Our rivers run fast, with the extreme weather and climate events we experience globally. With so many of our cities built on rivers, are we finally seeing the fallout from turning our creeks, and smaller waterways into drains, with limited ability to absorb groundwater before hitting our larger rivers?
In 2011, the Mississippi River reached record levels. Massive floodgates had to be opened to divert water away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the river rose to within feet of the tops of flood protection levees. Just one year later, droughts in the Midwest have dropped the river to a dangerously low level, threatening both the feasibility of freight transport and, due to rising salinity levels, the viability of New Orleans’s water supply. For the residents of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, however, the record flood of 2011 and low water of 2012 were barely perceptible events. After all, each city is largely divorced from the river, separated by the levee wall. The river has been engineered out of the daily lives of the people that live along it. Even more imperceptible is the massive environmental damage to the surrounding region that has resulted from human modifications to…
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Innate Ecology 