![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/Navios-Vega-1024x768.jpg\")
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The view from the canoe on the Fall 2019 river journey (Photo by the author).<\/em><\/p>\nThe Anthropocene asks us to consider the impact of humans on earth systems on a geological timescale.\u00a0 But in the moment and in the particularities of experiences like these\u2014out on the river with little sheltering us from the varied complexities of the realities on the ground\u2014 we see both how the Anthropocene shapes our experience (e.g. through extreme weather and the profound modifications of the river) and at the same time how the idea of the Anthropocene often seemed distant and largely irrelevant. The lived experience on the river entail responding to the immediate challenges and complexities of the journey. \u00a0If the Anthropocene connects us to deep time, the immediate needs on the trip pull us back into shallow time, in which there is still plenty of life and space for agency. \u00a0These expeditions constitute an alternative methodology and way of being and knowing\u2014carried out at the regional or watershed scale\u2014that, I argue, provide ways forward toward some kind of meaningful existence and sense of agency in the Anthropocene.\u00a0 It is as well a form of rebellion, by way of canoe, against business as usual in higher education and grounded in the central questions: What is to be done? What kinds of methodology and epistemology are called for as we seek a way through the Anthropocene toward some livable future or home? (Underhill 2020)<\/p>\n
This form of critical, place-based pedagogy and knowledge production emphasizes the centrality of embodied, place-based experience (Johnson 2008; Gruenewald 2003) and the forms of daily practice related to such things as energy and resource consumption (Illich 2009).\u00a0 Given the unavoidable entanglement between energy consumption, inequity, and environmental destruction, we need to be mindful of how the normal practices in higher education so often facilitate a separation and disconnection from the world, and how these technology- and energy-intensive systems create artificial environments that conform to certain socially constructed ideas of comfort and civilization.\u00a0 At the same time, we need to resist the counter impetus to take off to the wilds or the ivory tower, live off the grid, or retreat to consolation of philosophy.\u00a0 Given how high the stakes and how dire the need for immediate action, it is imperative that higher education provide a living example of what alternative ways of living can look like.\u00a0 Even if \u201cthere is no right life in the wrong one\u201d (Adorno 1974, 39), we can still find ways of being and knowing that are better than others within the existing system.<\/p>\n
The remainder of this essay begins by exploring the epistemology and praxis that have shaped the Mississippi River, as these were experienced on the river expedition.\u00a0 It then proceeds to sketch out alternative ways of knowing and living on and along the river, and concludes with some discussion of implications for the \u201cshape of a practice\u201d for an Anthropocene Curriculum that will allow us to navigate the waters that lie ahead without reproducing the dynamics that have brought us to where we are today.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Upon the Deepening of the Mouths<\/strong><\/p>\n The evocative subtitle to Andrew Humphrey and Henry Abbot\u2019s (1867) seminal report on the \u201cPhysics and Hydraulics\u201d of the Mississippi River, (\u201cdeepening of the mouths\u201d) refers to their challenge of maintaining the stubbornly unstable navigation channel at the mouth of the Mississippi delta.\u00a0 Their survey and resulting recommendations, guided by a new confidence in human ability to scientifically study and thus control the river, initiated a century of extensive river engineering.\u00a0 In conjunction with the massive alteration of the watershed through industrial agriculture, ongoing impacts of the plantation economy, and development of extensive petrochemical industries, a century and a half later, the mouths have indeed been deepened.\u00a0 New Orleans is now the busiest ports in the U.S.,1<\/sup> the river carries millions of tons of cargo each year, and the full effects of the wholesale re-engineering of the river and its watershed, including the rapid loss of Louisiana coastline and the large hypoxic Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, are well-documented (Weller and Russell, 2016; Anfinson, 2003; Fremling, 2005; Bentley et al., 2016; Osterman, Poore, and Swarzenski, 2008; Turner and Rabalais, 1991; Melilo, et al., 2014).\u00a0 The Mississippi is indeed a prime example of an Anthropocene River (Kelly, et al., 2018).\u00a0 Communities along the river have suffered as well\u2014from settler colonialism, slavery and the plantation economy, segregation, toxic trespass and environmental injustices, a burgeoning prison-industrial complex, and a hollowing out of the American dream as jobs disappear and incomes remain stagnant (Alexander 2010; Case and Deaton 2020; Hochschild, 2016).\u00a0 Given this long list of dysfunctions associated with Modernity\u2019s Great Acceleration, what has brought us to this place?<\/p>\n Of the various places to start, one of the more telling is the founding of the Mississippi Company in 1719 by the Scottish financial innovator and avid gambler John Law.\u00a0 He enticed investors and new settlers to the region before the whole scheme turned into one of the first major speculative financial bubbles.\u00a0 The venture collapsed, but it established the Mississippi and its watershed as a site of entanglement in the muddy mix of military conquest, industrial development, speculative capitalism, modernist engineering, and settler colonial\/plantation economy (Arrighi, 1994; Crosby, 2003, 2015; Harari, 2011; Moore, 2015, 2017; Braudel, 1984; Yuval, 2017; Davis, 2018; Pastor, et al., 2006; James, 2011).\u00a0 It would take another 150 years for the engineers to manage the river to the point of realizing its full economic potential of the river as a transportation system linked through the plantation economy to global markets. Fundamental to the success of river engineering was Humphrey and Abbot\u2019s attempt to work at gathering \u201cthe hydrometrical data for completing the determination of the laws governing the flow of water in natural channels\u201d (1867, p. 3).\u00a0 The Bureau of Topographical Engineers in the War Department engaged in extensive data gathering and produced a series of topographical and hydrological maps to understand the river system in terms that rendered it amenable to transportation, commerce, and urban settlement.\u00a0 This would eventually lead Humphreys to recommend the \u201clevees only\u201d policy of flood control, the apotheosis of which was the catastrophic flooding of 1927 (Barry 1998).<\/p>\n The \u201cmaster\u2019s tools\u201d used in creating these Anthropocene infrastructures were guided by these reductionist, mechanistic models of the natural world.\u00a0 The forms of data gathering were derived from abstract formulae that rendered the Mississippi River intelligible to the energy-intensive capitalist economy which employed increasingly sophisticated technologies to manage, in T. S. Eliot\u2019s words, the \u201cstrong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.\u201d\u00a0 This was the work of both the state and corporate actors to render monitored landscapes intelligible and amenable to political control and resource extraction (Scott, 1998).\u00a0 On our journeys undertaken by the River Semester program we saw these methods and epistemologies in the huge petrochemical and other industrial facilities along the river, with their faint odor of benzene and formaldehyde, and in the monumental river control structures.\u00a0 Perhaps most tellingly, they were reflected in two physical models of the river that were visited by the river expeditions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The river travelers visited the Corps\u2019 original river model near Jackson, Mississippi, which was part of post-1927 efforts to better understand the flooding.\u00a0 It now lies abandoned, a bizarre Lilliputian landscape through which the USACE engineers would walk like Gulliver through this \u201ceffigy of Old Man River\u201d (Cheramie 2011). \u00a0Now the space, overgrown with poison ivy, is a memorial to the limited success of attempts to model the river.\u00a0 Never fully completed and eventually abandoned in the early 1990s, it could not capture the complexity of the watershed (most notably in its omission permeable surfaces, vegetation, mud, or people).\u00a0 Starting in the 1970s, frustrated with the ongoing delays and technical problems with the model, the Corps vacated the 200-acre model and moved instead to even more abstract computer models that further separated them from the unruly mess of the river (McPhee 1989).\u00a0 A new sense of urgency, and influx of funds, after Hurricane Katrina, however, led to a new attempt to construct a new and strikingly sterile simulacrum of the Mississippi.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Following the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and with increased awareness and alarm regarding rapid coastal erosion, the engineers doubled down on the project of re-creating the river in terms that allow for the control that always seems just out of reach.\u00a0 The latest model of the lower 180 miles of the river, is located at Louisiana State University\u2019s Center for River Studies in Baton Rouge.\u00a0 Created and funded as part of the state\u2019s Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency (CPRA), the model\u2019s main function is to help efforts to guide efforts to counter the land-loss that the previous two centuries of river engineering had caused.\u00a0 It has moved indoors and consists of 10,000 square foot screen on which \u201ctwenty high-definition projectors illuminate the model and bring the river and coast to life,\u201d while simultaneously eliding the human communities and environmental injustices that are such a salient part of the region.\u00a0 The LSU River Model is described by its director in characteristically militaristic language, as “the tip of the spear on some of the most challenging issues confronting coastal and deltaic populations around the world” (Hardy 2017).\u00a0 Its simulations allow researchers to compresses the hydrological processes of a year into an hour of modelled sediment flow.\u00a0 Standing on the observation deck above the model, it is easy to imagine oneself as Homo Deus<\/em> (Harari 2018), master of all that one surveys.\u00a0 The sterile and sanitized tabula rasa onto which they could project scenarios of imagined mastery over the river is a particularly telling example of the master\u2019s tools (see also Kolbert 2021, 36-42).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These models and engineering reports have been crucial in informing the ongoing work of the Army Corps, charged by Congress with maintaining the navigation on the river, reducing risks of flood, and regulating the discharge of water into the various natural distributaries (most notably the Atchafalaya River) and artificial spillways.\u00a0 Having created models to understand the hydrology of the river, the Corps then returned to the river to re-create it in the image of the models originally created to understand the \u201cnatural\u201d river. \u00a0The riparian landscape is dominated by the massive concrete flood control projects, such as the Bonnet<\/em> Carr\u00e9 <\/em>spillway pictured above.\u00a0 The Corps has had to conceded some breathing room, the major spillways signaling some level of retreat and accommodation.2<\/sup> After Katrina, they were also forced to close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO). The Corps speaks of this work in terms of battle with this foe, maintaining vigilant watch over the river (Anfinson 2003; McPhee 1989; Pabis, 1998; Misrach and Orff 2014; Alexander, Wilson, and Green, 2012; Barnett, 2017; Kolbert 2021).\u00a0 The outcome of this battle remains unclear, but the long-term trajectories do not look good.<\/p>\n Contemptuous of attempts to master the river, Mark Twain\u2019s relationship to the river stands in sharp contrast to the engineers that followed Humphreys and Eads.\u00a0 Rather than seeking to tame and control the river, Twain\u2019s (1901) romantic and highly personal relationship to the river was grounded in an attitude of humility and acceptance of the river\u2019s sovereignty.\u00a0 He spoke with contempt of the increasingly ambitious attempts to control the river:<\/p>\n \u201cOne who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver\u2014not aloud but to himself\u2014that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, \u201cGo here,\u201d or \u201cGo there,\u201d and make it obey . . . Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities.\u00a0 Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.\u201d (Twain 1901, p. 207)<\/p>\n Since Twain\u2019s prescient observations from the 1880s, the system has suffered a series of devastating floods, although avoiding total collapse. \u00a0With each new disaster, the Corps responds with ever larger and more massive structures. But with sea levels rising by at least 1-3 feet this century, continued land subsidence, and increasing frequency and severity of both rain events and hurricanes, it seems only a matter of time before there is the right confluence of factors to bring about a collapse of this hydrological regime.\u00a0 The resulting Anthropocene River is a highly engineered, and ultimately self-destructive, system.\u00a0 The \u201cdeepening of the mouth\u201d has resulted in the river now \u201ceating itself\u201d as the Delta is cut up by pipelines, starved of the sediment needed to maintain itself, and sea levels rise (see Grey 2020).\u00a0 The writing is on the wall, and it is only a matter of time before most of the Delta will dissolve into the Gulf of Mexico\u2014the mouths gaping so wide open that they are literally engulfed by the oceanic mouth itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Getting off the train:\u00a0 embodied epistemologies and expeditionary methodologies<\/strong><\/p>\n One significant implication of the challenges of the Anthropocene is that we cannot just \u201crethink\u201d things while still living in the same resource-intensive ways.\u00a0 We have to actually stop, get off the train, and live<\/em> differently, as this is what these times require of us.\u00a0 All the theoretical or technological sophistication will not save us if we just keep operating within academia as if the current trajectory could just continue. \u00a0Instead we must find ways to teach and do research in ways that disentangle us from the technocratic and fossil-fueled dynamics that have brought us to this place.\u00a0 This entails, first, a stepping \u201coutside\u201d the machinery (while acknowledging that it is impossible to completely extract oneself from it). \u00a0We can choose to minimize out entanglements and find what opportunities for agency remain (Haff, 2017).\u00a0 The second move is exposing oneself directly to the Anthropocene and gathering data and knowledge by means of this embodied methodology to generate knowledge based on human-powered movement through an Anthropocene and, in this case, regional landscape.\u00a0 And third, we must frame this work in terms of the particular goal of understanding how to live in the Anthropocene, and to claim what agency we can, given that we always live within systems over which we have limited control.<\/p>\n If the Anthropocene presents us with the challenge of the elision of nature and culture, scholars and academics are likewise presented with the challenge of then recombining \u201clife\u201d and scholarship.\u00a0 Without a neutral or distantly objective vantage point from which to engage an \u201cothered\u201d natural world, the question then becomes how to produce knowledge without reproducing the dynamics and dysfunctions that have brought us hurtling out of the Holocene and into the world of climate change, pandemic, and mass extinction.\u00a0 As there is no longer a timeless or pure \u201cnature\u201d out there, we likewise need to break down the barriers between campus (life of the mind), and real world of work and worldly problems.\u00a0 This requires a return to the terrestrial (Latour 2018), or, to put it differently, an immersion in the river.<\/p>\n The other major figure in 19th<\/sup> Century river engineering, the polymath James Eads, focused his engineering recommendations on the river\u2019s ability to dig its own channel and \u201cdeepen the mouths.\u201d\u00a0 In contrast to the more abstract and quasi-scientific framing of Humphrey and Abbott\u2019s report, Eads\u2019 insight can be traced to a seminal moment of embodied experience in the river.\u00a0 Eads began work salvaging wrecks from the river, spending extended periods of time in his self-designed diving bell in St. Louis (Barry, 2007, Ch. 1).\u00a0 As Barry writes, \u201cthe experience changed him . . . without light he could not see the river.\u00a0 He felt it.\u201d\u00a0 In Eads own words, \u201cThe sand was drifting like a dense snowstorm at the bottom. . . . I found the bed of the river, for at least three fee in depth, a moving ass and so unstable that, in endeavoring to find a footing on it beneath my bell, my feet penetrated through it until I could feel, although standing erect, the sand rushing past my hands, driven by a current apparently as rapid as that on the surface.\u201d\u00a0 His experience of working on the bottom of the river in the pitch dark and feeling so viscerally the force of the river and the work it did in sediment transport was crucial to the development of his ideas of river channelization.\u00a0 This resulted eventually in the jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi Delta that would produce a navigable channel there.\u00a0 This was a key turning point in creating New Orleans as a major port, but also a tipping point in the process of land loss and coastal erosion.\u00a0 These jetties (or wing dams or weirs), in combination with increasingly extensive levee system, funneled and contained the flow of sediment out of the Mississippi, thus depriving the delta of the sediment it needed to replenish itself.\u00a0 From this experience he gained an undeniable truth of the sediment-transporting power of the river.\u00a0 In retrospect, we can see that Eads was both literally and figuratively working in the dark in terms of his understanding of the larger geomorphology and fluvial dynamics (let alone all the complexities of the river ecosystem).<\/p>\n But both Eads and Twain drew on their direct, embodied, subjective knowledge of the Mississippi (Johnson 2008). This very particular and subjective kind of knowledge allowed them to gain a deeper understanding of the river.\u00a0 This is a way of knowing and praxis that was shared by those on the river journeys.\u00a0 These direct experiences give us a sense or feel of a place\u2014operating in what Connolly (1999) terms the \u201cvisceral register\u201d\u2014that help enable a sense of its gestalt. They impart the complex and multifaceted results of the Great Acceleration as they manifest themselves in ways that are comprehensible to those living in their midst.\u00a0 These are different ways of knowing than those we get from satellite sensors or water quality monitors.\u00a0 Using the human body as instrument and lived experience (swimming, breathing, drinking, sleeping) as a mode of inquiry leads to an embodied epistemology.\u00a0 In contrast to Lockean empiricism, this form of knowledge production is rooted in the human organism\u2019s ability to take in and get a richer, phenomenological sense of a place and to understand it in the terms in which we as humans will be living in that space.3<\/sup>\u00a0 The travelers on the journeys of the River Semester viscerally and palpably experienced the flow of the river as they paddled along and swam in it.\u00a0 Along the way, they experience the multiple sensory disruptions of the near-constant noise of the machines and massive petrochemical and industrial food processing facilities, the light pollution, and the range of smells.\u00a0 This way of knowing a watershed is simultaneously immersive, synthetic, sustained, phenological, embodied, and lived.\u00a0 As with Twain\u2019s experience, these experiences engender humility, nostalgia, appreciation for complexity, a sense of mystery, and kinship with the river.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do we research what it means to live well in the midst of the Anthropocene?\u00a0 <\/strong>The expeditionary method on the Mississippi consists of a variety of particular modalities.\u00a0 Like matsutake mushrooms (Tsing 2017) or uranium ore, the Mississippi River is a richly informing interscalar space (Hecht 2018) that provides multiple opportunities for \u201cmaking kin\u201d with the river and its multi-species communities (Haraway 2016).\u00a0 Beyond frequently swimming in the water, at a few points the group was literally drinking water from the river (boiled and used to make coffee).\u00a0 In this sense, walking down to the river and getting into a canoe are profoundly political, risky, intimate, and counter-cultural acts (Diaz 2011, 2016). In regard to the exploration of a regional-scale watershed, this constitutes a methodology of the journey in which the \u201cshape of this practice\u201d is as transect.\u00a0 This meandering passage from north to south would take these academic vagabondi<\/em> on the river journey from the relatively pristine stream of the headwaters, through the Twin Cities, the Driftless (unglaciated) region in Wisconsin and Iowa, to St. Louis and Memphis, through the so-called \u201cWild Miles\u201d to the heavily industrialized and polluted Chemical Corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.\u00a0 This revisiting of the \u201cFourth Coast\u201d (Brown and Morrish 1990) likewise traversed the political landscape through deep red (white, mainly rural, and largely pro-Trump) and deep-blue (diverse urban) communities.\u00a0 This kind of mobility, carried out by a predominantly wealthy and white group of academics, required the group as well to acknowledge the inherently problematic nature of an expedition with its colonial and imperial legacies and implications (paperson 2017).\u00a0 These postcolonial tensions require a great deal of intentionality and awareness, and active work to collaborate with indigenous communities and communities of color, and to practice both humility and openness, considerations that were seriously addressed by the travelers (Kaplan-Seem and Kim 2019).<\/p>\n Travelers on the canoe expeditions did so as human-canoe-paddle-smart-phone cyborgs, <\/strong>using a set of technologies that included rubber boots, raincoats, compost buckets, \u201cdromedary\u201d bags for carrying our potable water, mobile wi-fi, and the usual assortment of cell phones and laptops.\u00a0 As a mode of transportation, the large canoe is particularly well-suited for the embodied exploration of watersheds at this regional scale.\u00a0 These vessels use an energy system that consists of caloric intake (eating food), solar panels, and some propane and firewood for cooking.\u00a0 It thus has a minimal carbon footprint.\u00a0 This kind of expeditionary method likewise has a particular pace, typically of no more than five knots (or ten kilometers per hour).\u00a0 It must attend to economic and budgetary concerns with staff needing to receive livable wages, and relying on grants and financial aid to make this affordable for students, and recruiting students so that there is enough enrollment to support the endeavor.\u00a0 The expedition likewise came to have its own culture, including elements of diversity, inclusivity, and building connecting across ideological differences.\u00a0 It has its seasonality, with the group heading south in the Fall with the migrating birds, when the river tends to be lower, and the biting insect are not as bad as in the spring or early summer (Whyte 2017, 2019).\u00a0 It also came to include a set of spiritual and ceremonial practices, with water blessings, and songs and storytelling around the nightly fires that naturally became part of the nightly routines.<\/p>\n What do we get from the approximately 250 days spent living on the river over the course of 15 years?\u00a0 What does the Anthropocene feel like? smell like? taste like?\u00a0 What emotional states does it elicit, and how can we create homes and ways of life within it?\u00a0 In contrast to the knowledge gleaned from the river models, this form of travel, with its minimal separation from the world, made the group aware of a strange mix of realities, none of which fit neatly into the engineers\u2019 constructed realities. Our experiences included the manifold hazards (natural and man-made) along the way, such as when canoes were damaged when hitting submerged stumps or rocks and had to be repaired.\u00a0 And on the river, there is need for constant vigilance and awareness of the huge barges and freighters.\u00a0 Physical health could also be an issue, as when one student got appendicitis and had to have an emergency appendectomy in Hannibal, Missouri.\u00a0 And well-being would be a factor, as when a student experienced post-traumatic stress disorder during an intense storm; or when a Hmong student was afraid her soul would leave her body and be claimed by the river, necessitating a shaman to come retrieve her from the waters.\u00a0 The dangers also came from human sources. \u00a0Bullets whizzing by our tents when the group was camped out in the backyard of a house in St. Louis near Ferguson, MO, and students of color had very real fears about their safety when spending time in the South.\u00a0 During one visit to a bar, we overheard one very drunk patron bragging that he would shoot any person of color who came into the place.<\/p>\n Reflecting the \u201call white\u201d river found in the LSU River model, the community of engineers and commercial operations along the river is strikingly white, male, and heteronormative.\u00a0 In contrast, and reflecting our global interconnections, the river trips have included Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli, Norwegian, German, Portuguese, and academics; and a diverse group of students including Mexican, Colombian, transgender, Dakota, gender non-conforming, Hmong shamanist, recovering addicts, white middle-class suburban athletes, and students with Asperger\u2019s syndrome.\u00a0 Life in the Anthropocene highlighted the need for the group to adjust and accommodate to the changing circumstances and varied needs of the group.\u00a0 This led at times to small-scale rebellions, as students took umbrage with what they considered to be unreasonable demands along the way.\u00a0 These travelers met up with, among others, duck hunters, white supremacists, Cherokee water walkers, oil pipeline workers, sugar farmers, ex-cons, mayors, a boxing champion, organic farmers, doctors, and radical black queer artists, all of whom are living in the Anthropocene along the Mississippi River and somehow making a go of it.\u00a0 The experiences of the group have included being stopped for questioning by police and the Exxon Mobil security officers at a refinery; being welcomed and hosted by conservative families at places like \u201cPoche Park\u201d in Pauline, LA and the \u201cDuck Dynasty\u201d hunting camp near Prescott, Wisconsin; and on one occasion being sprayed by a crop duster in the Chemical Corridor. In the midst of the wettest twelve-month period in recorded U.S. history (NOAA 2019), the 2018 River Semester expedition experienced straight-line winds of over 90 mph that blew six of the eight tents, two of them ending up in the river.\u00a0 Stranded in Trempealeau, Wisconsin by severe weather the river travelers were hosted by the Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church during Yom Kippur, where a lay rabbi in the group led an observance of the Day of Atonement in the sanctuary of the church.\u00a0 Try putting that<\/em> in your river model.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Conclusion: Paddling the Meanders <\/strong><\/p>\n In these disturbed and disturbing environments, what forms of flourishing, knowing, and investigation are called for?\u00a0 The dominant forms of understanding and engineering the Mississippi River should raise serious concerns about the risks of doubling down on the techniques and geo-engineering that have brought us to this place.\u00a0 Although we cannot fully extract ourselves from these systems, we can work to create more space for human thriving along what remains of the functioning river ecosystem.\u00a0 The river journey described here can serve as a different kind of \u201cmodel\u201d for the kind of radical change that is needed to thrive within the dramatically altered realities of the Anthropocene. \u00a0There have been various suggestions for new epistemological approaches in the Anthropocene, such as the data gathering and recycling of \u201cwaste data\u201d (Edwards, 2016) and formation of new ontologies and ways of knowing in the Anthropocene (Pickering, 2009; Morton, 2016).<\/p>\n The experiences on the river suggest the need to build new epistemologies grounded in place, humility, reciprocity, all of which can be found in traditional indigenous methodologies with their resistance to these grand, global, abstract classificatory schemes (Carlson 2020; Kimmerer 2013; Rixecker and Tipene-Matua 2003; Todd, 2016).\u00a0 As Irene Klaver (2018) has argued, the structure of the river itself, and challenges of navigating in a canoe, suggest various riverine and meandering methodologies.\u00a0 This points to the value of a more complex, nuanced, and ground-truthed understanding of the river, as a way to engender greater humility and sustainability.\u00a0 These direct experiences help as correctives for the various imagined Anthropocene futures (dystopian or utopian) and \u201cviews from above.\u201d\u00a0 The trouble with concepts such as the Anthropocene and Technosphere is that they operate at such an abstract, macro-scale that they can easily overlook or work to remove us from the lived realities of the moment.\u00a0 We need to understand the space as defying these efforts to model it.\u00a0 Following Latour\u2019s exhortation to \u201ccome down to earth\u201d and find more locally grounded ways of knowing and dwelling in these Anthropocenic landscapes, we can develop new maps (Solnit and Snedeker, 2013) and new ways of making kin with critters, paddlefish, warty-back mussels, and white pelicans that share the river with us (Haraway 2015).\u00a0\u00a0 These extended, lived experiences of the Anthropocene defy disciplinary boundaries, and this kind of expeditionary learning entails further strengthening transdisciplinary projects (Toivanen, et al., 2017) and the ethnographic interrogation of complex interrelationships along the river, informed by the norms of attentiveness and curiosity suggested by Tsing (2017).<\/p>\n One of the values of this kind of expeditionary learning is as a model for how to undertake the long journey ahead.\u00a0 As the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic amply demonstrate, the path ahead will itself be a long and perilous journey.\u00a0 To weather the increasing impacts of climate change, we will need real experimentation and exploration. \u00a0We have to figure out how to thrive within the Anthropocene, and the ways in which we can begin to disentangle ourselves from these dynamics and imagine new ways of living and generating knowledge as we move into whatever kind of system emerges from the current set of crises.<\/p>\n Paddling on the river is a powerful source of hope, inspiration and beauty. It is not a dead river, certainly highly engineered and radically altered from what it was prior to arrival of humans on the continent, and particularly since colonization.\u00a0 As a stream ecologist on one of the trips, observed, the Mississippi is indeed a \u201churting river.\u201d\u00a0 The river ecosystems are greatly diminished, with far fewer species and some extinctions, with loss of the massive freshwater mussel beds, and dramatic decline in migratory bird and fish species.\u00a0 Countering this sense that the river has somehow been so overwhelmed by human activity that it subsumed within these larger systems, the direct experience of the river simultaneously reveals the human impacts on the river, but also the river\u2019s ongoing presence, even agency (Mitchell 2002). \u00a0We will end with the uneasy balance between control and helplessness, informed, at its heart, by humility and love, with a fierce insistence on human agency in the midst of the Technosphere and momentum of global carbon-fueled capitalism (Vine 2018; Haff 2017).<\/p>\n The epistemology and methodology of the Anthropocene are disembodied, \u201cobjective,\u201d disconnected, abstract, secular, quantitative, narrowly empirical, predominantly guided by white patriarchal heteronormativity, and energy- and technology-intensive. The alternative is embodied, personal, visceral, directly experienced, spiritual, emotional, diverse, inclusive, and personal.\u00a0 It is as well disentangled as much as possible from the operations of the Anthropocene, with minimal use fossil fuels and the infrastructures that support that energy system.\u00a0 The resulting understanding of the Anthropocene river is both troubling and inspiring.\u00a0 Immersed in the literature of the Anthropocene, one would expect to find the Mississippi a desolate wasteland of toxic waste and social anomie.\u00a0 Viewed from a canoe, we are struck most by the force and presence of the river itself, and the indefatigable riot of nature in all its forms that fill the watershed.\u00a0 The river is polluted, is \u201churting,\u201d but all the workings of humanity fill but a small portion of the Mississippi, as, over the course of a year, it carries close to two trillion gallons of water, draining out of 3.2 million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles) catchment basin.<\/p>\n Once outside the bubbles we have created in our laboratories, malls, and cloistered and gated subdivisions, this canoe-based knowledge production answers a particular kind of question and provides us with particular information: namely what is it like to live and exercise agency in the Anthropocene.\u00a0 It is simply that\u2014the knowledge gained, not from the panopticon of Earth System Science, but from the perspective of those living exposed to the effects of the Great Acceleration.\u00a0 It might be appealing to think there is some more intellectually sophisticated or complex answer to the question of how to proceed, but the history of previous intellectually ambitious schemes has not worked out well.\u00a0 Instead we might be better served by walking down to the river, getting into our canoes, as we seek\u2014and, in the process, create\u2014other sites and practices of resistance within the Anthropocene, grounded in place, in the mud, in love for each other and the world.<\/p>\n Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/p>\n Thanks to HKW, MPI, Christoph Rosol, Carlina, Cornelia Wagner, Nell Gehrke, Steven Diehl, Audrey Buturian-Larson, Emily Knudson, John Kim, Benjamin Steinegger, Augsburg University, and the entire crew of the 2019 Anthropocene River Journey for insights, support, and feedback on earlier drafts of this post.<\/p>\n Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 <\/sup>The volume of cargo at ports is measured in a few different ways, but by the measure of tonnage, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest in the Western Hemisphere.\u00a0 See http:\/\/portsl.com\/facts-at-a-glance\/<\/a><\/p>\n 2 <\/sup>This is an idea that had historical precedent. As early as 1850, the engineer Charles Ellet Jr. had recommended using a system of outlets and reservoirs to protect the Delta (Pabis 1998, 424).<\/p>\n 3<\/sup>The \u201cpost-human\u201d and multi-species perspective is worth noting, but I am not sure if I can really say what the river is like, for example, from the perspective of a paddlefish that was raised in a fish hatchery and then released into the river.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Adorno, TW. (1974),\u00a0Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life<\/em>, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, New Left Books, London, 1974.<\/p>\n Alexander, J. S., et al (2013) \u201cA Brief History and Summary of the Effects of River Engineering and Dams on the Mississippi River System and Delta\u201d, in: U.S. Geological Survey Circular<\/em> 1375.<\/p>\n Alexander M (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration and the age of colorblindness<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: New Press.<\/p>\n Anfinson, J. O. (2003)\u00a0The River we have Wrought: A History of the Upper Mississippi<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n Arrighi G (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.<\/p>\n Barnett, JF (2017) Beyond Control: The Mississippi River\u2019s New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico<\/em>, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.<\/p>\n Barnosky AD et al. (2011) Has the Earth\u2019s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471: 51\u201357.<\/p>\n Barry, JM (1998)\u00a0Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America,\u00a0<\/em>1st Touchstone ed., Simon & Schuster, New York.<\/p>\n Bentley, SJ, et.al. (2016) \u201cThe Mississippi River source-to-sink system: Perspectives on tectonic, climatic, and anthropogenic influences, Miocene to Anthropocene\u201d, Earth-Science Reviews<\/em>, 153, 139\u2013174.<\/p>\n Braudel F (1984) Civilization and Capitalism. The Perspective of the World, B=Vol. 3. London: Collins.<\/p>\n Brown CR and WR Morrish (1990) The Fourth Coast: An Expedition on the Mississippi River Design Quarterly, No. 150, pp. 1-29+32 Stable URL: http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/4091279<\/a><\/p>\n Carlson A (2020) The Mississippi is the Opposite of the Anthropocene.\u00a0https:\/\/www.anthropocene-curriculum.org\/contribution\/the-mississippi-river-is-the-opposite-of-the-anthropocene<\/p>\n Case A and Deaton A (2020)\u00a0Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism<\/em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n Connolly, W (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n Crosby AW (2003) The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Praeger.<\/p>\n Crosby AW (2015) Ecological Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n Crutzen PJ and EF Stoermer (2000) The \u201cAnthropocene\u201d. The Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17\u20138. International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGPB).<\/p>\n Crutzen PJ (2002) Geology of mankind. Nature 415 (6867), 23.<\/p>\n Davis, JD (2018) Levees, Slavery, and Maintenance https:\/\/www.technologystories.org\/levees-slavery-and-maintenance\/<\/a><\/p>\n Diaz, VM (2011) \u201cVoyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking, and the Re-mapping of Indigeneity,\u201d Pacific Asia Inquiry 2:1 (Fall), <\/em>21-32.<\/p>\n Diaz, VM (2016) \u201cIn the Wake of Matapang\u2019s Canoe,\u201d Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations<\/em>, Aileen Moreton-Robinson ed. Arizona Press. 119-137.<\/p>\n Cheramie, KD (2011) \u201cThe Scale of Nature: Modeling the Mississippi River\u201d, in: Places Journal,<\/p>\n https:\/\/placesjournal.org\/article\/the-scale-of-nature-modeling-the-mississippi-river\/<\/a><\/p>\n Edwards, PN (2017) \u2018Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene\u2019, The Anthropocene Review, 4(1), pp. 34\u201343. doi: 10.1177\/2053019616679854.<\/p>\n Fremling, CR (2005)\u00a0Immortal river: the Upper Mississippi in ancient and modern times<\/em>. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.<\/p>\n Grey, I (2020) \u201cOutrunning the Anthropocene? Countering coastal land loss by the rapid restoration of salt marshes.\u201d\u00a0 Mississippi. An Anthropocene River. Haus de Kulturen der Welt.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.anthropocene-curriculum.org\/contribution\/outrunning-the-anthropocene<\/a><\/p>\n Gruenewald D (2003) The best of both worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place, Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 3\u201312.<\/p>\n Haff, P (2014) \u2018Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: Six rules\u2019, The Anthropocene Review, 1(2), pp. 126\u2013136. doi: 10.1177\/2053019614530575.<\/p>\n Haff, P. (2017) \u2018Being human in the Anthropocene\u2019, The Anthropocene Review<\/em>, 4(2), pp. 103\u2013109. doi: 10.1177\/2053019617700875.\u00a0 Room for human agency within the over-arching structures of the technosphere.<\/p>\n Harari, Y. N. (2015)\u00a0Sapiens : a brief history of humankind<\/em>. Translated by J. Purcell and H. Watzman. London: Vintage Books.<\/p>\n Haraway D (2015) Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities<\/em> 6: 159\u2013165.<\/p>\n Hardy S (2017) \u201c\u2019We are at the tip of the spear’: Baton Rouge opens international water research hub.\u201d Baton Rouge Advocate Online at https:\/\/www.theadvocate.com\/baton_rouge\/news\/environment\/article_60184940-df67-11e7-adf6-07debb728ea9.html<\/a> [Accessed Apr. 1, 2020.]\n Hecht, G (2018) Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.\u00a0 Cultural Anthropology\u00a033(1):109-141<\/p>\n Hochschild AR (2016)\u00a0Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right<\/em>. New York: New Press.<\/p>\n Humphreys, AA and H. L. Abbot (1867) \u201cReport upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River upon the Protection of the Alluvial Region against Overflow and upon the Deepening of the Mouths\u201d (Washington, D.C. GPO)<\/p>\n Illich, I. (2009)\u00a0Energy and Equity<\/em>. London: Marion Boyars<\/p>\n James, J. C.: \u201cEcomelanchoia: Slavery, War, and Black Ecological Imaginings\u201d, in K. Hiltner, S. LeMenager, T. Shewry (eds.): Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century<\/em>, Routledge, 2011,<\/p>\n Johnson, M. (2008)\u00a0The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding<\/em>. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n Kaplan-Seem A and Kim J (2019) Land Acknowledgement Statement<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.anthropocene-curriculum.org\/contribution\/land-acknowledgement-statement<\/a><\/p>\n Kelly, JM, P. Scarpino, H Berry, J Syvitski, and M Meybeck (2018) Rivers of the Anthropocene<\/em>, Oakland: University of California Press.<\/p>\n Kimmerer, R. W. (2013)\u00a0Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants<\/em>. First edn. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions<\/p>\n Klaver, I (2018) Meandering and Riversphere: The Potential of Paradox. Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place, and Community. University of Minnesota, Vol. 11<\/p>\n https:\/\/editions.lib.umn.edu\/openrivers\/article\/meandering-and-riversphere-the-potential-of-paradox\/<\/a><\/p>\n Kolbert, E. (2021) Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, New York: Crown.<\/p>\n Latour, B (2018)\u00a0Down to Earth: Politics in the new climatic regime<\/em>. English edn. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.<\/p>\n Lorde, A (1984) \u201cThe Master\u2019s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master\u2019s House.\u201d Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114.<\/p>\n McPhee, J. (1989)\u00a0The Control of Nature<\/em>. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.<\/p>\n Melillo, J. M., T. C. Richmond, and G. W. Yohe, Eds. (2014) Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC.\u00a0 doi:10.7930\/J0Z31WJ2<\/a><\/p>\n Misrach, R., and K. Orff: Petrochemical America, Aperture<\/em>, 2014, see also at<\/p>\n https:\/\/aperture.org\/blog\/richard-misrach-and-kate-orff-in-conversation\/<\/a> and at southernspaces.org<\/a><\/p>\n Mitchell, T. (2002)\u00a0Rule of Experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity<\/em>. Berkeley: University of California Press.<\/p>\n Moore JW (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.<\/p>\n Moore JW (2017) The Capitalocene, part I: On the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 594\u2013630.<\/p>\n Morton T (2016) Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n Motesharrei S et al. (2016) Modeling sustainability; population, inequality, consumption, and bidirectional coupling of the Earth and Human Systems. National Science Review 3(4), 470\u2013494.<\/p>\n National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 2019.\u00a0 Report on weather extremes<\/p>\n Norberg J (2016)\u00a0Progress: Ten reasons to look forward to the future<\/em>. London: Oneworld Publications.<\/p>\n Osterman LE, RZ Poore, and PW Swarzenski (2008) \u201cGulf of Mexico dead zone \u2013 1000-year record\u201d, USGS Open File Report.<\/p>\n Pabis, G. (1998). Delaying the Deluge: The Engineering Debate over Flood Control on the Lower Mississippi River, 1846-1861.\u00a0The Journal of Southern History,<\/em>\u00a064<\/em>(3), 421-454. doi:10.2307\/2587789<\/p>\n paperson l (2017)\u00a0A third university is possible<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Forerunners: ideas first from the University of Minnesota Press).<\/p>\n Pastor, M., R. D. Bullard, J. K. Boyce; A. Fothergill; R. Morello-Frosch; B. Wright (2006) In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race After Katrina<\/em>. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.<\/p>\n Pickering, A. (2009) \u201cNew Ontologies\u201d, in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds): The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming<\/em>, Duke University Press.<\/p>\n Pinker, S. (2012)\u00a0The Better Angels of our Nature: A history of violence and humanity<\/em>. London: Penguin.<\/p>\n Rixecker SS and B Tipene Matua (2003) \u201cMaori Kaupapa and the inseparability of social and environmental justice,\u201d in Agyeman, J, Bullard, RD and Evans, B.\u00a0Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world<\/em>. London: Earthscan (Urban and industrial environments).<\/p>\n Scott, J. C. (1998)\u00a0Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed<\/em>. New Haven: Yale University Press (Yale agrarian studies).<\/p>\n Solnit, R. and Snedeker, R. (2013)\u00a0Unfathomable City: a New Orleans Atlas. Berkeley (Calif.): University of California Press.<\/p>\n Steffen W, Crutzen P and McNeill JR (2007) The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36: 614\u2013621.<\/p>\n Todd, Z (2016) \u201cFrom Classroom to River\u2019s Edge: Tending to Reciprocal Duties Beyond the Academy,\u201d Aboriginal Policy Studies<\/em> 6, No. 1, 90-97.<\/p>\n Toivanen, T et al. (2017) \u2018The many Anthropocenes: A transdisciplinary challenge for the Anthropocene research\u2019, The Anthropocene Review, 4(3), pp. 183\u2013198. doi: 10.1177\/2053019617738099.<\/p>\n Tsing, A. L. (2017)\u00a0The Mushroom at the end of the World: On the possibility of life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n Turner, RE and NN Rabalais (1991) Changes in Mississippi River Water Quality this Century.\u00a0 BioScience 41 3 pp. 140-147.<\/p>\n Underhill J. (2017) What we learned from the river. Open Rivers Issue 6:\u00a0Teaching and practice University of Minnesota<\/p>\n Underhill J. (2020) Navigating the Anthropocene river: A traveler\u2019s guide to the (dis)comforts of being at-home-in-the-world\u00a0 Anthropocene Curriculum online<\/p>\n Vine M. (2018) Learning to feel at home in the Anthropocene: From state of emergency to everyday experiments in California’s historic drought. American Ethnologist 45(3):405-416<\/p>\n Weller L and T Russell (2016) State of the River Report 2016. Friends of the Mississippi River http:\/\/stateoftheriver.com\/state-of-the-river-report\/<\/p>\n Whyte K (2017) Is It Colonial Deja Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice. In\u00a0Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice<\/em>. Edited by J.\u00a0Adamson, M.\u00a0Davis, and H.\u00a0Huang, pgs. 88-104.\u00a0Earthscan Publications.<\/p>\n Whyte K (2019) \u201cWay Beyond the Lifeboat: an Indigenous Allegory for Climate Justice,\u201d in Bhavnani, K.-K.\u00a0et al.<\/em>\u00a0(eds) (2019)\u00a0Climate Futures: Re-imagining Global Climate Justice<\/em>. London, UK: Zed Books.<\/p>\n Yusoff, K. (2018)\u00a0A billion black Anthropocenes or none<\/em>. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The master\u2019s tools cannot be used to dismantle the master\u2019s house. \u2014Audre Lorde (1984) The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book\u2014a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35564"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35924,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564\/revisions\/35924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u201cRainbow](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/Rainbow-tour.jpeg\")
\u201cRainbow tour of the Mississippi River Basin Model Waterways Experiment Station, located near Clinton, Mississippi, was a large-scale hydraulic model of the lower Mississippi River basin, covering an area of 200 acres. The model was built from 1943 to 1966 and in operation from 1949 until 1973. Construction crew included WWII prisoners of war from Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Photo by Carlina Ross\u00e9e.\u201d (John Kim <\/em>Field Note<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/River-Simulacra.jpeg\")
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The Human Delta as tabula rasa (Amalia <\/em>Field Note<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Bonnet](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/Bonnet-Carre.jpeg\")
Bonnet Carr\u00e9 spillway; an acknowledgement of the need to give the Mississippi some breathing room, but always on terms dictated by New Orleans and local Petrochemical interests. (Joe Underhill <\/em>Field Note<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/Wreck-of-the-Anthropocene-Future-768x1024.jpeg\")
The \u201cwreck of the Anthropocene future.\u201d A toy Landspeeder washed up on a beach on the Lower Mississippi (Joe Underhill <\/em>Field Note<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Camp](\"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/river\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/70\/2021\/05\/Campsite-pastoral.jpeg\")
Camp site on an island in the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin in 2019.\u00a0 A way of living with enough comfort while being connected and immersed in the world.<\/em> (Christoph Rosol Field Note<\/a>)<\/p>\n