UNC Ecology Seminar: Marty Reuss

The Lower Mississippi as a Technological System

Beginning in the eighteenth century, settlers along the Lower Mississippi River used various kinds of technologies to contain the river's flows and protect the riparian land. These efforts accelerated in the nineteenth century, once the federal government became involved. Local levee districts worked with the federal government to maintain the river's depth and heighten levees. However, the devastation caused by the 1927 flood discredited dependence on levees, and Congress charged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct an elaborate technological system which includes not only levees but tributary basin improvements, channel stabilization, and floodways. In tracking the development of this system, still unfinished, we see how the Corps turned the river into a gigantic plumbing system with both beneficial and adverse consequences.