https://reasonstobecheerful.world/fundamental-power-mississippi-river/
"Ten years ago, I climbed into a canoe and paddled onto the Mississippi River.
This was a magazine assignment, one of the first big adventures in my then-new
career as a freelance journalist. The story was simple; I was meant to profile
a river guide who took tourists out on the nation’s mightiest river. Part of my
curiosity was why anyone might do so. I assumed that the Mississippi was a dead
river, just one big canal for the towboats.
I was so shocked by how wrong I was — by the incredible beauty I found out
there — that I spent the next decade traveling the Mississippi.
At first, I was just chasing the pleasure of being able to pitch a tent on a
beautiful sandbar in a landscape that felt so separate from the modern world.
Eventually, though, all that wandering turned into reading and interviews, and
then my first book, a popular history of the Mississippi. I still think of
myself as a clueless guy who once upon a time launched a little vessel onto a
big river, but now I’m often asked to speak about the Mississippi — its past
and its future.
Over the past two centuries, the Mississippi has been heavily altered.
Thousands of miles of concrete line its banks, preventing erosion. Levees
prevent the water from reaching the river’s life-giving floodplain. Locks and
dams chop a flowing body into a series of stagnant lakes. The transformation of
this river helped create the modern United States of America: It pushed us
first toward what settlers called the “frontier,” and then into our status as
world-shaping economic supergiant. But it’s become clear that the engineers did
not fully understand what they were doing."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
