The Mississippi River has long invited human tinkering to improve the productivity that humans can derive from its inherent powers. Compared to a car’s engine however, a river is shockingly inefficient. It is estimated that as much as 98 percent of a river’s potential energy is lost to friction and dissipated as heat.11Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of The Columbia River. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, p. 6. For good or ill, along the Mississippi, attempts have been made to improve this ratio and other forms of riverine productivity through both small- and large-scale engineering projects. Today, it is increasingly recognized that the effects of these attempts at hydrological control have proven of both local and planetary consequence. This short essay is part of a longer work which sets out the long history of attempts to put not just the river but the entire Mississippi watershed to work. These visions of a productive basin, realized or not, demonstrate the limits of human intentionality when faced with the complex cascades of relations set into motion by flowing water. Here the idea of a working watershed is explored via observations made in October 2019 during the fourth leg of the Anthropocene River Journey, and the consultation of both paper and sedimentary archives.

Foremost a basin

Bisecting the continent, the distinct energy geography of the Mississippi River has long influenced patterns of settlement, trade, and industry in North America and beyond. The various names it has been known by, from the “Misi-ziibi,” to “Mother of Rivers” or “Father of the Waters,” “Big Muddy,” to the “strong brown god,” also demonstrate its deep cultural resonances. Moreover, its unstoppable flow has inspired myriad plans for a more productive watershed. But before getting to this point, one might ask, why think in terms of basins at all? The Anthropocene denotes a new earth historical era, in which the planetary appears to be the scale at which human actions reach their most urgent conclusion. In response, this essay suggests that rather than immediately scaling up our thinking to such an all-encompassing perspective, we should consider the transformative capacities of the Earth system’s component regions.

Less-easily defined, these planetary provinces are distinguished by shared dynamic properties.22According to this definition, the planet is of course also region. The archetypal region is the river basin, a site in which the hydrological cycle offers an observable degree of holism. But regions defy abstraction and can only be discussed in specific terms. A belief in regionalism testifies to the belief that true descriptions of earthly processes can be understood only as an outcome of the interaction between physical laws, ecology, and human interventions manifest in specific places, a structure of relations from which myriad possibilities emerge.33For a clear articulation of regionalism, see Richard Hartshorne, The Nature of Geography: a critical survey of current thought in the light of the past, Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers, 1935, p. 289. Regions might be thought of as meaningful components of a prohibitively complex Earth system which can only be understood via abstraction. Regionalism heads in the other direction, toward the specific and the local. Moreover, rather than working with computational abstractions, geographers have long argued that regions can only truly be understood via fieldwork: by direct engagement with place.

So it was that in October 2019 I joined a venerable group of paddlers who have sought to understand the Mississippi by entering its flow. In travelling by canoe, environmental historian Richard White has written, you get to know nature through labor. You become intimately acquainted with a river’s unique energy geography, be it through paddling, or negotiating its currents, eddies, whorls, and boils. You can also become aware of the labor-saving potentialities of its flow, the shifting velocities of its meanders, and the smoothing or roughening effects of riverbed topography; a variety of propulsive means that require more experience than brawn.

White had come to such conclusions about canoeing twenty-five years earlier, while writing about a very different river, the Columbia. Less than half the length of the Mississippi, and with a greater elevation, at 820 meters versus the Mississippi at 450, the Columbia is a far more obviously turbulent river.44Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1995, p. 10. But though seemingly more languid, the Mississippi is in fact far more powerful. The Columbia expels just 7,500 cubic meters of water per second, while the Mississippi releases 16,790 cubic meters per second into Gulf of Mexico. Vast quantities of water are amassed as it passes through a landmass of 3.2-million-kilometres, a gently banked watershed more than five times larger than that of the Columbia. Given this distinctive profile, what if White’s immersive approach to understanding a river’s energy is applied to the Mississippi?

The river is just one obvious manifestation of the many dynamics at work in the world’s fifth largest watershed, a planar surface that acts as a vast machine for the accumulation of energy, water, biota (including us), and matter— it is the main trunk line of a diffuse and complex system. Considered in this way, it was clear that our line of travel had been predetermined by energy; specifically the law of energy conservation, which over millennia has caused the river and its sediment to carve a path of least resistance through a landscape, minimizing its expenditure of energy in accordance with this inescapable principle.55White, p. 12. Moreover, like the tangles of a trees’ roots and leaves, the very landscapes through which we would travel, from the dendritic fractals of the river’s many tributaries to the spidery deltaic outlets at its mouth, can be explained as an outcome of the structuring effects of the second law of thermodynamics, that of energy dissipation.66Axel Kleidon, Thermodynamic Foundations of the Earth System. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 118.

Riding an archive

On a balmy October day, the fourth leg of the canoe journey began in the small town of Cairo (pronounced Kay-ro) at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. Nervously loading the boats, it was easy to forget that 337 years earlier Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle and his crew had made a similar journey. Their route had also ended at the Gulf of Mexico, where, amid alluvial mud, La Salle had declared all upriver land, water, people, and resources the possession of his King Louis XIV. Returning to Paris from the newly named “Louisiane,” La Salle had been appointed Viceroy of this new territory. Two years later, looking to consolidate his rule, he set sail from La Rochelle with four ships loaded with enough priests, guns, soldiers, and women to establish a colony. However, his fleet mistakenly landed in Texas. Forced to continue overland, they dragged their canons and supplies, and subsisted on alligator flesh. Perhaps unsurprisingly, La Salle was eventually murdered by his mutinous crew.77Isaac Joslin Cox, The Journeys of Réné Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle as Related by His Faithful lieutenant, Henri De Tonnt. New Haven, CT: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1905.

Though ending in failure, the notion that this new world should be governed as a watershed would assume and retain a hold over the imagination of Francophone colonialists, not least diplomat-historian Alexander de Tocqueville, who saw the Mississippi Valley, with its surface area six times greater than that of the Kingdom of France, as potentially the “most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by God for man’s abode.”88Alexis de Tocqueville, “Exterior Form of North America”, Democracy in America, Trans. 1841. Vol. 1, New York, NY: J. and H.G. Langley, p. 20. Even a century later, the memory of La Salle’s declaration would help support a belief that it was the demarcations of its river basins which offered an appropriate unit over which North American sovereignty should be administered.99Benton Mackaye, From Geography to Geotechnics. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1968, p. 60.

Of course, the region’s history did not begin with this colonial expropriation. Nor were colonialists distinguished by their reverence for watersheds. Water held, and continues to hold a sacred role for Indigenous Americans. Its availability and wise-use were, and are still, worshipped as a precondition of continued human existence and means of cosmological distinction between the secular and spiritual realms.1010 Craig Colten, “Meaning of water in the American South: Transatlantic Encounters”, Atlantic Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008): pp. 203-222. 207. Moreover, a veneration for the spatial cohesion of river valleys was far from just a European idea. Remaining place names in and around New Orleans suggest that, if not strictly demarcated by watersheds, indigenous political geography was also strongly associated with these obvious markers of spatial coherence.1111Ibid.

In the 1680s, La Salle’s crew had come into contact with Indigenous peoples from the Natchez, Koroa, Taensa, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes. These peoples had long recognized the productive capacities of the watershed. Settled on or near bluffs, the river provided fresh water, clay, and fish, as well as acting as a lure for bison and a conduit for transport, trade, raids, and inter-tribal enslavement.1212Patricia Galloway, LaSalle and His Legacy: Frenchmen and Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. These were the survivors of a more centralized society that had developed for at least one thousand years across the lower-section of the river, united by a shared religion and a tendency to build monumental mounds, of the kind found at Cahokia, just outside of St. Louis.1313Jennifer Colten and Jesse Vogler, “Significant and Insignificant Mounds: An Essay,” Anthropocene Curriculum (blog), Aug 28, 2019: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/significant-and-insignificant-moundsHere, the ability to intensively cultivate maize, nourished by the river’s gift of rich alluvial soil, allowed society to grow in size and organizational complexity. In recognition of the centrality of the river to this civilization, archaeologists termed this age and its people the “Mississippian.”1414Jennifer Ross, Sharon Steadman., eds. Ancient Complex Societies. London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge, 2017, pp. 266, 284.

How can such cultures come to be known when they left no written record? One source lay in the water beneath our boat. An array of fine matter, minerals, particles, clays, microbiota, and more novel sediments such as plastic were suspended within its flow. Marine biologist Rachel Carson poetically described the deposition of this cavalcade of material as the “the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the earth has ever seen.”1515Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1951. Ground down by heat, cold, wind, rain, and motion, these minute entities incessantly enter into planetary circulation.1616Peter Haff, “Technology and Human Purpose: The Problem of Solids Transport on the Earth’s Surface,” Earth Systems Dynamics, 3 (2012): pp. 149-156. Though initially buoyed by the hydrological cycle, each particle gradually loses its fight against gravity and settles somewhere on Earth’s surface. The resulting layers, or laminations, Carson suggested, offer a “sort of epic poem of the earth” for those able to decipher their meaning.1717Op. Cit., note 18.

Today, advances in radiocarbon dating mean cores of sediment drilled from riverbeds can tell rich sagas. The nature inhabited by Indigenous Americans was far from untouched. They harvested timber, farmed maize, drained swamps, maintained flood plains, and built dams to redirect flows and trap fish. Though small scale, these Earthly recalibrations resulted in subtle but distinguishable changes in a river’s sedimentation processes, reflected in the shifting composition of laminations.1818E. Stinchcomb, T. C. Messner, S. G Driese., L. C. Nordt, and R. M. Stewart, “Pre-colonial (A.D. 1,100–1,600) sedimentation related to prehistoric maize agriculture and climate change in eastern North America”, Geology 39 (2011): pp. 363-366. Assuming such practices were widespread, a belief in the Mississippi basin as a pre-colonial “natural” flood plain would be as mistaken as a belief in “prehistory.” These granular witnesses also tell of a dramatic shift in North American history. The arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century and the intensified agriculture and deforestation which followed, caused a marked increase in erosion, leaving a thicker legacy of sedimentary layers an order of magnitude higher than those formed by Indigenous Americans.1919James Knox. “Plain Sedimentation in the Upper Mississippi Valley: Natural Versus Human Accelerated”, Geomorphology, 79 (2006): pp. 286-310.

It was clear that as sedimentologists have become more attuned to reading earth’s signals, the distinction between field and archive dissolves. Our canoe rode atop of not just layers of water travelling at different velocities but also a thick repository of interactions between Earth and human history which all-the-while the river was busily archiving.

Working water

The greatest shift to the river’s sediment load has come from a sequence of efforts to put its flow to work. Damming, levees, and dredging have created a sediment starved river, a lightened load which denies the Louisiana coast sufficient means of regeneration.2020Tyler Priest, Jason Theriot. “Who Destroyed the Marsh? Oil field Canals, Coastal Ecology, and the Debate over Louisiana’s Shrinking Wetlands”, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook, 2. (2009): pp. 69-80. Despite this ambitious re-engineering, the Mississippi remains a river largely unsuited to the derivation of hydrological power. Sitting in a canoe demonstrates why. The river’s flow does a large part of the work of transporting you downstream, particularly where it narrows, but even so, you won’t travel faster than about five miles an hour.2121Thanks to John Kim, our canoes carried sensors to record various parameters, from geolocation to acceleration. Over the five legs of the journey, the canoes averaged 4.5 miles per hour. https://github.com/grahamammal/miss_river_data The interaction between topography and gravity has imparted a subtle power upon the river’s main branch which is not easily harnessed. From source to sink the river descends just 450 meters over its 2,350-mile length, averaging a mere 20 centimeters per mile. In the words of water-power historian of technology Louis Hunter, the river’s its main trunk was “unable to power much more than a country mill.”2222Louis Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1939. Vol. 1., Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1979, p. 133.

Despite this lack of tractable vitality, upstream lakes and reservoirs have been used as means of accumulating water power, providing an enviable form of energy storage exploited by dams such as that developed at Keokuk, Iowa (otherwise known as Lock and Dam No. 19).2323Hunter, 1979, p. 509. In fact, the main trunk of the lower river better serves as a moving reservoir, a body of water able to diffuse the power of more dynamic tributaries such as the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Minnesota, Saint Croix, Chippewa, and Wisconsin rivers, as well as the powerful upper river.2424Hunter, 1979, p. 134. Like a power plant’s coolant pond, in normal conditions, the lower river redistributes the energy of these dynamic inputs, safely conveying their power out to sea.2525Of course, when rainfall overloads the system, devastating flooding occurs, as was the case in 1927. See John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Riverside, NJ: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

From the 1880s onward, entrepreneurial Europeans began to generate electricity by using water to rotate vast coils of wire within a magnetic field. The problem was that the resulting electricity could only be conveyed short distances. It took a decade, and the invention of alternating current—the intermittent reversal in current’s direction of travel—to allow electricity be transmitted over far longer distances without prohibitive losses in voltage.2626Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1983, pp. 93-94, and White, p. 49.Suspended with sufficient tension, transmission lines could now carry water-derived energy over vast distances, allowing flows of electrons to bypass the constraints of a river’s geography. However, due to its shallow descent, the main-branch Mississippi remained as unsuited to the derivation of hydro-electricity as hydropower.

Besides the Keokuk dam, St. Anthony Falls provides another site of energy derivation. There in 1882, the Minnesota Brush Electric Company built the first central hydroelectrical station in the U.S. To demonstrate the wonders of electrification to a skeptical public, eight arc-lights were hung from a 257-meter tower in the center of Minneapolis. The result was a Mississippi-powered “man-made moon” intended to cast a shadow over a mile away: the river seemingly disagreed with such exhibitionism, and the underwhelming result cast its light in a radius of just one-hundred feet.2727Larry Millet, Lost Twin Cities. St Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 1992, p. 109. Thanks to Joe Underhill and Jacqui DeVries from Augsburg University for hunting down the following reference. Joseph Zalusky, “Bridge Square: Going, Going, Gone,” Hennepin County History, 21 1 (1961): p. 5-7.

The watershed also does plenty of logistical work. Its main branch provides a means of low-friction transport for vast quantities of goods. The regularized channel we all smoothly traversed was the result of a series of initiatives that had begun after the Civil War. With Congressional support, the US Army Corps of Engineers had begun, in the words of historian of the Mississippi John Anfinson a “massive if disjointed Earth engineering project” aimed at turning the river basin from a diffuse wetland into an concentrated channel of a uniform 4½ foot depth at low-tide.2828John Anfinson, “Perfecting and Recreating Nature on the Upper Mississippi River”, in Brunn Stanley ed. Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects. Springer, 2011. The Corps other major intervention, the levee system, built to constrain the river’s propensity to flood, and which limits its depositional propensities, generally lay out of sight beyond the treeline.2929Martin Reuss, “Andrew A. Humphreys and the Development of Hydraulic Engineering: Politics and Technology in the Army Corps of Engineers, 1850-1950”, Technology and Culture, 26 1 (1985) pp. 1-33.

Around 1905, the Inland Waterways Commission, a group of entrepreneurs and idealists, had hoped to continue this process of enhancement by persuading President Theodore Roosevelt of the need to widen and deepen the river’s channel further to allow for the passage of larger and heavier towboats. Their spokesperson, geologist-ethnologist William McGee environed a fourteen-foot wide channel stretching from Chicago to New Orleans, which he hoped would act as a vast conduit for steel ships packed with coal, wheat, timber and iron. Costs, he argued, could be recouped by developing a large hydro-electrical plant, possibly in St. Louis.3030Ian Tyrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015, p. 120.

It was the partial achievement of this vision through which we travelled. The submerged wing dams we dodged as we canoed the outer edges of the river acted as sentinels to the past’s logistical ambitions, their chicane-like structure maintaining a concentrated flow and ensuring sediment incessantly scours the riverbed. Deepened by the river’s work, the passage of towboats and their improbably large retinues of barges is assured. On our stretch, we saw wind turbine blades heading to the Midwest and refinery components, like a floating chemistry set, headed to Texas via the Gulf Intracoastal waterway. Though deceptively wild at points, the intermittent traffic reminded us that this was less a river than an industrial archaeology.

Enveloping Atmospheres

In late October 2019, we ended our leg of the River Journey in the once ambitious and now poignantly named town of New Madrid, Missouri. As we broke camp, the river looked placid, as flat as a mill pond. But as son of St. Louis, the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, the Mississippi “is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed, and intractable.3131T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Dry Salvages. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1941. Our downriver journey, accompanied by environmental data from our digital devices and the ambient news cycle, ably illustrated that the river remained intractable and far beyond human control. In this, the second warmest year in recorded U.S. climate history, the land we camped by had been inundated with rainfall and subject to persistent floods.3232Daniel Cusick, “Today’s floods occur along ‘a very different’ Mississippi River.” Climate Wire News E&E, May 13, 2019. Changes could be perceived at all scales, from the saturated soil beneath our feet to the changing atmosphere within which we were enveloped.

No stranger to catastrophes, New Madrid had been designated as flood plain by the Corps since 1927.

Only two months earlier,  a Category 1 Hurricane called “Barry” had formed over unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, and had threatened to drop as much as 15 inches of rainfall inland, raising the possibility that an upriver “fuse plug” levee might need to be destroyed by the Corps, allowing a vast floodplain on the East side of the river, stretching as far back up as our starting point in Cairo, to fill with water.3333Sarah Okeson, “Storm may force flooding thousands of acres of farmland”, Salon.com, July 21, 2019: https://www.salon.com/2019/07/21/storm-may-force-flooding-thousands-of-acres-of-farmland_partner/, see also Brian Holmes, “Into the Breach: Wetlands for the Anthropocene River”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/project/mississippi/anthropocene-river-journey/into-the-breach Luckily, for the citizens of New Madrid at least, Barry deposited most of its rainfall in and around New Orleans.

One scale up again, oceanographers were warning that the Gulf Stream Drift, the ocean current into which the Mississippi flows, was growing weaker as the energy balance of Earth’s climate altered. Our collective will to consume, move, and grow—and the fossilized carbon we enrolled to do so—have seemingly altered the dynamics of an oceanic river whose volumetric flow is three-thousand times greater than that which we had just travelled.3434Damien Carrington, “Gulf Stream current at its weakest in 1,600 years, studies show,” The Guardian, April 11, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/11/critical-gulf-stream-current-weakest-for-1600-years-research-finds; Voituriez, Bruno. The Gulf Stream. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. 2006.

In this all enveloping context, it was impossible to ignore that attempts to tame the river, to transform the watershed into a tractable and productive “organic machine,” to use White’s term, had in fact played a contributing role in unleashing a far wider set of relations whose outcomes exceeded human intentionality. We had learnt first-hand, as White had known, that rivers are “tied to larger organic cycles beyond our control.”3535Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of The Columbia River. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, p. 112.