Down the Mississippi #1
This morning, I woke up thinking of Boston’s sewage. Then I thought about forest-killing air pollution and the almost 9,000-square-mile “hypoxic” zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico that is so oxygen deprived that it cannot support life.
Fortunately, I am an inveterate optimist, so I didn’t find these thoughts particularly depressing. In fact, I found them potentially exciting and encouraging, especially the thought about Boston’s sewage.
In the 1880s, Boston built a state-of-the-art wastewater facility. It mostly consisted of some large holding tanks on Moon Island in Boston Harbor. Twice a day, the plant operators opened those tanks, and the untreated waste “disappeared” to sea on the outgoing tide. Amazing: just let nature take care of the city’s crap. It was brilliant and innovative for its time.
Times changed, and our knowledge of natural processes grew. Only a few decades ago, Boston Harbor was one of the most polluted bodies of water in the US, mostly because of bacterial contamination from untreated sewage flowing into it. Thanks to a court order, a few billion dollars, and a lot of engineering, Boston’s waste now gets “digested” and turned into fertilizer pellets, and the no-longer-contaminated liquid gets pumped far out to sea. As a result of the amazing resilience of nature, Boston Harbor again teems with life.
So what would prompt these weird thoughts on a Monday morning in August? Easy: my wife Rebecca and I are planning our winter adventure: A multi-month, 2,400-mile drive down the length of the Mississippi River along the “Great River Road,” from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
The drive from Vermont to the river’s headwaters in Minnesota will take us through Sudbury, Ontario, home to the 1,250-foot-tall Inco Super Smokestack. (It used to be the world’s tallest, but lost that dubious distinction in 1987.) The logic behind building a smokestack nearly a quarter-mile high was about the same as building a waste facility that released raw sewage on the outgoing tide. The dirty crap miraculously seemed to disappear. At the time, in fact, one of the more bizarre adages of modern history drove a lot of environmental engineering: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” By belching the smoke high into the sky, it dissipated and seemed to vanish before doing any damage. Then large swaths of forest in the eastern US started to die, and scientists discovered that rainfall had about the same level of acidity as Coca Cola. That trick of diluting the pollution didn’t work so well after all. Nature caught up with engineering and forced some more creative thinking. Today, we neutralize a lot of the contaminants in combustion gases through scrubbers and fluidized beds … but way too many of us still deny the habitat-destroying effects of carbon dioxide levels and other greenhouse gases. What a bunch of morons!
Once we get to the Mississippi, we will be following the greatest river in North America from source to mouth. We will also be witnessing one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the century: the “taming” of the river. Locks and levees have made the Mississippi navigable and its path predictable. In the days before the Civil War, when young Samuel Clemens worked as a cub pilot on riverboats alongside his mentor, River Pilot Mr. Horace Bixby, the river changed course regularly. The pilots had to learn to read the river because it seldom followed the same course on any two consecutive trips. As it changed course, the silt from most of a continent settled out and became soil again.
For all practical purposes, the Mississippi River Delta is not where the river empties into the Gulf. It is roughly between Memphis and Vicksburg, where the land flattens and the river’s silt spreads out for miles, creating some of the flattest, darkest land imaginable.
Today, the river’s course no longer shifts. The Army Corps of Engineers sees to that. The silt no longer settles along its banks. Floods generally wipe out towns only when levees fail. The silt and floodwaters … and fertilizers and agricultural wastes … now flow into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the northern Gulf has a dead zone the size of New Jersey that grows larger every year. The runoff contains silt and nutrients that cause algae to grow. The algae suck up all the oxygen. Life in that part of the Gulf disappears.
Theoretically, fixing the problem is easy: just keep the nutrients out of the water and allow the sediment to settle out over the land instead of the bottom of the Gulf, and nature will take care of the rest. But things that might be easy theoretically are darn-near impossible in the real world where human beings “have dominion” and rarely give a damn about the environmental consequences of their actions. I am a lot less hopeful about the ecosystems of south Louisiana and the northern Gulf than I am about Boston Harbor and the eastern forests. There’s way too many dollars at stake for people to be sane. The cost of taking the risk of allowing nature to be nature is just too high.
There you have it. Planning a driving route through Ontario triggered these thoughts. I can’t wait to discover what other fun connections this adventure conjures.
myinnersociologist 