Fortified But Still in Peril, New Orleans Braces for its Future
On The Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island
Drawing as Imagining Absence: Sometime prior to 1963 a person sat down at a table to draw a map. This person could effectively communicate with lines across a page, possessing the technical skills of rendering exact scale ratios of a three-dimensional space on a sheet of paper. The task of this artist was to draw a blueprint that would be used to harness a river for industrial use.
In Quad Cities, Reconnection to the Riverfront Is Well Into Its Fourth Decade
In January 2018, residents of the Quad Cities (Moline and Rock Island, Illinois; Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa) attended an open house exploring possibilities for “new” riverfront land left vacant by the realignment of the I-74 bridge over the Mississippi. Bridge replacements happen all the time, of course, but this meeting signaled two things: first, the continued significance of this particular stretch of the Mississippi as a transportation crossroads, and second, the ongoing vitality of the regional riverfront redevelopment programs, begun out of industrial economic crises over three decades ago.
Where the Water Flows: Understanding Glacier’s Triple Divide Peak
Imagine pouring out a glass of water. Where does the water go?
After soaking your computer or floor, it would eventually flow to join a greater body of water and become part of a larger drainage system. Where I grew up, outside of Milwaukee, my water would join with Lake Michigan. In the Twin Cities, where I went to university, it would flow into the Mississippi River. From Jackson, Wyoming, where I’m writing now, it would combine with the Snake River and flow into the Pacific Ocean. But Glacier National Park, where I worked in the summer of 2017, has a unique little point called Triple Divide Peak.
Mosquitoes, Muck, and Mussels: A Look Into Scientific Research
The aspiring young undergraduate scientists envision fieldwork as a romantic escape from the office cubicle, classroom desk, and seemingly endless pile of homework. Working alongside experts in their field, they anticipate working in the wildest regions of the world: dense tropical forests, remote mountain ranges, and distant glacial rivers. They see themselves on the forefront of groundbreaking discoveries: truly shattering the scientific community with a cure for Malaria, discovery of a new species, or theory of planetary evolution.
Introduction to Issue Nine
Welcome to Issue 9 of Open Rivers, which begins our third year of publication! Our tagline, “Rethinking Water, Place & Community,” speaks to our sense that there is a conversation taking place in diverse professional sectors and academic disciplines about the relationships between our human communities and our water communities, and that there is an audience for this conversation, both on campus and in the broader water-oriented professional community.
Review of Underwater
The Story Behind a Nassau Bottle Excavated at Historic Fort Snelling
For millennia, Native American people traveled and traded on the Mississippi River. When colonial powers moved into North America, they quickly saw the importance of controlling transportation and the movement of goods on the river. In 1820, The United States government established Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers to protect American fur trade interests in the region and to gain a foothold in the western territory that would become Minnesota.
Free-Flowing Waters: A Vision for a Lower Mississippi River Wilderness
Wilderness is a feeling. It is more than that, of course—wilderness is the wind and the water, the turtles and coyotes, all that exists beyond and around and within our human selves. But when we speak of wilderness, we’re so often speaking about a feeling: that feeling of smallness, strangely comforting, or of connection, or of wonder at how much there is in the world.