by Charles C Scott, published posthumously.

This review by Verlyn Klinkenborg did some sweet summarizing that aid me in conceieving of the in-between and its undervalued importance— as place, and imaginary.

what fascinates Scott are the places that are sometimes land, sometimes water, and often mud: floodplains, alluvial islands in the Ayeyarwady, the Ayeyarwady Delta, and wetlands of every kind. These are places of extraordinary biological diversity, which declines rapidly as you move away from them. They’re also places of biological and geomorphic resistance, defying the human desire to create a vastly simplified “state-serving habitat.” In times past they were refugia for people who chose for their own reasons to become or remain illegible to the state, creating “potential sites of resistance and rebellion.” All of these in-betweens are replenished, along untamed rivers, by the bounty of periodic flooding.

Very few of us have ever seen a wild or “untamed” river, undammed, unsiphoned, unleveed, free flowing. They still do flow—a few of them—in relatively inaccessible places like the far north and parts of Central Africa and South America. And though the United States was once rich in in-between places (“approximately 221 million acres of wetlands—an area more than twice the size of California—at the time of European settlement”), very few of us have ever seen what might be called a living floodplain. So why go on talking about these things? Why make such an effort to understand a world none of us has ever lived in? Why try to remember what isn’t part of our personal memory?

Let me suggest two reasons. Trying to understand the richness, the biotic wealth of a former world makes it plain that our species, especially in the last few centuries, has been conducting a brutal, undeclared war on diversity. We can pretend that the social and cultural diversity humans have created—itself now under threat—can somehow substitute for biological diversity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The second reason is this: I believe we owe a nearly infinite debt to nature—a debt to the natural world in which we evolved. This is a debt we can only try to repay by our actions. Yet we’ve acted—and still act—as though the natural world has somehow contracted an irredeemable debt to us, giving us the right and duty to extract repayment in every way we can.