Book Review: Imagining a Radical New Relationship with the Mississippi River

Imagining a Radical New Marriage with the Mississippi River

By Meera Subramanian

NONFICTION

The Wonderful River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
by Boyce Upholt.
W.W. Norton, 2024 ($29.99)

Blast. Carve. Dredge. Smash. These kinds of strong verbs fill a one paragraph midstream in Boyce Upholt’s sweeping ecological heritage of the Mississippi River. It is fitting, specified that brute pressure has been the dominant paradigm since settler situations for contending with the river, whose watershed encompasses 40 % of the continental U.S. There was a time when people had a much more personal partnership with the river the Ojibwe folks named the Misi-­ziibi, which Upholt interprets as “the Excellent River,” and in this interesting and troubling e-book, he argues that we could opt for this route again.

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Upholt, a New Orleans–based journalist, deftly weaves the river’s tale with deep historic study, as perfectly as reporting from canoes and atop levees. 4 thousand many years in the past the continent’s indigenous inhabitants created huge earthworks along the river, mysterious testaments from terrific civilizations. But far too rapidly, the two on the continent and in Upholt’s telling, Indigenous peoples had been pressured offstage. Enter settlers and swindlers, pio­­­neers and politicians, all bent on unbending the river, ecosystems and human bodies deemed expendable along the way as engineers pressured their will on the landscape. “It’s an imagined canvas,” Upholt writes, “that we’ve stretched atop the geological body of the continent.”

Upholt’s narrative can loop like the river’s oxbows, folding back again on by itself in an at situations bewildering chronology, but these kinds of is the complexity of the Mississippi. The river that once was will under no circumstances be all over again, so altered is its shape and so transformed the world it classes via, a warmer location that swings far more often in between drought and flood. Upholt reckons with his have uncertainty about how to shift forward. Crack down all the limitations and allow the river operate absolutely free all over again together the sinewy paths depicted in cartographer Harold Fisk’s 1940s maps, a person of which graces the address of The Terrific River? Go after green infrastructure as relentlessly as it has been denied? Whom or what to prioritize? Farmers or cypress or shrimpers? Commerce or communities?

Even if we can rekindle our relationship with the river, what we may possibly not be capable to pick out is the path of the river alone. Water finds its way. Can we?