I.
The Mississippi River is a wild and impressive body. The Mississippi is one of the world’s major river systems, in terms of size, habitat diversity, and biological productivity. However, this global ecological resource is largely only maintained at the river’s edges. Everywhere in between, land is transformed into vast territories of productive landscapes and small hubs of urban development.
The river’s catchment basin, approximately 40% of the continental United States (source: NPS), is the principal conveyance mechanism for commercial commodities, namely agricultural products. The agricultural and agribusiness industry that has developed in the basin produces 92% of the nation’s agricultural exports, 78% of the world’s exports in feed grains and soybeans, and most of the livestock and hogs produced nationally (source: NPS).
Farming is a mix of small and large producers, however, nearly all the commodities end up processed, and brought to a global market by the so called “ABCD+” multinational conglomerates: Archer-Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus.
ABCD+ actors also own the transport market. Farm commodities enter the river system at any number of privately owned ports sprinkled along the rivers edge, transported by tugboats and barges downstream until reaching the global supply chains at the Southern Mississippi Delta. The industry is a global juggernaut. For example, at “Lock 27” of St. Louis – the last “weigh station” between the Upper and Lower Mississippi River Basins – “farm products” make up two thirds of all commodities flowing south toward global markets. In 2019, approximately 16.7 billion USD of agricultural commodities flowed down stream through “Lock 27”.
The Upper Mississippi River Region: An introduction
The river itself is largely a public infrastructure, managed and engineered by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers primary task is to control the river in order to preserve a stable flow of commodities. The Army Corps uses many tools to control the wild river, to make river traffic more accessible and efficient. However, the river is a dynamic ecological system, in persistent struggle to be made stable, predictable and contained. These tools do not always function as intended, or are simply not up to the task to control increasingly volatile and extreme weather events that cause widespread flooding due to climate change. These engineering goals form the basis of a peculiar contradiction. The engineering interventions made to serve capital and/ or resist severe weather events have disrupted the natural ecology of the river. As a consequence, flood risks have been increased and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in recovery efforts.
The Upper Mississippi River region has had major flood events dating back to the great Flood of 1844- the largest flood ever recorded on the Missouri River and Upper Mississippi River. In terms of sheer size and the impact on surrounding areas, the Great Flood of 1993 holds the record as one of the most devastating floods in U.S. history. The flood caused $15 billion in damages and water levels reached 49.58 feed in St. Louis, the highest stage ever recorded. In recent years massive flood events have increased. The Midwest flood of 2019, for example, destroyed large areas (250,000 acres) of farmland, amounting to $20 billion in damages across 19 states. It was the longest flooding event on record, delaying shipments of agricultural commodities for months, and adding to the economic stress of crop losses caused by the flooding.
Possible Futures: Opportunities for Design Research
II.
Historically, the main method for mitigating flood events and controlling the Mississippi river has been to build levees along the river to protect land and cities from flooding, but also to prevent sediment build up and maintain a navigable shipping depth and width for commercial vessels. Levees increase river level and speed and in some cases are based on outdated calculations and projections that do not take into account volitale evaporation and rainfall projections due to climate change. Levees also create a false sense of security that incentivize development and agricultural activity on flood-prone areas. 85-90% of native wetlands, which naturally mitigate flood events, have been destroyed due to development encroachment. Levee maintenance is also an issue. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated it would cost $80 billion to update the system to national standards. These existing ubiquitous flood mechanisms have shown to have an adverse impact on the communities that do not have the resources to build higher or stronger levees: higher levees force water to move faster, and simply push more water to neighboring communities, which can cause deadly flash floods.
The River System is changing, and old tools are no longer working.
Evidence of an ongoing climate crisis is empirically documented everywhere. It is imperative to construct a more resilient relationship between human settlements and the environment. H.R. 3684 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) signals an increasing bi-partisan awareness for the need to invest in environmental systems at the regional scale. However, this so called “physical” infrastructure bill largely invests in the repair and upgrade of pre-existing systems, such as: roads, bridges and levees, and other hard infrastructures, multi-modal transit, water, energy and communication networks. Although repair and upgrade does begin to confront the climate crisis, the act does not imagine how these investments will initiate a paradigm shift.
The construction of a resilient relationship between human settlements and the environment can be assisted by federal initiatives like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but it is also critical for local and state agencies, private businesses and community organizations – actors who have an intimate impression of their cities and landscapes – must build a regional political coalition. A regional political coalition is able to initiate specific project based solutions that address both long neglected infrastructure and an ongoing climate crisis with new focus.
Regional planning is able to bring together a diverse mixture of populations across large geographic territories. Furthermore, a regional Project is multi-scalar, and as such, regional design and planning can engage systemic social and ecological challenges via large-scale networks and singular locations or types of locations. The Upper Mississippi Region is tied together via a river network that creates opportunities for large scale agricultural development, which in turn links a system of urban settlements tied to the river. Where and how could these networks be imagined to interact in a more collaborative and resilient nature?
Levees could be paired with other nature-based solutions (from “gray” to “green”). Agricultural production could be paired with native and more diverse productive landscapes (strengthening the ecology of the region). Urban development could be paired with adaptive and renewable ecological systems. All of which could mitigate flood events, respond to changes in the river system, and create a more resilient livelihood for the region and its political actors.
© PĀR
