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The image features the cover of the book "All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis." The book is labeled as a national bestseller, with a quote from The New York Times at the top. The background includes a landscape with a cloudy sky and a ground covered in orange and green moss. Surrounding the book are illustrated flowers, including a red poppy and yellow blooms, adding a natural and vibrant touch to the scene.

All We Can Save

By Marceleen Mosher. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, is an anthology for anyone looking to turn away from the brink of disaster and toward a life-affirming future for all of Earth’s inhabitants. The collection brings forward the feminist voices of people at the forefront of the climate movement, weaving together creativity and science through essays, poems, and art that face the existential threat of climate change head-on while illuminating a way out of our current mess with energy, humility, and a spirit of collective action.

Highway 61 at the mouth of the Onion River east of Tofte. Image courtesy of M. Baxley, Bear Witness Media.

Rivers of Lake Superior’s North Shore: Historical Methodology and Ojibwe Dialects

By Erik Martin Redix. The drive along the North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and the international border on Highway 61 is an iconic Minnesota experience. At just over three hours long, the trip offers unparalleled scenery in the upper Midwest. Visitors pass through a handful of small towns and over two dozen short scenic rivers along the shore of Lake Superior. These rivers are narrow and relatively short, descending anywhere from 20 to 40 miles down the rugged landscape of Minnesota’s North Shore into Lake Superior. For example, Brule Lake, the source of the Temperance River (and the South Brule River as well) sits 1,851 feet above sea level and, over 39 miles of North Shore terrain, it descends to 697 feet above sea level at its mouth. These steep descents result in dozens of waterfalls that beckon visitors from across Minnesota and North America.

The North Shore lies within the traditional historical territory of two modern tribal nations: the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Fort William First Nation.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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)

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.