The mixing of the clear and turbid, rural and urban at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers (detail).
Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Eleven: The Paradoxes of Peace and Water

This issue of Open Rivers, anticipating and drawing on the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minneapolis, explores the complex intertwining and paradoxes of water, conflict, and peace. Anything so fundamental and complex as water or peace must, of necessity, contain seemingly contradictory or opposite qualities. The beauty of water is in how it reconciles and provides space for those complex, muddy mixes of qualities and characteristics.

Beach and beaver tree at Bdote. A tree has been gnawed down to its core by a beaver.
Feature

Learning from the Dakota: Water and Place

These videos and audios are from Bdote Memory Map. The deep mapping project created by Allies: media/art is a partnership project with the Minnesota Humanities Center.  The website was created several years ago to help citizens of the area now called Minnesota know where they are, and to learn from the Dakota that this place and the river is not a resource, but rather a relative.

A large expanse of solar panels are being baked by the sun.
Forum

Water as a Source of Regional Cooperation in the Middle East: The Work of EcoPeace Middle East in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine

Water is at the core of sustaining all life on earth, and the people who have inhabited the arid and semi-arid lands of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region throughout the centuries know this very well. Scarcity of water in the region has shaped its history and geopolitics, including into the present day, with climate change and population growth putting more pressure on already scarce water resources (World Bank 2018).

Aerial shot of a river flowing through an extremely dry environment.
Forum

Meandering and Riversphere: The Potential of Paradox

Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 BCE-475 BCE) was the master of paradox: “It rests by changing,” “a thing agrees at variance with itself,” and “the same: living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and the young and the old” (Kahn 1979, Fragments LII, LXXVIII, XCIII). Both Plato and Aristotle saw his views as logically incoherent and inconsistent with the law of non-contradiction.

People gather for a religious ceremony near the water.
Forum

The Sources of the Nile and Paradoxes of Religious Waters

The River Nile has long been a subject of study and veneration. From the earliest times the Nile has presented problems upon which men have speculated. “Two of the most important which have been discussed since the time of Herodotus, the position of the sources of the Nile and the origin of its annual flood, were solved during the last and at the beginning of the present century.”[1]

WTTR welcomes new river related meanings and links through creative writing.
Feature

Writing the River

What does the river say to you? This is the core question posed by Write to the River, a creative writing project that I launched in partnership with the Twin Cities nonprofit Friends of the Mississippi River and photographer Tom Reiter, in spring 2017.

Fishing on the Nile. Photographer Islam Hassan.
Primary Sources

Paradoxes of Water: A Reading List

Questions about water are often implicitly about systems of power. The benefits and impacts of how water is used, distributed, and accessed are unevenly distributed. Water thus becomes a site where the inequalities in society are made visible and contestation arises. The readings listed here offer a sample of some of the ways water is implicated in systems of inequality and work toward social justice.

The fall colors along the Mississippi River are framed nicely by the Ford bridge. This photograph was taken looking upstream of Lock and Dam 1 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. USACE photograph by Sam Mathiowetz.
Perspectives

An Endangered River: The Mississippi River Gorge

Almost 500 river miles below its source at Lake Itasca, the Mississippi River tumbles over its only waterfall in downtown Minneapolis. Dubbed the Falls of Saint Anthony by explorer Father Louis Hennepin, the falls were formed by glacial action more than 10,000 years ago. The magnificent waterfall was once over 200 feet high and located in downtown St. Paul. Over the years, the falls migrated upstream to their present location in downtown Minneapolis.