The Mississippi River has been called many names: Ol’ Man River, The Big Muddy, Old Blue, and so on. Each of our Big River’s names has something in common. Each of the Mississippi’s names relates to its vastness in size and power or the power of its history and scope. Our River is a big river.
And chaining giants is no easy task, as we found out this Spring when the floods came. We’ve wrapped her with levees and sheathed her with dikes but our River still found a way to do what she has been doing for millennia. This Spring the River spread some roots and the news is saying the River toyed with the idea of rerouting.
But the Mississippi River is constantly rerouting itself. Look for a moment at the above screenshot of a Google Map. The dotted lines are the tri-state borders of Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi. Those borders were laid out to be exactly where the River was, which makes sense. Except that you can see there are places where the dotted lines are very squiggly and the River does not match up. You can see where the River has moved in the (relatively) short amount of time those states have existed.
We, as humans, understand the River’s placement as permanent and build what we hope to be impermeable structures to protect ourselves from the Raging River. Our levees sometimes break and so we make them stronger and higher and will continue on this very human path until we run out of concrete or funding. Probably funding.
But there are alternatives. We could, instead, work with the natural systems that Ol’ Man River provides us. Realistically, there is not going to be a massive restructuring of the management systems we have in place: corn is growing on floodplains. Period. But we can rebuild some wetlands and we absolutely can protect wetlands that still exist through Farm Bill Conservation programs that already exist.
Wetlands can help protect the corn we are growing and other investments we’ve made by soaking the River up like a sponge during Great Floods. Strategic and intentional levees make sense, but building levees up like the double barrels of a shotgun on either side of the River has proven, if you’ll excuse the pun, explosive. This funneling approach makes the River higher and faster, as well as increases other problems such as sedimentation in the Lower River. As Larry Banks, former US Army Corps Hydraulics Engineer said, “We don’t control the river. The river is the control.”
For more information on how the self-rerouting River affects economies, read this article. To take action to protect wetlands, click here.