Editor's note: This story was originally featured on The World on September 3rd, 2019 and rebroadcast for a Thanksgiving special. Reporting for this story was made possible by a fellowship with the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.
Transforming the Mississippi River into a highly efficient shipping corridor has brought some steep costs to the environment and wildlife and cities and towns along the river. This past spring and summer, cities and farms near the river were besieged by record precipitation and flooding. Damage and lost income was costly, and sure to reach many billions of dollars. But it could’ve been far worse. The complex river system, one of humanity’s greatest civil engineering feats, largely held.
But the challenges confronting the Mississippi are only growing more intense with the added impacts of climate change — wetter weather in the Midwest, more intense hurricanes, and sea level rise — leaving many people along the river worried about how much more the river system can endure.
The World’s Jason Margolis recently traveled nearly 1,100 miles down large swaths of the Mississippi River from Dubuque, Iowa, to Buras, Louisiana (60 miles south of New Orleans). Along the way, he also passed through Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. Here are some images from his trip along with comments from river stewards he talked to along the way.
“If you look at what we’ve lost, and you see what’s left here, in the next 50 years, it will all be gone.”
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“This is water filled with all kinds of unspeakable things because it's coming out of sewers; it’s coming out of everywhere. It’s got everything in it — waste, everything — so, it’s not something you want to go frolicking through at all.”
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“My customers for my corn are all overseas. They're all overseas, every one of them. And we're in a highly competitive situation now with South America, Brazil, Argentina, China does a little exporting of corn and all these other countries are competing for the same customers that we're competing for. And if our transportation efficiency falls to where we're not the lowest-cost supplier, we don't get the business.”
“We think, holy crap. I mean that's truthfully what we see. It's scary. Because [of] the height of the river and the current.”
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““We want to live here, so how we do that? We’ve got to compromise. That’s it. If we don’t compromise, none of us will be here.”