{"id":547,"date":"2011-05-04T18:46:55","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T17:46:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=547"},"modified":"2011-05-04T18:46:55","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T17:46:55","slug":"mississippi-god-dam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/05\/04\/mississippi-god-dam\/","title":{"rendered":"Mississippi God Dam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The US Army Corps of Engineers has been playing God again. \u00a0It decided to flood around 130000 acres of farmland rather than let an historic town, Cairo, Illinois, be inundated by the Mississippi. \u00a0It did this by busting a hole in one of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/weather\/floods\/2011-05-03-mississippi-river-cairo-illinois-levee-floods_n.htm\">Old Man River's<\/a> levees. \u00a0A bit of a no-brainer, perhaps, but not to all those farmers who are about to get silt with their compensation. \u00a0Mind you, the Corps is no stranger to controversy or the Mississippi (often both together), but it is usually to be found trying to prevent the river from going its own way. \u00a0 This is a long game.<\/p>\n<p>The best conference I ever attended, in Eugene, Oregon, had a keynote on this very topic: the Corps' heroic struggles to prevent the Mississippi from flowing into the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sjsu.edu\/faculty\/watkins\/oldriver.htm\">Atchafalaya<\/a> river. \u00a0This was a conference with the very best keynotes: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/contributors\/richard-c-lewontin\/\">Richard Lewontin<\/a> (whose input changed my already liberal view on human intelligence and inheritance \u2013 for the better, I should say); Donna [Cyborg] <a href=\"http:\/\/www.egs.edu\/faculty\/donna-haraway\/biography\/\">Haraway<\/a> whose frequent references to \"bitches\" caused a stir amongst her popular (right-on) fan base \u2013 nominally, she was talking about dogs, but ...; and then this bloke (a scruffy Brit whose name I cannot remember) from the University of Illinois who read us a parable about the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya.<\/p>\n<p>The scruffy bloke's message to the Corps of Engineers was to give up because the Mississippi would win in the end (more time and patience and infinitely more resource). \u00a0\u00a0His message to the rest of us in relation to sustainability was, like the River, just to go with the flow. \u00a0 It was stunning \u2013 a bit like the Mississippi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US Army Corps of Engineers has been playing God again. \u00a0It decided to flood around 130000 acres of farmland rather than let an historic town, Cairo, Illinois, be inundated by the Mississippi. \u00a0It did this by busting a hole...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}