Mississippi. An Anthropocene River

Sediment, Settlement, Sentiment: The Machinic River (Field Station 1) addresses the uppermost part of the Mississippi river as a sight of river engineering, experimentation, and speculation. It considers the stretch of land that extends from the Mississippi River’s headwaters at Lake Itasca, down to the unglaciated region that crosses southeastern Minnesota, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa known as the Driftless. This stretch of the Mississippi River marks both its “natural” and “anthropogenic” origin, where a small creek becomes a continental torrent, where the Dakota, Ojibwe, and many other native peoples centered their material and spiritual lives, and where the US Army Corps of Engineers has pursued its mandate to organize, manage, and direct the river’s flow for almost two centuries.

Anthropocene Drift (Field Station 2) centers on biome change, contrasting the monocrop landscapes of the Corn Belt with the Driftless Area stretching across southeastern Minnesota, southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Iowa. The Midwestern United States is dominated by cropland, a patchwork of monocrop fields laden with corn and soy destined for confined animal feedlots, fuel refineries, chemical manufacturers, and global export. Globally, such large-scale agriculture is deeply connected to climate change, contributing more than one fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. However, political ecologists argue that the impacts of industrial agriculture cannot be measured by emissions alone. From the near-total destruction of the prairie biome by the beginning of the 20th century to the flow of 21st century chemicals down the Mississippi River, agricultural land degradation reaches across territories, connecting past, present, and future.

Anthropocene Vernacular. Industry, Indigeneity, and Empire (Field Station 3) explores the long and conflicted histories of settlement and domestication in the St. Louis area and the American Bottom. The St. Louis region is an irreducible landscape that carries the memories, meanings, and anxieties of millennia of settlement overlain on a metropolitan area grappling with the persistent, interconnected legacies of industry, race, and empire. Here, the Mississippi River is a hydraulic cleave through a territory that is rife with contradiction: once the meeting point of the tribes of the Osage and the Illinois, the Cahokia and the Missouri; once a boundary between empires; once a line between the free and the enslaved; still a real and conceptual divide to collective imagination and action. Along this river, which troubles the totalizing binaries of corporations and individuals, environmental devastation and renewal, rural and urban geography, distant past and uncertain present, these latent histories and liminal boundaries rise to the surface and resist any form of clean analysis, any easy narrative closure.

Confluences Ecologies (Field Station 4) engages with intermingling of ecologic-economic-technological infrastructures in the “Confluence Area” between Southern Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky. As a central axis through both real and mythic America, the Mississippi designates a particularly heterogeneous space in which the natural, cultural, and historical intersect in a unique way. Located in “confluence territory” where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet (in Southern Illinois and Western Kentucky), Confluence Ecologies aims to bring a regionally focused lens to the globally entangled Anthropocene condition. The undertaking of this Field Station is one of intensive engagement with the juxtaposition of opioid addiction and our dependencies on coal and nuclear power, issues of native species loss and invasive replacements, animal labor, and ethical questions about future terraforming and historical geoengineering initiatives.

Commodity Exploitation (Field Station 5) explores identity and commerce in the in the Lower Mississippi River stretching from Memphis to Natchez. The Upper Delta region—stretching from Memphis, Tennessee, all the way to New Orleans, Louisiana—is shaped intensively by environmental forces, the dynamics of evolving multiracial identities in the American South, as well as by inherently global economic forces. All these factors spatially construct the Upper Delta. This is as true for the social meanings and identities it confers on human bodies as it is for the actual terrain and aquatic infrastructure that has formed the topographic body of the landscape itself.