I have grown especially interested in water issues. I care about the Mississippi riverfront in Minneapolis, the effects of agriculture on water quality, and the connections people have to their drinking water, lakes, and rivers. So when I went to Germany to study, I took a good look at how the places I visited treated water as part of the landscape.
By Nicholas R. Jordan, Carissa Schively Slotterback, David Mulla, and Len Kne. Rivers are critical connectors across our communities, states, and national boundaries. They offer essential benefits in the form of drinking water, recreation, transport, food, and aesthetics. At the same time, human activities, from agriculture to urban land use, affect rivers profoundly…
When viewing the Minneapolis skyline, one generally doesn’t think of hydraulic research laboratories. Indeed, from the Stone Arch Bridge… the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory building looks rather nondescript. Yet, this facility, associated with the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, is an interdisciplinary research facility whose work is focused at the intersection of fluid dynamics and major societal challenges in energy, environment, and health…
Rivers have long been the spines of our greatest cities. Regardless of your geography prowess, you have no doubt heard of them—Thames, Seine, Potomac, Tiber, Ganges, Nile. These names twist through our history and culture in ways that imitate their own billowing shapes. They feed our wells and our fields. They clean away our rubbish. They are the arteries of our civilization…
By Bethany Wiggin. How do we see an urban, industrial river? How do we hear its stories? Who gets to tell them? I first got on the lower, tidal Schuylkill River on October fifth, 2015. With a boat captain, a first mate, and a photographer, I was helping push a floating lab for experiments in sustainability into position. Since that day, these questions about how to see and to listen for Philadelphia rivers’ stories have occupied me, a historian trained originally in European literature and in the print culture of the colonial Atlantic world…
…A movement has grown at Standing Rock, inspiring the largest gathering of American Indian tribes in over a century. In attempting to understand this historical contestation over water resources and tribal sovereignty, the question of treaty rights has been on the lips of Standing Rock water protectors, as well as scholars, community leaders, politicians, and commentators.
In November 2016, I visited Water/Ways, hosted from October 1 to November 13 at the Goodhue County Historical Society in Red Wing, Minnesota. This traveling exhibition and community engagement initiative— which then moved on to Sandstone, Minnesota—is part of the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street and is available at a series of venues nationwide through April 2017.