coe198_mississippi.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:22] Hey, welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast still coming to. From loud and echoey Berlin. Hey Simone, how are you?

Speaker2: [00:00:30] I'm pretty good. I just realized we didn't even do. We didn't do any podcasting from not so loud.

Speaker1: [00:00:38] Zurich Oh my god, it's so quiet there.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] It's like one of the it's a strange place in a way because of the silence and because of the formality. I'd like to say it runs like a Swiss clock, and it kind of does. It feels like that my

Speaker1: [00:00:51] Homeland, they talk about places where you could hear a pin drop and you could literally sleep in the streets there. I mean, even the cars are quiet. It's a very strange feeling. I felt like I was breathing too heavily. It was going, OK. Yeah, I got a quiet breathing down. They're going to hear me breathing the Swiss.

Speaker2: [00:01:07] I felt that we were really, yeah, I felt extraordinarily loud there. Even even using my softest quiet voice. I felt like I was hollering at the top of my lungs. Yeah, it's just funny, because isn't that where yodeling? Isn't that a yodeling culture? That's kind of a loud thing, but you do that in the mountains, I guess.

Speaker1: [00:01:23] Yeah, mountains are appropriate place to be loud. You can't city can't

Speaker2: [00:01:27] Yodel in the cities.

Speaker1: [00:01:28] No, on the mountains, you can make as much noise as you want. But in the cities, keep it quiet, folks. Keep it quiet right now.

Speaker2: [00:01:34] The funny thing is is that I noted a difference between Geneva and Zurich. Yeah, I think Geneva felt a little more lively. It was slightly louder, a slightly more colorful, literally like in the streets. You know, there's some advertising and there's some posters and there's signs of activity and life. But the weird thing about Zurich is that it kind of reminded me of the former East Germany of East Berlin in the lack of signage anywhere like like if there's a sign on a bakery, it's super, super understated and it's just kind of just barely there, for example. And there's like no posters. There's not a lot of colorful anything. We saw some political posters around, but even those were fairly circumspect. It's like very austere isn't exactly the word I'm looking for, but maybe that's close

Speaker1: [00:02:24] It definitely on

Speaker2: [00:02:25] An unadorned. One of the most unadorned, let's say, western developed countries places that I've been to.

Speaker1: [00:02:33] I feel like we're going to get in a lot of trouble with our Swiss audience. And we want to say, first of all, that we had a lovely time there. People were very sweet, but there is a certain kind of quiet Protestantism about the place. But you know what? It would make sense as from the country that gave us Calvinism.

Speaker2: [00:02:49] So I'm not I'm not making any digs. I'm just making an ethnographic observation. That's not it's not judgment. It's just an observation. Cool. I didn't say that like garish advertising is a good thing. I'm just saying that there doesn't really appear in Zurich,

Speaker1: [00:03:04] But I think he wanted to be seduced by a laundry detergent ad like he

Speaker2: [00:03:09] Wanted. I definitely wasn't, and that was kind of nice.

Speaker1: [00:03:11] I mean, it's somebody to sell you a Prada bag and why isn't anybody trying to sell me a product?

Speaker2: [00:03:16] They do have a lot of fancy stores there. It's true.

Speaker1: [00:03:19] It's not a commodity poor country.

Speaker2: [00:03:20] Oh no, they got a lot. They have. Yeah, they've I saw a lot of Prada and and Chanel and all of them anyhow.

Speaker1: [00:03:27] Let's get that's the main topic of today's introduction. Yesterday night, I'll set the stage. Yesterday night I saw some activity in our kitchen, which is also our living room and our dining room here in Berlin. Multi functional space, very efficient. I saw some activity that led me to believe that one of the co-hosts here was in the process of planning what I describe as a a a soup, a an attempt to for the next day to switch out a meal with soup. And that led to a discussion about whether soup can be a meal, whether it should be considered a meal, or whether it should be considered a prologue to a meal, whether, in other words, soup can function on it. So now we are in a country where people do eat soup for lunch sometimes. I had a sneaking suspicion this was an attempt to install a soup dinner, which does have

Speaker2: [00:04:21] Some time to time. That's why you're so terrified.

Speaker1: [00:04:22] I was worried.

Speaker2: [00:04:23] I thought it was going to be

Speaker1: [00:04:24] Dinner, and I know because we were doing many things vegetarian and vegan these days that I thought it would be a vegetarian soup, and I wasn't sure that that soup would be nourishing enough. And so I said,

Speaker2: [00:04:39] Oh, you claim you said the soup wasn't a meal, as you said, it was like saying the apple juice is a meal. I see. It's like saying apple juice at dinner.

Speaker1: [00:04:48] Maybe I was just swept up in the heat of it. Was it much of an analogy holds? Well, what did happen today, folks, is that we had that soup for lunch and it was delicious. It was very delicious, very filling. So I was wrong about that. But I still have this feeling.

Speaker2: [00:05:02] I put a whole bunch of potatoes in it so that it would be filling because I knew that would be. Your main complaint is that if it was a brothy kind of thing, and if it didn't have like a lot of starch in it, you're going to say that you were hungry a minute afterward.

Speaker1: [00:05:13] That's true.

Speaker2: [00:05:13] So I loaded it with starch.

Speaker1: [00:05:15] So maybe what I was really thinking was like a consume or like a light soup like that? Thank you for making a hearty soup.

Speaker2: [00:05:22] I mean, I, you know, I had soup for lunch a few days ago and we ordered soup for lunch at another place. It's you know what? It's all about the size of the bowl and it's all about the thickness of the soup. I agree that if it's like a real consume with hardly anything, anything that would be very light, be good for like sort of diet food, but really wouldn't keep you going for very long. Well, this soup was pretty hearty and it was really good because it was all veggies. And can I just talk about the frugality of soup? Do you know how I because I bought all the all those vegetables I bought fresh at the market? You know how much it costs for all the vegetables? Five Euro No. 150 what? I got all those vegetables for one 50. Ok. And then I added the potatoes. Let's say those were another 50 cents worth of potatoes. So that entire pot of soup, which fed three people and they're still leftovers, only cost two euro,

Speaker1: [00:06:15] Including a growing pre teenager in Brigida who didn't eat this and a sizeable linebackers sized male

Speaker2: [00:06:23] Who ate his whole

Speaker1: [00:06:24] Bowl of soup. I did eat my whole bowl of soup, but I felt pretty full.

Speaker2: [00:06:27] Well, we got bread too. I guess you had to count the bread.

Speaker1: [00:06:30] You do have to kind of cut the bread.

Speaker2: [00:06:31] I threw the bread in for good measure. I made sure that there was good bread and like little spreads and butter and stuff on the table because I knew if you had bread, you'd be happy. That's all it would take.

Speaker1: [00:06:41] It's pretty simple to figure me out. Yeah. All right. So we had that was the main thing we need to cover today was whether a soup can be a meal or not. And I think the coming out and I think what we come back to is size of the bowl plus type of soup thickness

Speaker2: [00:06:54] Of the soup. Yeah, I'm going to make. I think I'm going to start making more soup.

Speaker1: [00:06:58] No, no, I wouldn't take that from this company.

Speaker2: [00:06:59] I I remember this was a long time ago, but I OK. Just plug your ears for a second. I had a boyfriend once a long time ago, and he his mother, would he lived with his parents, whatever with the mother, I guess. Sounds like a great boyfriend and living with you? Well, I mean, I think I was like 17 typical soup.

Speaker1: [00:07:19] It was.

Speaker2: [00:07:20] It was young and it was teenage time. And so it was legit to live with your parents when you're still in high school, I think. And she, the mother, would always have this big, huge pot of soup on the stove like a big one because they had a lot of people coming through the house. It was like one of these houses where there's a lot of activity and visitors and stuff, and she just always had this huge pot of soup, and I think she just added to it or something was gigantic. But you come in there and it was always vegetarian. It was a huge pot, was full of all kinds of vegetables and beans and all kinds of stuff. And it was really yummy. And you could just go, you just walk into the kitchen and eat as much soup as you want. It was like a soup for all. I thought it was kind of brilliant. It's just, you know, you. And if you have like hungry boys like these hungry teenage boys who need to eat, it's always got a big pile of soup for them. I mean, it's not quite the same as like having a freezer full of hot pockets, which is maybe another way of viewing that dilemma of what do you do with, like a lot of hungry people rambling into your house? But I'd like to the vegetarian soup. I aspire to be that that person,

Speaker1: [00:08:27] The person who has a big bowl of soup going, that's the big pot. That sounds. If you got like the neighborhood soup pot going, yeah, it's like a nice thing, right? I agree with that. Maybe we'll get there someday. Yeah, OK. What we have going on today, though, on the podcast, is a conversation with two of the organizers of what is a really interesting, ambitious and I hope very successful project called Mississippi and Anthropocene River. And this has been put together by the House Dakotan velt or the House of Cultures of the World. Harkaway HK kW here in Berlin, in association with the Max Planck Institute for the History of the Sciences. So we talked to Christoph Rosell as well as Tom Turnball, and they have been involved with organizing a project that connects several different field sites in different parts of the Mississippi Basin that are doing research, as well as events, artistic activities, academic activities that have been going on through September. And I think it's all culminating in November. So it's like a two month long attempt to engage the Anthropocene through the many examples and multitudes of the Mississippi River pretty cool project, don't you think?

Speaker2: [00:09:45] Yeah. One of the things I learned in reading the materials is that the Mississippi, the Greater Mississippi River region, if you look at all the extensional rivers that it feeds and the land mass it covers, they said it was 40 percent of the continental United States. I believe that, yeah, it's kind of amazing. And and I've been listening, of course, to the I wish I brought this up in the pod, but it's OK. I've been listening to that, that 16 19 podcast from New York Times.

Speaker1: [00:10:16] You have been homeschooling.

Speaker2: [00:10:17] Yeah, I've been homeschooling with that and they talk. Quite a bit about the Mississippi Delta region, too. And the fecundity of the soil there, the richness, the fertility of the soil and how that, you know, this very elemental fact of the river silt that had been built up over time makes it super super rich soil and places to grow. Guess what,

Speaker1: [00:10:42] Cotton? I think you're in your soup ingredients that you found a way to connect this.

Speaker2: [00:10:48] That's, you know,

Speaker1: [00:10:49] So many like somebody looks up at a river and sees all the soup that could be made

Speaker2: [00:10:55] Out of that. Probably there probably is good soup.

Speaker1: [00:10:57] If you turn the Mississippi into soup, that would be like it would be like a soup pot for the nation.

Speaker2: [00:11:04] It would be, yeah, would be like a black bean soup, I think. Yeah, like a kind of a pureed I'd use my immersion blender. And that's that's how I imagine the Mississippi looking as like a little bit salty and sludgy.

Speaker1: [00:11:16] Well, up in the north, you know, in the kind of Swedish Scandinavian territory where it starts, you might have more of a kind of a carrot ginger there or something, maybe a parsnip turnip type of soup?

Speaker2: [00:11:25] Or is it is the water sort of clear there? So it's more like a consommé, like a like a chicken noodle soup.

Speaker1: [00:11:31] You get down to the Midwest with all the Irish and German settlers. It becomes more potato, the potato as it's more of a potato soup, probably like not very well flavor. Maybe like a little salt and pepper if you're lucky. But then by the time you get down to New Orleans, of course, you get your really good soups or Cajun soups, your combos, your crawfish crayfish, soups.

Speaker2: [00:11:50] Yeah, you know what else? We forgot to ask our guests. We forgot to ask them if they can say Mississippi.

Speaker1: [00:11:57] Yeah, I can't.

Speaker2: [00:11:58] You can't. Every American child can do that, can they?

Speaker1: [00:12:02] Can you? We're looking at our American child right now.

Speaker2: [00:12:05] Cypress.

[00:12:07] Oh, oh no. As as I assess

Speaker2: [00:12:11] Ip API, am ISIS, ISIS API. Yeah, she said. When you're a little kid, I thought everyone did that anyhow.

Speaker1: [00:12:18] It's OK. Those of us who live near the Mississippi who lived in that watershed for us, it wasn't so exotic. Yeah, it was just where we got our troops from and our other beverages, all your beverages, beer anyway. So we have a we have a nice conversation with with these gentlemen, and we hear a little bit also about one of the things that I was interested in, particularly in Tom's research, was he has found going back to the 1930s to the Roosevelt era and did not know that the Mississippi was also, you know, targeted to be a place that would have something like a Tennessee Valley authority around it too. There was plans afoot for kind of a massive organization of of energy and labor around the Mississippi to that never came to fruition because of the war. But certainly, I think it would be the background to a very interesting alternate reality.

Speaker2: [00:13:10] Yeah, it's super interesting. Yeah. And he found it through finding this weird, decommissioned book.

Speaker1: [00:13:15] I know folks

Speaker2: [00:13:16] Just carted

Speaker1: [00:13:17] Book libraries are filled with magic. You should go to your local library and dip your toes in that magic.

Speaker2: [00:13:23] Yeah, or a goodwill store. Maybe as the case might be.

Speaker1: [00:13:26] And while you're with us on the rest of the podcast. Yeah, totally sound good. Yeah. Take us out

Speaker2: [00:13:31] Here. All right. So we say Go Tom and go Christophe.

Speaker1: [00:13:53] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast we have with us two extraordinarily distinguished guests and specialists in all matters relating to large, slow moving rivers in the United States. I am speaking, of course, of Christopher Russell and Tom Turnbull.

Speaker3: [00:14:10] Welcome, folks. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Speaker1: [00:14:14] So do you want to tell us? Maybe we could each just take a brief moment to hear a little bit about yourselves and kind of what brought you to this project on the Mississippi and Anthropocene River?

Speaker3: [00:14:27] I off here. That's my voice. I have a background in cultural studies and media studies and history of science, so I ended up in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences here in Berlin many years ago, trying to finish my Ph.D. there. And then since I was working on the history of the climate sciences and paleo climatology in particular, I came across this notion of the Anthropocene pretty early on, like 2008 2009. Then there was this application or this announcement from the health secretary added that they are planning to produce a two year project on that Anthropocene. I applied there and ever since I'm part of the curatorial team there at the House of Trinidad Huckabee since 2012. So the first three months before the actual Anthropocene project started, OK?

Speaker1: [00:15:30] And so you've been responsible for developing the Anthropocene Curriculum Project two? That's been part of one of the things you've been curating, right?

Speaker3: [00:15:38] Together with my colleague and boss Kathleen Klinger. She is head of the Department of Literature and Humanities at the at the Huckerby, and she's an make curator for everything that is Anthropocene related. Now, it wasn't back then. Back then, in 2013 and 14, the entire house and all of the four departments were involved. But out of that project rule the Anthropocene curriculum, and I'm more responsible for leading the scientific parts of it that is more closed to conversation with academic partners about how the cutting is more involved from the artistic side of it.

Speaker1: [00:16:23] All right. So Tom, how did you get involved with this project?

Speaker3: [00:16:27] Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:16:28] So I am a geographer. By training, I finished a PhD in Geography a couple of years ago. And around that time I moved to Germany, and at some point I ended up happily at the Max Planck Institute to work on my own research about the history of energy conservation. And in the process of doing that, I got involved. Well, I wasn't employed by the Anthropocene Group, and out of that, I was asked by Christoph if I wanted to help him organize this byzantine but exciting project, the Mississippi. And foolishly I agreed. And now I'm here and enjoying it very much and enjoying it many

Speaker1: [00:17:05] Different aspects, and it's got a lot of different moving parts, it

Speaker2: [00:17:09] Looks like. So maybe we should talk a little bit about what what the project is, the shape of it, the direction of it, who's involved with it overall. So the project is called Mississippi and Anthropocene River, and it takes into account these kind of eco social spaces that are part of the greater watershed region of the Mississippi writ large. So do you want to tell us a bit about maybe the origins of how this project came into being, how it came to life, and then kind of the scope of what you hope to do with the project as it as it kind of goes through its different phases and formations

Speaker1: [00:17:48] Of work is it flows from the stream to

Speaker3: [00:17:51] Golf.

Speaker2: [00:17:52] I would, as it were, I was trying to avoid such metaphors, but it's all very well.

Speaker3: [00:17:58] It's it's a pretty baroque project. So I don't know really where to start. It's basically a confluence of two different developments. The first one would be what we've just talked about this Anthropocene curriculum stream. This is our long term project between the Harkaway and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in developing New Space's new constellation for core learning and co-producing knowledge. Really finding cultivating a new sense of research and education under the Aegis. So stay off off the Anthropocene. So the Post have been a rebirth. The other stream was that the federal the German Federal Foreign Office asked us pretty much to about two years ago whether we didn't want to apply for the upcoming project. That is the. Year of Germany in the United States, they run this program every other year or so with a different partner country. India was involved or they had a project with India, Brazil, I believe Mexico and this year two thousand nineteen and also a little bit of 2018. It is the United States, and they were asking us because of our very visible and successful programming around the Anthropocene. They asked us whether we didn't want to follow in an application that is on that topic on the Anthropocene. And so we came up with idea rather than focus on on the on the centers along the coasts. We would love to go into the heartland. And what better is there than than the Mississippi region? Because it it it has. It incorporates many skills at once in orders. It's a very local setting. It's an inter-regional setting and it has this these connections to the world. And that's that's why we we focused on this geographic space of the Mississippi watershed to then really engage with the many different historical social ecological facets of the region.

Speaker4: [00:20:12] Yeah. And media is a geographer. We're kind of used to considering things in terms of region. So that was one of the things that really attracted me to the project and the demarcation that the watershed itself. I think Christoph at my right and thinking it's a third of the North American continent. So it's it's it's a huge watershed and it's when we talk about the Mississippi winners. Yeah, yeah, we're not talking about just the river. We're talking about that entire kind of topographic basin where, as Dominique said, water flows down into the river and forms this conduit that's used for transporting goods for people transporting sediment. So it's it's it's a kind of frame of analysis that is common to some disciplines, but not so common to others, and particularly when we think of how politics is administered in the United States according to a federal scale or at a state scale. So it's this kind of super imposition of a kind of strange, huge basin like shape on on the US. And what does it mean to think in terms of that basin rather than to think in terms of normal political jurisdictions?

Speaker2: [00:21:23] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. To think of flows in place of borders and boundaries of states, for example. I mean, one of the ways that you structure structured is to have these field stations, too that are particular. So you've got the Anthropocene River Journey and the River School, the river campus, which is called the human delta, which I think is a really brilliant way of framing it as kind of, you know, bringing the watery truth into the the inhabitation spaces of humans and how they've impacted that region. But then you've got these field stations. How did you designate these particular field stations and what's going to happen at each of them

Speaker3: [00:21:59] Field stations as a kind of an allegorical term or metaphor? It's basically a team, and it is a team of local activists, academics, humanities scholars, as well as natural scientists and artists. Lots of actually put together focus on one particular region and tried to frame its many different aspects that are driving, you know, sort of the Anthropocene dynamics in the region. We have set up five of these teams after a zillion emails and Skype meetings more or less has checked out into these five teams, for instance, is Station Number One, which is based around the Headwaters region around the Twin Cities area that focuses on the industrialized futures of that of the region because they are now literally debating of determine meaning that all, not all of that some of the tone of that system of 29 lock and dams that are in place for the Upper Mississippi River to regulate its flow and to to serve for a nine foot deep water channel, that there is an active discussion now in the Twin Cities, but also beyond what would happen if we demolish these and we nationalize the flow of the river, which is as as a station, one explains. It's a kind of another experiment on its own, as much as as the original one has been an experiment with the water. And it touches so many different registers of problematic and conflicts.

Speaker3: [00:23:44] Also, because of course, this is all indigenous land. Mm-hmm. That's certainly one of the main critical issues, but. At the same time, it unleashes sort of a new wave of real estate planning you the riverfront, which was more or less in the backyard so far for industrial development and now becomes this high priced property. And these kinds of kind of discussions are ongoing in physician. One agent who is really more about agricultural land restoration because it focuses on the Midwest and you have those two contrasting landscapes. One is the roofless area. The area in Wisconsin. The Bill of of Minnesota and Illinois that has been untouched by last last glaciation. And therefore it's not really shaped for industrial agriculture because it is very hilly and rocky. And where biodynamic or organic farming has been growing over the last decades, it's going to be after California around Santa Cruz. It's the largest area in the United States where organic farming takes place. That's pretty interesting. She's from Santa Cruz and Arizona. Exactly what do they do? And the field station to contrast that area and they are land practices with the heavily industrialized mono crop cultures that are, you know, everywhere in Illinois, Iowa, et cetera, that are almost famous. But they do so from mostly indigenous viewpoint.

Speaker3: [00:25:36] So they were collaborating and working with a lot of different indigenous communities and discussing their ways and their approaches to land restoration. So it's less about sustainability as we know it, but more about regeneration that that's kind of the the main issue these days is three, four or five many more issues. Maybe you can say a little bit more about four and five. Number three, maybe it's it's also very interesting because it focuses on St. Louis and the Greater St. Louis area and the American bottom, which is a fairly unknown floodplain and the center of the path, but has a long history of racial violence on the one hand, but also industrial industrialization and industrialization issues. You know, St. Louis is famous for its crime rate homicide, and it's also another center of a lot of 20th century agricultural developments. The city of Soji, just across the river of St. Louis, was the hometown of Monsanto, the famous company, seed and fertilizer company, and it brings us a whole baggage of industrialized agriculture. Once you enter the archives, when you when you talk to people there and the sort of more or less this sort of this direct contact with what physician three terms the vernacular Anthropocene is what what interests them. And also understanding the dynamics of this area.

Speaker4: [00:27:25] Mm hmm. Yeah. For Field Station four, which is in Carbondale, Illinois, the title of the field station is Confluence Ecologies. And one thing that's of kind of interest there is there's a group of artists and academics from Chicago called Deep Town, Deep Time Chicago, and they are particularly interested in kind of mapping out these deep historical registers that come with Anthropocene thinking and thinking forward about how they affect the present day. And in and around Carbondale, there's a Carboniferous forest underground, basically. So like a coal deposits on the ground, but they want to conceptualize this as as an underground forest. So there'll be a kind of visit to the site of this Carboniferous forest, this subterranean Carboniferous forest and kind of walk around it with with local experts. The kind of other activities as part of this field station are pretty diverse will be learning about Asian carp, which are an invasive species in the river. And as part of that kind of experience, we'll also be having a kind of banquet where we eat an Asian carp. For those that eat fish. So this kind of experiential aspect to the field stations as well, it's not a kind of conventional academic format where you sit and look at some PowerPoints. It's it's I mean, there could be PowerPoints, but it's more a kind of field visit. Thing, it's more a kind of engaging with local communities, engaging with local activists or experts, and these kind of experiences where you do something unusual, like like tucking into this Asian carp with your fellow filling station guests. Am I missing?

Speaker2: [00:29:10] And then the final oh, the final field station. Yeah, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana.

Speaker4: [00:29:16] Yeah, I may struggle to say too much about this because I only

Speaker3: [00:29:19] Be there for one day. I have decided to it. It's it's it's a combination of two teams, one that is focused, one is focusing on Natchez and the colonial history of it and the sort of moment where genocide and ecocide meet the current ecocide. The other one is they or Dulaimi and Richardson, two guys, also from Chicago, originally, I believe, but also have connections who do a series of podcasts. Oh, OK. By all means on on the deep south and water right issues, environmental justice issues, etc. And they'll be

Speaker4: [00:30:08] In Memphis, and as part of that will be actually visiting a church and finding out about the kind of confluence of Christian worldview and an environmental and climate change sensibility. So this will be something very interesting. I think it's one of these kind of what are known as megachurches, I think. Yes. Yeah. Should be

Speaker3: [00:30:28] Going, Yeah,

Speaker1: [00:30:30] If I can jump in, I wanted to ask a little bit about how you're working with scale here in terms of the organization of the event. Obviously, there's a macro dimension to this. You have a whole watershed you're working across, which is kind of an unimaginable prospect to do research, but yet significant because watersheds are kind of alternative way of understanding sociopolitical relations. Say then you know, the the typical terrestrial models we might have for, for how we live and how we govern and how we use resources. So it makes a lot of sense. It's very attractive conceptually. But then I imagine at the same time, there must be a challenge between working with so many different groups that are obviously doing very locally engaged types of research. And kind of, like you said, with the carp or or with the visit to the forest, you know, finding ways to to to get people to connect to these particular very local landscapes. So there's a kind of, if you will, you know, a hyper local dimension, it sounds like, but then also this trans local dimension that you're working with. So I just wanted to ask you to maybe talk a little bit about that. And is there any mechanism for allowing people to the different groups to connect with one another or to find ways that people can have multiple experiences across these scales?

Speaker4: [00:31:43] Yes. So earlier this year or last year, we had Bruno Le Talk give a lecture that Huckabee has the co-chair David, and then he's introduced this notion of the critical zone, which is the idea that if you're to kind of engage sensibly with the Anthropocene, the planetary is not really the kind of scale that you want to begin at. And the critical zone is a concept he borrowed from Earth scientist. And it's this idea that on the surface of the Earth, you have the interaction of various forces, be there kind of chemical, hydrological, human, whatever else interacting in this one space. And so part of the concept of the entire project is that at any point on the Earth, you should should be able to identify evidence that we've entered a new geological epoch. And on the other hand, you should also be able to kind of find evidence as to why we entered that epoch. So the kind of causative factors within that given area. So part of what the project is intended to do is to help encourage these more local initiatives to think in a kind of planetary way, but in a way that doesn't dismiss their own vernacular kind of experience of these changes that we associate with the Anthropocene.

Speaker4: [00:32:58] So one of the kind of ways in which we try and mediate is relations between people is to have this online platform, which is has been a huge undertaking by the Karvy. And it's essentially a website, but it's a website in which everyone is involved in the project can upload material. There's a mapping element to it. Things can be geotagged, videos can be uploaded. It's designed as a kind of digital manifestation of the region, but in a way that's interactive in a way in which you can kind of dig into the research or have a kind of synoptic view from above and try and understand that whole watershed aspect, but perhaps relate that to the planetary relate that changes in the Gulf of Mexico or changes to the climate system. So it's this it's this kind of interplay, a tension that I think is important between these local experiences and the planetary consequences of of environmental change on the local scale.

Speaker3: [00:34:06] And I guess within our team, which has been growing, of course, over all the months when we were preparing that project here in Berlin, we also have developed a kind of a critical zone of our own in the sense that it is a it has been become a very extensive project where we were engaging with a lot of very different partners. So for instance, we have beyond all these field station teams that we just try to sum up. We are partnering up with of four different extant institutes who also have brought in projects of their own from from their own researchers, and we are also teaming up with Scott Knowles and Kim Fortun. They are running a sort of a program nested within our project that is called. Yeah, it's a field school program, but it is tied to their own effort to quotidien and quotidien and rosin. Thank you is tied to their own engagement with localizing Anthropocene issues on on a community scale, on or on environmental justice issues in different regional and local settings. So it is sort of a it's a it's it has a wide, it is a wide ambit of bringing in different actors who all are personally committed to to the issues. So it's not that it really has more the culture of the Bottom-Up project. It still just tries to stitch together the right people rather than having a grand concept and then having local people to to serve that, you know, to to realize that for us, that's not how these things could work, but it can only emerge from the local concerns and from the work that is already ongoing and then find a good way to bring that together, to bring that into conversation and to also meet all these people.

Speaker3: [00:36:21] Maybe back to the question, Dominic, the way that these five different field stations are connected with each other is one through what we have termed the Anthropocene River Journey that is a three month journey in canoe and in vans, in different sections. But that goes from one field station to the other. And and members of these field stations have become what we've called mobility funds, so they could actually also visit the events taking place at these different field stations. So there's a lot of interactions beyond the virtual space of of the website. Plus, we have some sort of a culmination of the whole project a seven day Anthropocene River campus happening in New Orleans and this November, where most of the people who have participated in this project. And this is again, this is, I think more than 80 individuals will be present and will once again interact with each other in holding seminars and doing futures in the human data must be returned it.

Speaker2: [00:37:34] And then one of the things that you note is the the when this is, you're not the first to point this out is the way that the Mississippi meanders, the way it sort of bleeds into the spaces that surround it, and that human activity has then again bled back into the river itself. So you say that, you know, the Mississippi has this mythology, of course, in literature in the United States, you know, going back since the beginning of the United States as a settler nation state. But you say that more recently, the Mississippi has become a symbol for human impact upon the environment. So I wonder if you can speak to how you see it as a symbol for human impact upon the environment?

Speaker4: [00:38:14] Yeah. So if I can quote one of our project partners, we have a geologist working for us. Call Catherine Russell from Leicester University and parts of the Lower River she describes as a large canal. So it's it's so the levees and river control structures are so evident that she really doesn't even conceive of it as as a river. And she's someone that works on the history of sedimentation in rivers and so is aware of how rivers can evolve and change paths. And and she's deeply aware of the fact that this river. So constrained, and it's such a kind of afro centric river in some ways that it is the prime candidate for a kind of Anthropocene river insofar as it the human impact on its on the path of its flow is evident. And it is an old thing that goes beyond kind of French colonial settlement. It's a long term process by which the river has been constrained, and it's a process that is particularly evident if you go to somewhere like New Orleans today.

Speaker3: [00:39:24] I mean, for us, you probably could interchange the Mississippi River with pretty much any other large river system on the globe today, whether it's whether it's the Mekong or the Nile. Not so much the Amazon yet, but we're getting at it. Yes.

Speaker1: [00:39:40] Yeah. Or the Danube or the Rhine or.

Speaker3: [00:39:43] Exactly, exactly. All the rivers that have been transformed in Europe 200 years earlier. And still, I think the dynamics of sort of this cross continental divide in North America as as its own particular history that that works as a it's a good model for the Anthropocene itself because it is worth the with the arrival of settler colonialism, that long term habitation has been more or less wiped out at the blink of a geological, I sort of say, and then started to to transform the land and the river itself from a highly unstable floodplain to a constrained river. And just and just, you know, 150 years or so. So that that has this dynamics itself is is quite interesting. I before for the project,

Speaker1: [00:40:50] I think it is, and I do think the Mississippi is is a good choice, not only because of its size and because of the depth of the history of human manipulation that's been involved with that that system, but also because I think we're reaching a point and I don't know how much this is part of the mathematics of the project, but because of other Anthropocene trajectories, notably the weather, rainfall, flooding, I think that it's raised new questions about its future as a kind of spine of industry and economy in this region and also at the bottom end at New Orleans. I mean, very, very real existential questions about how much longer that city can survive as as the the waters rise and as the rainfalls increase and as the storms become more severe. So it seems like a very apt moment to do this. And I wondered if either of you would be interested in speaking kind of to the timing of this event now. And maybe, you know what other kinds of conversations that allows you to to expand into when we're thinking about other Anthropocene phenomena?

Speaker3: [00:41:55] I don't feel really qualified, I guess, to to say anything about the future of this case. That's why I hope to learn even more when I'll be back in a few weeks from now for the Anthropocene River Campus. However, so far what what I have learned is that this huge industrial corridor of of the Mississippi River reaches its sort of end of which reaches a certain level or limit, as far as I can tell. And it is mostly visible, of course, in the delta. One example might be, of course, that these so-called old river control structure that keeps the Mississippi water away from spilling over into the Atchafalaya Basin is a critical infrastructure that at one point in the future will break, probably certainly, which will be the death call for New Orleans, because all of a sudden needed water will will flow into the city and a freshwater influx is stopped. And most importantly, also the whole stretch of refineries and the petrochemical industry that stretches from Baton Rouge down to New Orleans will be left without fresh water supply. So I think as with all the different dimensions of the Anthropocene and this of them, the multiple multiple crises that we are entering, the Mississippi River itself might even symbolize this critical moment pretty soon when when we hit sort of. The rock bottom of of the crisis.

Speaker1: [00:43:53] No, I think that's absolutely right, that's exactly what I was thinking of. And Tom, also one of the things that struck me in in the project synopsis that I looked at for your piece, very fascinating. I don't think most people know this. I didn't. It's been news to me. I've been studying rivers for a couple of years now. You were talking about the plan to develop something like the Tennessee Valley Authority that would have covered the Mississippi. And I suppose then there would have been some plan involved with that, with using the Mississippi to harvest energy and to of create a particular kind of hydraulic landscape. Do you want to talk a little bit about that history and sort of what stopped it from becoming reality and why the Mississippi didn't go the way of the Tennessee River Valley?

Speaker4: [00:44:37] Sure. Yeah, it's I'm like you both. I'm very interested in the history of energy. And it was a kind of lucky find on a book. So I found these beautiful plans for something called the Mississippi Valley Committee, and it was a publication dating from 1934. And I had this beautifully illustrated maps and beautiful kind of visualizations of the basin and the infrastructure that could have been developed in the basin. And essentially, it was a project that begun under Franklin Roosevelt's kind of New Deal era interventions in response to the Great Depression, which was had its own kind of Anthropocene elements insofar as you had the Dust Bowl for me, you had unprecedented flooding in the Mississippi in 1927. You had mass unemployment and all these kind of quite apocalyptic things occurring. And part of the the proposed solution was that America would undertake planning on a kind of scale that had never been done before and arguably hasn't been done since. And the Tennessee Valley Authority, this scheme to bring electricity to one of America's poorest regions had a guy that was considered its resident philosopher, and that's a guy called Benton MacKaye. And he was a forester who had worked with Gifford Pinchot, and he had been kind of on the fringes of the technocracy movement in the 30s and then in the early 30s. Like most other people, he was unemployed and he was hired as a planner as part of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But in his kind of philosophical work, he had developed this approach to river basins, and he thought watersheds could be the basis of a new form of democracy where instead of state boundaries, you divide the U.S.

Speaker4: [00:46:27] up according to watersheds and perhaps not even just the U.S. he envisioned a kind of planetary watershed scheme. So he was the kind of visionary behind this project. And Roosevelt also hired a guy called Maurice Llewellyn Cook, who was actually a kind of tailoring engineer, a specialist in scientific management and optimizing industrial processes and so on. But he was also particularly interested in conservation, and he undertook this survey essentially of the whole basin working out what the potential for hydropower was in the region, the potential of transportation, the potential for irrigation, how they could help stop erosion that had been caused primarily by deforestation and agricultural practices. So it was this really a visionary scheme for transforming the whole Mississippi watershed into the kind of heartland of a total conservation movement? That's what Cook called a total conservation, a form of conservation that didn't just take specific areas into account or specific species or whatever else. It was a kind of holistic scheme. And this was quite mind blowing to me that people were thinking in this completely holistic way in the early 1930s. And this kind of thinking, obviously at the moment is is particularly resonant given discussions in the U.S. and elsewhere about the need for a Green New Deal. But part of the reason this didn't really work is because actually the way in which U.S. politics works, as I know you both know, and Christof no doubt knows, is that decisions are taken according to state interests, right? So if you say, OK, we want to cut across state boundaries, we're going to have this watershed.

Speaker4: [00:48:14] Benton MacKaye called the watershed democracy. Then those kind of entrenched interests in Congress and not going to be so keen on this. And actually other parts of the federal government weren't so keen on it because the federal government was divided up according to agriculture or waterways. It wasn't. There wasn't this kind of holistic conception of how to administer the problems and the kind of geopolitical reasons that this this plan slowly fell by the wayside was because of the rise of fascism in Europe and this gearing up towards the world wars. And so the plan for. Revitalizing the U.S., according to this Mississippi, as this convoy of of conservationist principles came to an end, but I think hopefully in returning to these discussions and returning to this plan and kind of presenting it to a new audience, it can reinvigorate that kind of ambition, perhaps. And I think that there was a lot that was not good about these New Deal initiatives that were technocratic, that displaced people, particularly indigenous people. But there was a kind of ambition in the way that people thought, and there was a willingness to kind of engage with processes that went beyond corporate interests or market mechanisms that I think is something that is probably necessary at the moment and something that contemporary advocates of such things can kind of strengthen their arguments by calling on these older examples of of large scale planning initiatives.

Speaker2: [00:49:48] So do you have any speculative futures for how this might play out in a Green New Deal or how you might sort of retool or reimagine this formerly truncated plan to be revitalized into a future that is possible?

Speaker4: [00:50:03] Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is that Ocasio-Cortez is is occasionally mentioning things like the Tennessee Valley Authority in in speeches when she discusses the Green New Deal. But I think the the important thing would be that if if the Mississippi was to become the kind of, I don't know, you could think of it as like the highway of this more sustainable conservationist USA, then I think it needs to be done in a way which is more sensitive to the complexities of ecology and the complexities of hydrology. Because particularly the way in which the river was engineered in the 1930s did draw on ideas about conservation. But they were wrong, and part of what's happened is that we see large parts of Louisiana being lost because the river was over engineered. And so I think there needs to be a different approach to engineering that is a little looser and works with things like sedimentation rather than against sedimentation processes. And it's a kind of it would be a Green New Deal that was more ecologically aware than perhaps it was in the 30s.

Speaker3: [00:51:12] Another colleague of ours, a landscape architect, calls it nonstructural engine that actually works with the hydrological features of a certain region and also even the biological features of a certain region. For instance, when it's now being considered to plant mangroves in the southern Louisiana wetlands, mangroves that historically hasn't been there. But now with climate change and the shifting of climate zones into northern regions, we'll probably have a sort of a good chance of survival and could protect wetlands.

Speaker1: [00:51:54] I wanted to ask you kind of looking ahead. We're in the middle of this right now. It's some of the events have already started. Obviously said there would be a culminating event in a series of events in November. So it's it's again not only ambitious in spatial scale, but in temporal scale to relatively speaking and in terms of the scale of the network you brought to bear. What are your hopes for what will come out of this project in terms of a network of of involved parties that might continue on? Do you think that this is something you could imagine iterating in the future? Are there methods or relations that are developing now that might find further forms down the road?

Speaker3: [00:52:39] Now this pretty much gets to the heart of the Anthropocene curriculum project itself, because we understand ourselves as an initiative that tries to create the space where these kinds of experiments can happen in order to forge at least and new experiences. That research can be done differently than in our usual conference settings or usual academic settings. So the hope is that all of the many participants who have been part of part of that and brought in their own chair of their own expertise, created this wonderful array of really powerful experiences for everyone that they keep on. With that experience of having had the possibility to do that and to engage with maybe people who are not or rather unusual to to engage with, you know, getting out of their own comfort zone and then create moments of public engagement, public awareness. Types of conversations, art pieces, et cetera, that can have an afterlife. One particular example would be probably. John Kim is a media scholar from the Twin Cities. He will continue with this project. Setting up a barge eventually that will travel down the Mississippi River. And our hope is that that with this project and with this high visibility not only in the U.S. but also here in Europe, we have created a momentum and a sort of support for these kinds of projects to happen. However, the Mississippi project itself is really just one of many. None of these other projects, of course, match the scale of it in either the temple nor the spatial scale, nor the money that is involved here. But hopefully it can be a precedent for other initiatives for other partnerships across the globe. It depends just on the commitment of people, and they are constructive approaches to make the real.

Speaker1: [00:55:13] Well, I think that's a good note on which to leave it. I want to thank you both for taking the time to talk with us about this project. We wish you every success. We're sorry. We can't be there. In fact, it's kind of a sad thing that this is happening very close to our home in Houston, although I think we're just outside the Mississippi watershed. Nevertheless, this is something that we very much support because, as you know, Houston is a city that's built around a complex river system itself. And we're coming to understand that there's no way that Houston could have anything like a future unless it learns to to rethink itself in terms of not trying to pour concrete over a complex river system, but actually somehow learning to live with this river in a new set of ways. So I think it's a wonderful, wonderful project.

Speaker3: [00:55:59] Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker2: [00:56:00] Thank you. Native title will hold up.