YouSaid · the spoken record

Vanessa Taylor

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-08-14
most recent: 2025-08-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The experience of people who live alongside them, which are often very different, even though the rulers might wish to control the thinking of the ordinary people and how they perceive things, they don't always see things in the way that the state would like them to. Thank you so much, Vanessa, for that conversation. That was Vanessa Taylor, author of Seven Rivers, A Journey Through the Currents of Human History, which is available now online and in all good bookstores. I have been Caroline Dodds-Penneck. You've been listening to intelligence squared. Thank you for joining us.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although there is also lots of evidence that none of us are going to flourish in a time of global warming, well, I say none of us. It depends on what time scale we're talking about. But inequality is always kind of the bedfellow of hazards and benefits that arise from water, who benefits from rivers, who's most at Who's most vulnerable to the hazards that come with water, with rising seas, with waters rise and fall, with its supply and with its scarcity. That inequality is really visible in the book and one of the interesting things about the book is how it talks about these differential experiences, how emperors and kings and rulers and contemporary saints deploy and use rivers and also”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hurricane in 2005 in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, which although it was an act of nature, sort of a natural catastrophe, it had a very different impacts on people depending on where they live, what kinds of where they lived in relation to the flood defenses, how robust their houses were, how they were able to how easily they were able to respond to warnings to get away from the oncoming storm, how much resource was put into rescuing people, into looking after them after the storm had passed. All of this was deeply shot through with inequalities of race and class and has become this kind of emblem of what might happen in the future that we're going to have these very unequal kind of Fault lines running through how much climate change impacts some communities and not others.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a long term issue. I mean, certainly in the 1950s, after the 1953 flood, which killed people along the east coast of Britain, but also on the other side of the North Sea, one of the battlegrounds was about the fact that the focus was on protecting London and the people of Essex and Kent on the lower estuary who were absolutely the kind of front line of storm surges, they had to fight to make sure that river defences were also put in place there. So it's always, it's not just about money, it's also about where it's seen as the most important communities. I would say it's taken on almost an emblematic role is the”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I talk about Shanghai is one area where the Yangtze, the distributory rivers from the Yangtze that flow through Shanghai, that is an area where it's got a combination of subsidence, long-term subsidence, because it's on soft ground that is prone to sinking. It's also highly developed. My last chapter in the book is about a sinking city. It's both sinking and it's at risk from rising sea levels. The issue with Shanghai and any river that's at the interface with the sea is going to be about money and how much money is available and justifiable to protect the land from the encroaching sea. This is like a key kind of battleground for inequalities. Where is going to be protected and where is not going to be protected?”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Communities who can afford to kind of put a buttress around coastal cities or coastal areas will do what they can. Of course, changing weather patterns is going to have this kind of combination of increasingly severe and possibly increasingly unpredictable floods, but also low river flows, drought, again, somewhat unpredictable at this point, how that's going to play out. And this is happening already. The vol we've been floods and droughts, but the incidence of severe weather and extreme weather as it relates to rivers, coastal areas, with also rivers. General that are prone to flooding, that seems to be likely to get become more intense. You quote William Gibson, who's the science fiction writer, The Future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I think probably the most stark is probably sea level rise at deltas, at estuaries, that is already evident. There's communities in the Mississippi Delta, for example, who are already having to retreat in land because of rising seas and encroachment into the land, as well as things that are going on in the land, which makes or going on the rivers that make the rivers less resistant to storms or less resistant to incoming tides. So the rivers mouth is a key kind of zone where climate change is going to be only increasingly visible and those”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reasons to be concerned about the future, I guess. I guess in a sense that's where we are with lots of environmental questions, isn't it? The push me pull you, the pressures on them, on our environment coming from all of these different directions, which are so well highlighted in the book, in the focus on rivers. And even before contemporary questions around climate change, the rivers brought natural challenges, didn't they? They have characteristics which mean that they offered challenges as well as opportunities to civilization, floods, droughts, altering of the course of rivers, for example. Did you get a sense of rivers as something that is still changing? Are they going to be changing in the future because of climate change? Are there people who rely on them now who are going to be affected by the changes that we're seeing? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that as far as rivers and climate change,”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sewage is flowing plentifully into the rivers. It does tell us, I guess, that we're not, it reminds us that we're not always going in the direction of progress. We're not flowing one way like a river. Ebbing and flowing, I guess, in terms of the pressures on the rivers. So I don't know that I've answered your question, but I guess I feel there's plenty of reasons to be hopeful about protections of rivers, but also...”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think also there's this sort of sense of what is kind of certain norms have evolved about what is and what is not okay to do with the river so in the 1930s and 40s although people didn't love sewage into the river there was it was sort of seen as um rivers certainly uh the thames if we go back to that one but it's certainly not the only one rivers were seen as naturally to be used as a drain that's what they're there for they're used shipping highways and for drains to get rid of industrial effluent and sewage that is not how most people see rivers today as naturally best suited to being a drain so although there is an awful lot of sewage going back into the rivers now there's also a sense of outrage that we're back in this position where the rivers of brushing for example we've had lots of money pumped into them and lots of protections are now seen to be going kind of backwards where it seemed that there was progress happening but now uh”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Highly well informed people who know why rivers are important. But there's lots of reasons also to keep drilling away in them, to keep running pipelines across them, to kind of encroach on them. Even the Thames in London is kind of constantly in this sort of sense of, oh, that would be good to build another bridge here, or maybe we can have a floating helipad or something like that. This sort of push-me-pull-you thing has been going on for a long time. And the power balance changes over time, partly to do with who's in government or... Variety of factors, I guess, how much money there is to fund wetland conservation parks and projects, whether we're in the EU with its environmental protections or whether we're out of the EU. There's lots of different things that kind of play into how protected rivers can be”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very opposing pressures on rivers. And I think they're probably, I can't really see how that isn't going to continue that you're going to have these kind of forces kind of fighting against each other. What we do have now in the wake of kind of emergence of environmentalism is a lot of very high positioned environmental experts. So there's no shortage of understanding of what the impacts are of oil pollution or sewage pollution or overabstraction of water. So much is known about that. Plus there's a lot of very highly motivated and active citizens who are very often members of their local friends of the river group or every river seems many rivers have their own kind of activists. Group, so there's a lot of”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, there's loads of ideas around, there's loads of pressure groups around, there's loads of expertise that lends itself to the protection of rivers, to trying to help people understand why they're central, you know, what nature freely gives to us as society, economically as well as spiritually or however you want to look at it. These forces are also kind of pitted against other forces which continue to see”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Preeminent river in the whole world, and it kind of mirrors the rising confidence, arrogance, and sense of the London and Britain being at the heart of the universe that grew from the sort of 1700s onwards, if not a little earlier. but certainly grew with some justification in terms of the power of the British government during that period. Absolutely, and it's been seen as so central to so many aspects of empire, but also the British.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started to kind of see the Thames as a kind of world river, as an imperial river, to match the river Tibor, to match one of the ancient great rivers. And it's tiny, but it started to sort of try to, it was kind of almost like this is there to compare with the most wonderful rivers of the ancient world because of the might of the British Empire. So it's both what the Thames enabled Britain to do with its steam-powered gunboats, but also had this sort of symbolic reach. So there's this image by James Barry, and I think it's a 1790s where he's got the River Thames being born aloft by navigators and like James Cook and various sea nymphs across the oceans to suggest that the Thames is the most”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world across the oceans. And it kind of, I use the word shadow rivers because it kind of, it's partly about the way London sort of tried to suck the power into itself, you know, to make sure that anything else that was going on in Britain or in the world was kind of to the advantage of London. So it kind of creates this sort of bright London light that tries to cast shadows over other rivers and other parts of the world. But also during the kind of late 1500s, 1600s, the Thames seems to have become kind of recreated as a suddenly this arrived on the world stage. It wasn't suddenly. It was gradual, but it kind of started to various poets, artists, navigators, naval.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just on the kind of ongoing colonization of rivers, it seems that when some powerful agency decides that the river is no longer going to be this, it's now going to be used for hydroelectricity or it's going to be used for water supply or for irrigation. That kind of very often is a kind of colonizing move to say, okay, this may be your livelihood, this may be your era, but now we need it. It's more important that we have it for a larger purpose. So that's a kind of colonizing thing that is absolutely ongoing now. But there's something about, certainly the Thames is not the only one, you know, but it's the Thames is kind of one of these rivers that became an imperial river that was used literally to launch ships into the far reaches of...”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where you started working on this. And I was really interested in how you talked about the Thames and its relationship to other shadow rivers, because the Thames, when you compare it to the Mississippi, is a tiny kind of scale, isn't it? But it has these really far-reaching tentacles. How has the river been important in the growth of London and of the city's evolution? And could you say a bit more about that wider significance of the river? Sure.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scope of rivers goes far beyond the rivers themselves, as you talk about in the book. And one of the things you talk about is the Tennessee Valley Authority and how the models that were created in the Mississippi basin have gone on to be used in other places. So these rivers aren't confined to their own borders or boundaries, but have much further reaching consequences. You say in the book The Colonization of the American continent is ongoing and how that colonization continues into the present day is something which I found really, really interesting. I didn't know about how the TVA had gone out across the world. This is how for people who are listening, this is how models that were created in that place are used elsewhere. But I guess to take it from my particular area of interest to yours, your expertise, of course, is the River Thames.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All its waterways. So when LaSalle kind of arrived, he managed to get down right down the river from the Minnesota or from the Great Lakes region, he just said, this is, I now claim this on behalf of France, the King of France, and he renamed the river, and he knew perfectly well that all these other indigenous communities living along the river. But he said, this is, I've spoken to all of them. I have their permission. This now belongs to the King of France. And he named it after the French finance minister, I think it was the Colbert River, it was intermittently. So it was kind of this territorial land grab or water grab, but it amounted to the same thing. And it wasn't until a very long time afterwards that the extent of the Mississippi, this sort of massive extent, was truly understood in terms of sort of square miles.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The English had the eastern seaboard already sort of tied up east of the Appalachian Mountains. But this Mississippi river basin, the territory of which they didn't know, the extent of which they didn't know, but it was kind of a territory that kind of was visible, you know, is this sort of streams and threads of tributaries and waterways that all kind of threaded into this great river of this spine of the Mississippi, as you say. So clearly it was a prize worth claiming, but there was something about this kind of water escape that kind of put down markers that could be colonized. It was the same with the Hudson Bay claim of the English over the Hudson Bay kind of drainage only about 10 or 12 years earlier, they also laid claim to the whole of the Hudson Bay.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Colonization, but it came certainly on the Mississippi and found this amazing evidence of highly productive societies in the form, for example, of Mississippian mounds all along the Mississippi River basin. So they didn't come to this place and think we're the first to arrive or there's just very sort of Spartan settlements. This was clearly a place that had been a really important territory before the arrival of Europeans. But when the French arrived in the 1600s, they kind of laid claim to the entire Mississippi River basin.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit more about how it comes to play such a significant role and how that role changes over time. Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the features of the Mississippi is this kind of shift from an absence of historical written records to an abundance of written records with the arrival of the colonizing Europeans. creates this sort of imbalance in terms of what we understand about what people would do.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really important, isn't it, to understand them in that instrumental way, as well as these kind of spiritual ways. And I found that really interesting that your emphasis on, for example, how we can know what people think about rivers before we have good records, because it's really easy, isn't it, to kind of fall into thinking about the more modern parts of rivers simply because we know more about why people are using them. In my own work, when you talk about networks, you end up talking about economic networks very frequently because those are the things you can track, right? where ideas are much trickier. And I was really interested in what you were writing about the Mississippi River because, of course, it touches on some of the things I work on as a historian of the Indigenous American world. And there's a transition here, isn't there, in how the river is being used, but also how it's being talked about. And the Mississippi, which is one of your rivers, as you said, is often called the spine of America. And I wondered if you could just tell”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“River system for part of the year, so that's where all the kind of natural world can flourish or not. They are where the fish, the birds, the crops, all of this stuff is absolutely essential to the running of a society. So rivers kind of being able to control the river banks and to have the sort of territorial control is important to governments, empires. It's all kind of bound up with territorial power, but also access to those important natural resources, whether it's cotton or palm oil or whatever it is, you kind of want to be there on the riverbank where it's all this sort of fertility and life is kind of there for the taking.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This kind of instrumental relationship with rivers so that you kind of societies or sections of society sort of take from rivers they feel they need at the time, but they also kind of invoke this higher power or this kind of justifying concept, whether it's deities or progress or development or civilization, all these kind of words get attached to the way societies are kind of controlling and managing to harness the resources of their rivers. So those resources are many, many and varied. I mean, certainly rivers, whether it's the Niger or any number of rivers really, in the book or elsewhere, they kind of, their transport systems, their water supplies, they are the place around which there's these wetlands that are kind of part of the”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is often appropriated by rulers, isn't it? And deployed in really strategic ways. You talk about dams, I think, in particular as being thinking like a state, but there are so many ways in which the state uses rivers and is impacted by rivers. And one of the rivers you concentrate on in the book is the Niger River in West Africa. And like a lot of the rivers in the book, it was central to the rise and fall of a lot of different empires, wasn't it, such as the Mali, the Songhai, not to mention the British Empire. Why is it that you think rivers like this are so crucial to the way in which dynasties evolve and survive and empires change in those ways? Just to sort of touch on what you said before, like when you were talking about thinking like a stage, one of the continuous threads through the history of human interaction with rivers is”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of tried to negotiate that natural world through the gods. Now, I don't understand enough about how that all evolved, but it does seem to be the case that the centrality of rivers and water supply and the rivers as a kind of ecosystem for all this other natural life that was also important to people's survival, that all kind of lends itself to this very lively and highly populated world of deities certainly in Egypt, but in lots of other contexts as well. Yeah, because it's so important, isn't it, to rulers, as you've suggested, to control the environment to be able to at least claim to be controlling the supply of water, which is so central to fertility, to crops, to harvests. And so it is a spiritual significance, but that spiritual significance...”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, the flood reaches the plenitude of a river does what it needs to to replenish the earth, so to make the harvest work. So there's lots of kind of different kind of ways in which rivers are absolutely essential for the functioning of a society. And typically the ancient world”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us a bit more about why you think rivers have been so spiritually important and significant. Yes, for sure I'll certainly try. I mean, I think it seems to be the case that people find spiritual significance in all kinds of places, but there also seems to be something particular about water itself, any little body of water upon a lake, a thing that you've made in your own garden, a river has its own kind of power, I think symbolic power for lots of reasons. That's one of the things. It kind of seems to invite a spiritual connection, water does, rivers do. So that's something, but it's obviously there's much more to it than that. One of the things, I guess, also is that rivers are this kind of natural resource and natural resources themselves invite kind of propitiation of deities, asking for things from the river, hoping that the river”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you become with some of their slightly difficult ideas. And just use the people who are already there is the only way to do it, I think. Yes, once you start delving into kind of writing in public history, don't you? You end up reaching outside of your comfort zone. And it's so reliant on the work of this huge range of experts, which are woven into the book. One thing I wonder about, which you've mentioned slightly already, is about rivers as a place of spiritual importance and significance, because you talk about them as a place where stories are retained and told across time, where they can become places for the repository of belief and of stories. And the sources can lead us perhaps slightly into seeing them in this timeless way, but it's quite clear that the spiritual significance of rivers, isn't it? They're fundamental to cultures and religions from the Romans and the Hindus and river gods. Could you maybe...”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. And I think that sort of, there was a somewhat continuous culture, you might call it, for a very long time, maybe 3,000 years, maybe 5,000 years, but it is also a trick of the distance. The impression we get looking back gives it a homogenous feel. There was enough continuity for it to seem like it's a single continuous kind of culture to some extent. But the challenge of doing that was quite, it was the most, the Nile was, I think, the most difficult one to do. All of them have their challenges because if you do want to tell the story at a sort of long duration story about a river, you end up going back into the distant past, which is way beyond, certainly as a modern historian. And this is all way outside my understanding and knowledge. So there's loads of history, you know, that you rely on.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the ancient Egypt had this sort of like it's almost like the most iconic example of this where every part of the river is kind of peopled with gods and deities, not just people actually creatures everything, non-human animals as well, just both connected to nature but also to this unseen world. those people can understand the world, but I've tried my best to sort of understand it for myself and what I think people might be interested in as a reader. And the Nile, you say, is that no single river culture retains such a formidable presence for so long. It's the starting point for the book, isn't it? And it's a huge sweeping history. It must be quite a challenge to try and tell that enormous history.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because once you start exploring something as a historian, everything's interesting, isn't it? Ancient Egypt was the most daunting for me because I didn't know anything about it. I've always found it an extremely unapproachable subject. But I was really fascinated to see that kind of unravel and come alive and try to see how this kind of ancient society was kind of woven into the life of the river both through the way they kind of harnessed the flood to make the society work to the way that connected to agriculture, but also and lots of kind of power being displayed on the river. There's lots of forced labor going on to make it all go round. But there's also this huge sort of symbolic world on the river that all rivers seem to have this very vibrant, symbolic model, but Egypt.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has to get kind of contextualized and connected. So over time, I got interested in water systems and then rivers, as you said, the RNA River Thames project at Greenwich is right on the riverbank there in Greenwich. And so it was a perfect place to sort of talk to people who were involved in the running of the river or affected by the river. And then somebody contacted me a few years back, an agent actually contacted me out in the blue and said, would you be interested in writing a history of the world through rivers? And I thought, well, yes, that sounds really fascinating. And you mentioned the people that are alongside the river, the human connection with the river there in your answer. And that's really something that's central to the book that the actual humans who use the river, the lives of the people on the river, who was it you found most interesting to delve into? In this book, wow, that's very difficult to say.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some common properties of rivers to tell us something about what major rivers are like and also to give us a sense of how rivers have connected with human history from a very early phase until today. It could have been even a small tributary can help to do that, but these seem to be big sort of weighty rivers that would be useful to kind of use as a main thread. And why rivers? I mean, what sparks your fascination with rivers? Why did you choose to study this particular field? I got into rivers actually through a very tiny bit of a very focused bit of water. I became very fascinated with drinking fountains about 25 years ago, Victorian drinking fountains that you see neglected around the cities of Britain. And I just kind of dived into history from there. And the water bodies started to expand because everything gets...”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“history and so you're obviously focusing on a specific set of rivers here as an example of these kind of bigger questions could you maybe give us a little quick explanation of the rivers you explore in the book and why it was you chose those particular rivers Yes sure I chose the Nile, the Danube, the Ganges, the Thames, the Mississippi, the Niger and the Yaoundsi. I think that's all seven of them. I really did struggle quite a lot to narrow it down to seven. It could have been 107, but I chose these because they were famous. I'd heard of them. I thought other people would be would have heard of them too and would be interested in some of their history. They might know some of their history. Others might be a bit more of a blank slate. And I just thought that they would have enough kind of historical weight and stories connected to them to allow them to kind of embody.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Caroline Dodds Penneck. Our guest today is Vanessa Taylor. Vanessa is a historian of rivers, water and environmental history at the University of Greenwich, focusing on the politics of water use. She has written for BBC History magazine, appeared on Channel 4, and she also took part in the ESRC project running the River Thames, which created a guide to the environmental history and governance of the river. Today we're discussing her new book, which obviously partly comes out of that, Seven Rivers, which explores how the world's rivers are interwoven into history and society and how they're integral to humanity's development and survival. Welcome to Intelligent Squared, Vanessa. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to talk to you about your new book, which is out very, very soon. I was privileged to get a preview, copy of it. And of course, the title is Seven Rivers, A Journey Through the Currents of Human Rights.”
2025-08-14 · Intelligence Squared · How have rivers shaped human existence? With Vanessa Taylor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT