Extractive processes have historically shaped the human-environment relations along the Mississippi. In this piece, Morgan Adamson calls for a radical new imagining for the river’s future.

The Mississippi as Amenity

Morgan Adamson chronicles the historical mechanisms that have seen the Mississippi shift from an industrial river to what she terms a “real estate river.” Far from offering a blank slate, she argues, without the intervention of radical imaginings regarding the river’s future—which acknowledge past violence and injustices—deindustrialization will merely serve to further the long history of extractive processes associated with the Mississippi’s riverfronts.