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I think what we’ve learned with recent science is it is a dynamic river; a river that’s always changing; a river that rises and falls… All of those things are so integral to its health as a complete and functioning river.
Boyce Upholt, author of The Great River
In many ways, modern American engineering was born on the Mississippi. In the early days of westward expansion, the continent’s largest river basin presented both a vital resource for transportation, biodiversity and agricultural production and a complicated barrier.
The Army Corps of Engineers was founded in 1802, a year before the Louisiana Purchase. By the mid-1800s, Congress charged the Corps with improving transportation on the river to support the nation’s burgeoning steamboat industry and riverine settlements. Military-trained engineers were enlisted to control the river, using brute force technology, into a predictable path to prevent flooding of communities and stabilize water levels for travel.
In the new book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, award-winning investigative journalistBoyce Upholt questions the logic of believing it possible—or ideal—to control one of the world’s largest and most powerful rivers for centuries. Taking a holistic and geologic view of the landscape, Boyce describes how the Mississippi River has continually changed paths over millennia and why this is necessary to the health of the entire delta, especially in a changing climate.
The book offers insight into the power and the fragility of many of the ecosystems on which we rely. Listen in as Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Boyce Upholt discuss the intersections of the built and the natural environments, and the complexities of maintaining habitable places within essential yet hazardous geographies.
Relevant articles and resources:
Read more from Boyce:
“Is the ‘Age of the Delta’ Coming to an End?” (Knowable Magazine, 2023)
“The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi” (Hakai + WIRED, 2022)
“A Killing Season” (Winner of the 2019 James Beard Award for Investigative Journalism, The New Republic, 2018)
Learn more about the Mississippi Delta:
“Want to Understand the Future of U.S. Climate Resilience? Look to the Gulf Coast” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, December 2024)
“Sunk Costs, Sunken City: The Story of New Orleans with Richard Campanella” (Ten Across Conversations podcast, June 2023)
Guest Speaker
Boyce Upholt is an essayist and author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. His work has appeared in The Atlantic and National Geographic, among other publications, and he is the 2019 recipient of the James Beard Award for investigative journalism for this piece in The New Republic. Boyce is also the founder of Southlands, a newsletter field guide to Southern nature.
