineries in 2005, caused oil releases, and increased gasoline prices, ther…
Basin Street blues
Chicago's waste lands
Shrinking New Orleans
International audience
The Hidden Landscape of Yosemite National Park
National parks share many obvious landscape characteristics. One of them goes largely unnoticed—infrastructure to provide water, sewerage, and garbage services. This paper traces the gradual adoption of romantic-era concepts about shielding human intrusions in parks from public view by Park Service landscape designers during the early twentieth century. It focuses on sewerage, water, and garbage facilities which were essential to serve growing nu…
The American Environment
Community Resilience and Oil Spills in Coastal Louisiana
The persistence of communities along Louisiana's coast, despite centuries of natural and technological hazard events, suggests an enduring resilience. This paper employs a comparative historical analysis to examine "inherent resilience," i.e., practices that natural resource-dependent residents deploy to cope with disruptions and that are retained in their collective memory. The analysis classifies activities taken in advance of and following a s…
The Road to Love Canal
Journal Article The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA. By Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xiv, 217 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-29271182-4. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-292-71183-2.) Get access Christopher Sellers Christopher Sellers Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Iss…
Pride in the Jungle
Historical Questions in Hazardous Waste Management
Research Article| January 01 1988 Historical Questions in Hazardous Waste Management Craig E. Colten Craig E. Colten Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1988) 10 (1): 7–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377810 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Si…
Petrolia
A Historical Perspective on Industrial Wastes and Groundwater Contamination
Reconstructing the progression of geographical understanding has an important role in current environmental litigation. Determining damages for past contamination of groundwater by surface discharges of hazardous sub- stances requires knowledge of developments in groundwater hydrology. A re- view of the scientific literature on the motion of subsurface fluids, public health, and sanitary engineering indicates that by 1940 knowledge was sufficient…
Reintroducing Nature to the City
The Land of Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln is prominent in the business names across central Illinois. A review of Lincoln place and business names serves as the source to delimit the vernacular "Land of Lincoln." Lincoln as a town name is common in Illinois, although the state is not prominent as part of the overall nationalistic place-naming enterprise. Business names associated with the popularization of travel to Lincoln historic sites and the state's promotion of cent…
Environmental justice in a landscape of tragedy
Cities and Water Pollution
Cities have been a prominent source of water pollution over the years. Historians have argued an instrumental conception of water-use that developed in New-England-sanctioned environmental abuses in the interest of economic development. This interpretation assumes both a geographic and temporal consistency in policy responses to water-quality degradation. Several historical assessments of state laws, a review of court cases responding to complain…
Industrial Topography, Groundwater, and the Contours of Environmental Knowledge
Civil engineers have played a central role in reshaping the physical environment during the past two centuries. Their accomplishments were made possible in no small measure by an ability to assess local hydrologic conditions and design structures to withstand the forces of water. Recent assertions that engineers had little comprehension of groundwater processes until the 1970s prompted an analysis of the engineering literature to reconstruct the …
Adaptive Transitions
Adaptation is a key concept in long‐term human adjustments to climate change. Despite the centrality of human decisions and actions in adaptation, much of the climate change literature is thin on humanities and social science which are the primary approaches for understanding human activity. This situation is particularly pronounced in Louisiana's discussions about its disappearing coast line where research has concentrated in understanding bioph…
Raising New Orleans
Previous articleNext article FreeReflections CollectionRaising New Orleans: Historical Analogs and Future Environmental RisksCraig E. ColtenCraig E. Colten Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSince 2015, I’ve been involved in a project to formulate an adaptive course of action for New Orleans …
Reflections on the American environment
Rusting of the Chemical Corridor
Numerous locational advantages spurred and sustained several decades of industrial development along the lower reaches of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. In recent years, some of the attractive features of the region have lost their luster and decline has set in. Much of the industrial growth occurred when abundant oil and natural gas reserved existed both on shore and in the Gulf of Mexico and during lulls in extreme weather events such, mos…
Redirecting sediment and rearranging social justice
Historical Questions in Hazardous Waste Management
Research Article| January 01 1988 Historical Questions in Hazardous Waste Management Craig E. Colten Craig E. Colten Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1988) 10 (1): 7–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377810 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Si…
Historic Illinois from the Air
A Historical Perspective on Industrial Wastes and Groundwater Contamination
Reconstructing the progression of geographical understanding has an important role in current environmental litigation. Determining damages for past contamination of groundwater by surface discharges of hazardous sub- stances requires knowledge of developments in groundwater hydrology. A re- view of the scientific literature on the motion of subsurface fluids, public health, and sanitary engineering indicates that by 1940 knowledge was sufficient…
Always a River
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 153 David Holly’s book concludes with seven appendixes, including specifications of each vessel in the Weems fleet, a representative sample of scheduling and board meeting minutes, construction agreements and costs, a Weems family history, and a comprehensive listing of river landings visited by Weems boats. Notes and a bibliog raphy round out the volume. It is, as the subtitle claims, truly “a saga of the Che…
Pride in the Jungle
The American Environment
Always a River
Chicago's waste lands
The American Environment
Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Early Explorations in Impact and Policy Chapter 3 Primary Economies and Resource Exploitation Chapter 4 Management and Environmental Change Chapter 5 Playing With Nature
The Land of Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln is prominent in the business names across central Illinois. A review of Lincoln place and business names serves as the source to delimit the vernacular "Land of Lincoln." Lincoln as a town name is common in Illinois, although the state is not prominent as part of the overall nationalistic place-naming enterprise. Business names associated with the popularization of travel to Lincoln historic sites and the state's promotion of cent…
The Road to Love Canal
Journal Article The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA. By Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. xiv, 217 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-29271182-4. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-292-71183-2.) Get access Christopher Sellers Christopher Sellers Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 83, Iss…
Troubled Waters
Journal Article Troubled Waters: Champion International and the Pigeon River Controversy. By Richard A. Bartlett. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. xxvi, 348 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-87049-887-8. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-87049888-6.) Get access Craig E. Colten Craig E. Colten Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume…
The Road to Love Canal
Groundwater and the Law
Research Article| April 01 1998 Groundwater and the Law: Records v. Recollections Craig E. Colten Craig E. Colten Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1998) 20 (2): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/3379417 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site…
Historical Geography and Environmental History
1998). Historical Geography and Environmental History. Geographical Review: Vol. 88, No. 2, pp. iii-iv
Industrial Topography, Groundwater, and the Contours of Environmental Knowledge
Civil engineers have played a central role in reshaping the physical environment during the past two centuries. Their accomplishments were made possible in no small measure by an ability to assess local hydrologic conditions and design structures to withstand the forces of water. Recent assertions that engineers had little comprehension of groundwater processes until the 1970s prompted an analysis of the engineering literature to reconstruct the …
The Sanitary City
Petrolia
Reintroducing Nature to the City
Basin Street blues
Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs
Concrete and Clay
Devastation and Renewal
Reviewed by: Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region Craig E. Colten (bio) Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region. Edited by Joel A. Tarr. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Pp. vii+281. $32. Pittsburgh no longer is the smoky city that breathless visitors reacted to with amazement in the latter nineteenth century. Nor is it the major source of industrial…
Deceit and Denial
Deceit and Denial
Book Review| May 01 2004 Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution Craig Colten Craig Colten Louisiana State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2004) 26 (2): 113–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2004.26.2.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tool…
Geography (39 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (31 works) · History (27 works) · Political science (27 works) · History (25 works) · Archaeology (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Engineering (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Environmental planning (16 works)