And it undermines traditional socio-cultural approaches which reduce rivers to passive backdrops of human activities. Departing from progressive narratives that equated change with improvement, and declensionist narratives that equated change with loss and destruction, it moves away from morally loaded notions of better or worse, and even dead, rivers. This book refocuses on the production of new and different rivers and fully situates the Tyne's fluvial transformations within their political, economic, cultural, social and intellectual contexts. Let us sit with the Tyne itself, some of its salmon, a seventeenth-century Tyne River Court Juror, some nineteenth-century Tyne Improvement Commissioners, a 1920s biologist, a twentieth-century Tyne angler, shipbuilder and council planner and some twenty-first-century Tyne Rivers Trust volunteers. What would they disagree about? Would they agree on anything? How would they explain their conceptualisation of what the river is for and how it should be used and regulated?
This book takes you to the heart of such virtual debates to revive, reconnect and reinvigorate the severed bonds and flows linking riparian places, issues and people across five centuries. By analysing the Tyne's past conservatorships, we can objectify ourselves through our descendants' eyes, reconnecting us not only to our past, but also to our future.
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