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E-book Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta : A Call for Reclamation

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Penilaian

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My early memories are murky and, like sediment, can be reshaped and sometimes permanently obscured. Particularly my memories of mud—alluvial silt and clay delivered by water so omnipresent in a childhood of bayous and streams. I grew up in a town on the Red River, which gave my home parish (not county) the name Rapides. Before the Red River was irreparably tamed by the US Army Corps of Engineers’ $2 billion lock and dams project in the 1980s, it flowed with force.1 It was too dan-gerous for swimming. And sometimes, when the water level was low, you could see the remnant earthworks of “Bailey’s Dam,” constructed under Union Lt. Col. Joseph Bailey during the Red River Campaign. The dam lifted the water for Union gunships to pass downstream. My dad, who seemed to know everything, said the dam was built to slow the pursuit of Confederates. In that campaign, Alexandria’s downtown riverfront was burned to the ground. But Tecumseh Sherman, known for his scorched march to Atlanta, reportedly sent orders to spare the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (later renamed Louisiana State University [LSU]), where he had served as its first superintendent.2 He also spared several rural planta-tion homes as a sentimental gesture to the owners he had befriended during his post.According to Alexandria’s town history, a wealthy Pennsylvania landowner named Alexander Fulton laid out the city in 1805 after receiving a land grant from Spain two decades earlier. He named it after his daughter.3 A different Fulton two years later would pilot the first steamboat up the Hudson River in New York, cross-ing a metaphorical Rubicon that would eventually open the Mississippi River basin to commerce and much of its southern tributaries to plantation slavery and Indig-enous displacement. But I want to clarify that this is not a story about the Mississippi and Red Rivers—or at least not only about them. That story is famously retold with each new release of Mark Twain’s canon or travel article about New Orleans or even he scratchy recordings of Jellyroll Morton and Bessie Smith and the lamentations in Paul Robeson’s “Old Man River” about the unrequited nature of it all. John McPhee added his own imprint on the unintended consequences of controlling nature. The common narrative about the Mississippi River arguably comes from a bias of water. This project asks: What would happen if we start from a slightly different perspec-tive? Would destabilizing and disorienting the landscape as it is popularly conceived bring forth questions that are not being asked in the deluge of water?The book will certainly discuss water and land and how places and the people who live there are shaped by efforts to control nature. It will also explore how things may have been otherwise. The heart of this story is really mud. We will roll up our sleeves and get dirty, in a good way. This story proposes the framework “Muddy Thinking” to recast and denaturalize some of the effects that modern engineering and think-ing have imposed on rivers and lands that have brought humanity to the edge of planetary extinction. But it is not meant to outline a dystopian future that forecloses discussions about possible action and alternatives. The specter of extinction is not the end of the story but rather a part of its “ongoing,” as Donna Haraway would say. Extinction is an extended plateau of events. It is a long and slow process that “unravels great tissues of ways of going on in the world” for many animals and people.4 As we journey along our current spectrum of history, extinction challenges us to respond. And how we respond is the question of our time. The provocation of this work aligns with what Haraway identifies as an ethos (my word) of compost (her word). This work investigates the entangled histories of people, racial capitalism, and mud. In this book, organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, I pose a deceptively simple question: How could this muddy place, whose land and people are uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise and environmental injustice, be one of the nation’s most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? What cultural work makes this painful paradox feel not only possible, but inevitable? To answer this question, I bring together conversations in environmental studies and humanities to understand global warming as a technical and cultural phenomenon.Once described in a New York Times article as a “disaster laboratory,” Louisiana offers a compelling template for the contradictions of modernity and extractive capital-ism.5 The state’s eroding shores, pollution, and petro-capitalism are emblematic of the forces causing global climate change. A three-century project to drain and reshape the Mississippi River since the colonial founding of New Orleans has been driven by interests to enable waterborne commerce, “reclaim” riverine marshes for plantation agriculture, and supply petrochemical plants with abundant feedstock of oil and gas. The harm of these practices is measured in “football fields” of land loss as well as high morbidity rates for minority communities on the fence lines of petrochemical and industrial plants along the Mississippi River corridor.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

627.5 RAN m

Penerbit

USA : University of California Press., 2024

Deskripsi Fisik

270 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780520397217

Klasifikasi

627.5

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Reclamation

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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