Crew excavating eroding house at Walakpa in 2017. Image courtesy of the Walakpa Archaeological Salvage Project.
Geographies

Libraries Burning

By Phyllis Mauch Messenger. For much of the planet, 2023 was the warmest year on record, and the 12 warmest years have all been documented since 2005.[i] The repercussions of this warming pattern, of undeniable climate change, are both dauntingly real and not yet fully knowable, both immediately problematic and also intensifying over time.

The article republished here demonstrates a commitment to action and hope in the face of climate change. In 2019, Phyllis Mauch Messenger detailed the work of several archaeological projects across the Arctic region focusing on salvaging materials long held in permafrost landscapes that are at risk due to warming temperatures.

Detail from The Keeyask Dam site on the Nelson River, 2019. Image courtesy of Aaron Vincent Elkaim.
In Review

Stories to the Surface: Revealing the Impacts of Hydroelectric Development in Manitoba

By Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez. Manitoba, although known as one of Canada’s prairie provinces, is arguably more defined by its waterways. One story tells that the very name “Manitoba” was born from water, derived from the Cree words Manitou, “Great Spirit,” and wapow, “sacred water,” to describe the sound of waves crashing against an island on Lake Manitoba (Sinclair and Cariou 2011, 4–5). The Red and Assiniboine Rivers, two prominent entities of movement and memory, meet in the heart of the province’s capital city of Winnipeg. The northward-flowing Red River empties into Lake Winnipeg, the tenth-largest freshwater lake in the world. The northern area of the province is dappled and threaded with thousands of lakes, abundant rivers, and watersheds. It is here, in the north, that water has been harnessed and commodified as a source of energy by Manitoba Hydro for the past six decades. Today, according to provincial and Manitoba Hydro websites, a staggering 97 percent of electricity generated in Manitoba is derived from hydropower (Manitoba Hydro 2023a, 9).

Poster for UPRIVER: A Watershed Film. Image courtesy of Freshwaters Illustrated.
Perspectives

Reflections on UPRIVER: A Watershed Film

By Chris O’Brien. As part of the longstanding Moos Family Speaker Series on Water Resources, Freshwater and the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences presented a screening of UPRIVER: A Watershed Film, on December 5, 2023, at The Main Cinema in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The sold-out event featured a post-show panel discussion with Carrie Jennings (Research and Policy Director, Freshwater), Jacques Finlay (Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota), John Whitehead (Filmmaker, Fretless Films), and Patrick Moore (Emerging Systems Consulting).

This hour-long documentary, produced by Freshwaters Illustrated and directed by Jeremy Monroe and David Herasimtschuk, is an inspiring look at the successful conservation efforts underway on Oregon’s Willamette River system. Freshwaters Illustrated is a nonprofit organization based in Corvallis, Oregon, dedicated to raising awareness of freshwater biodiversity, ecosystems, and conservation.

2014 flood in the Detroit metro area. Image via Flickr by Michigan State Police Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division. CC BY-ND 2.0 DEED
Primary Sources

Ghost Streams and Redlining

By Jacob Napieralski. In 2021, metro Detroit was hit with a rainstorm so severe that President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration at state officials’ request.

Nearly 8 inches of rain fell within 24 hours, closing every major freeway and causing massive damage to homes and businesses. The storm was of a severity historically seen in Detroit every 500 to 1,000 years.

The Coosa River in Wetumpka, Alabama, after rain. This portion of the river is below the Jordan Dam. Image via Flickr by brian_esquire. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed.
Teaching and Practice

Centering Water: Practices of Commitment

By Boyce Upholt, Katie Hart Potapoff, Michael Anderson, Britt Gangeness, Angie Hong, Coosa Riverkeeper, Greg Seitz, and Andy Erickson. Water is part of our everyday lives. We depend on clean water for health and sanitation, for livelihoods and recreation, for habitats, histories, and futures. Since water is so important to humans (and nonhumans) in myriad ways, how do we demonstrate our reciprocal commitment to water?

The Mekong River winds through six countries, across 2,700 miles (about 4,350 kilometers) from the mountains to the sea. Image via Unsplash by Parker Hilton.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue 25 | Rivers & Borders

On a map, the defined line of a river makes a compelling case for becoming a border. The line crisply delineates one space from another, dividing lands and creating distinctions between peoples, cultures, economies, and more. Certainly, these bodies of water have been adopted as borders with some frequency. A recent study published in Water Policy determined that rivers currently make up 23 percent of international borders, not to mention creating borders at provincial, state, and local levels as well (Popelka and Smith 2020).

Historical Grace Chapel Church at the intersection of Big Bull Landing Road and Bucksport Road, entering Bucksport community. Image courtesy of Geoffrey Habron.
Feature (Peer Review)

Socio-Ecological System of Flooding in Bucksport, South Carolina

There is growing awareness that climate change has the potential to deepen inequalities, especially regarding the threat of riverine flooding. For example, the United States published its Fifth National Climate Assessment in 2023 and for the first time dedicated an entire chapter to Social Systems and Justice (Marino et al. 2023). But just as importantly, how we decide to respond to climate change also runs the risk of having disproportionate and differentiated impacts (Petersen & Ducros 2022). We must ask ourselves: Resilience and adaptation for whom?

The main Tamar crossing at Saltash, engraved from a painting by J. M. W. Turner around 1830.
Feature (Peer Review)

A Fluid Border: The River Tamar and Constructed Difference in Travel Writing of Cornwall

The Tamar is a relatively modest river. With a length of just 61 miles, and an average discharge at the upper tidal limit of just 807 cubic feet per second, it is dwarfed by other British rivers such as the Severn and the Thames. But despite its small scale, the Tamar has a heightened cultural significance: for more than a thousand years it has served as the border between the bulk of England to the east and Cornwall—a region with some distinct quasi-national characteristics—to the west. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel writers’ accounts of crossing this border have tended to construct the Tamar as a site of absolute transition from familiarity to otherness—a construction which has at times intersected with (and arguably informed) the emergence of modern identities of difference from within Cornwall.

The Quad Cities in 2013 taken from an airplane as it took off from Quad City International Airport. In the foreground is Milan, Illinois, Rock Island, Illinois is in the center and Davenport, Iowa is in the back. Image by Farragutful via Wikimedia. (CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)
Feature (Peer Review)

The Backbone of America: A New River with the Same Ol’ Bones

The Mississippi River, among many names, is known as “The Backbone of America,” and has played a major role in shaping the lives of the Indigenous people, European colonizers, and others throughout the rest of the nation and the world. The river flows approximately 2,340 miles beginning at its source at Lake Itasca in Clearwater County, Minnesota through the center of the continental United States to 100 miles downstream of New Orleans, Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Its tributaries (e.g., the Arkansas River, the Illinois River, the Missouri River, the Ohio River, and the Red River) reach from east and west across much of the United States of America. Prior to the emergence of trains in the late nineteenth century, the Mississippi River served as a major throughway to transport cargo and passengers destined for both domestic destinations and for larger ships where captains would continue their voyage out to ocean and into ports located in other parts of the world.

Sunset at Governor’s Landing overlooking Amistad Reservoir. Image by Seth Dodd/NPS.
Feature (Peer Review)

Not a Border, But a Path: Swimming Across the Rio Grande

On a cool November day, I floated in the middle of Amistad Reservoir, a lake formed by a dam on the Rio Grande. I was swimming from the United States to Mexico and back, a ten-mile round trip. From the middle, I could see two of the widely spaced buoys that mark the path of the river under the reservoir, one on either side of me; up on the dam, I could see two flags waving in the wind, one for each country. But in the water itself, there was no way to tell if I was in the United States or Mexico, no line to mark the boundary between the two nations. My body floated in both countries and in neither. There was no border; there were only the water and the sky.