The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, taken from the Minneapolis Stone Arch Bridge. Photographer Patrick O'Leary. Image courtesy of SAFL.
Feature

The Lab on the River: The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota

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…

Stretch of the Los Angeles River in the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Area.
Feature

Making an Icon out of the Los Angeles River

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…

WetLand + Refinery: View from The WetLand Project's floating lab motoring up the Schuylkill River. Image by Phil Flynn.
Feature

Forgotten Places and Radical Hope on Philadelphia’s Tidal Schuylkill River

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…

Small bay on Lake Oahe on the Missouri River. By Argyleist, via Flickr, CC-BY-2.0.
Primary Sources

Treaties & Territory: Resource Struggles and the Legal Foundations of the U.S./American Indian Relationship

…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.

Water/Ways exhibition in the atrium of the Goodhue County Historical Society.
In Review

Museum on Main Street’s Water/Ways

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.

The Mississippi River in Minnesota, by Ken Ratclif (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Perspectives

The National River Organizations

Citizens who appreciate the importance and preservation of our country’s natural resources know that governmental agencies need assistance to do their jobs. That’s why in the conservation arena so many not-for-profit or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are acting to augment and monitor the work of the government agencies.

Louisiana wetlands. By JamesDeMers [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Feature

An Orphaned River, A Lost Delta

Over thousands of years the Mississippi River deposited fresh water, nutrients, and sediment through a vast American territory to form one of the world’s grandest deltas. Today, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands—a critical ecosystem in this delta and a place we call “America’s Wetland”—is dying.