Rivers of Blessing: A Selection from Jared Diamond’s Upheaval (2019)

“A major geographic advantage of the U.S. is our waterways, both coastal and interior. They constitute a big money-saver, because transport by sea is 10–30 times cheaper than transport overland by road or by rail. The eastern (Atlantic), western (Pacific), and southeastern (Gulf) borders of the U.S. consist of long sea-coasts, protected along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts by many barrier islands. Hence ships navigate the latter two coasts through an intra-coastal waterway partly sheltered by those islands. All three U.S. coasts have big indentations within which lie sheltered deep-water ports, such as Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Galveston Bay, San Francisco Bay, and Puget Sound. As a result, the U.S. is blessed with many excellent protected natural harbors: more on our East Coast alone than in all the rest of the Americas south of the Mexican border. In addition, the U.S. is the world’s only major power fronting on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

As for interior waterways, the U.S. East Coast has many short navigable rivers. But our most important interior waterway is the huge Mississippi River system and its big tributaries (the Missouri and others), which drain more than half of our area, including our prime farmland of the Great Plains (map here). Once barriers to navigation on those rivers had been engineered out of existence by construction of canals and locks, ships could sail 1,200 miles into the interior of the central U.S. from the Gulf Coast. Beyond the Mississippi’s headwaters lie the Great Lakes, the world’s largest group of lakes, and the group carrying more shipping than any other. Together, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes constitute the world’s largest network of inland waterways. When one adds the intra-coastal waterway to the Mississippi-Great Lakes system, the U.S. ends up with more navigable internal waterways than all the rest of the world combined. For comparison, Mexico has no large navigable river at all, and the whole African continent has only one navigable to the ocean (the Nile). China has a much shorter coastline (only on its east side), not as good ports, a much lower fraction of its land area accessible to navigable rivers, and no big lake system comparable to our Great Lakes. All of those waterways join together much of the U.S., and connect the U.S. to the rest of the world, by means of inexpensive water transport.”—Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019)