Issue Four : Fall 2016

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Elwha River at Goblin's Gate by Jeff Taylor

Perspectives on River Interventions

Over the past two decades, river management has added a new approach to the “toolbox” of efforts to undo some of the damage caused by earlier generations of river interventions. Humans have intervened in river flows for millennia, damming water courses and creating levees to shape river flows, all in the name of providing expanded benefits from managed river flows. But things have changed recently.

Aerial photo of north Minneapolis and the UHT area, 1947 (north is the top of the image). USGS Open Access.

Minneapolis’ Upper Harbor Terminal: A Geostory of Collaborative Creation

The images here show three configurations of Minneapolis’ Upper Harbor Terminal landscape across a century. Together, these images demonstrate the temporal layering of a physical and social landscape, highlighting changes over time; my analysis aims to illuminate how these changes emerge at the intersection of humans and nonhumans, and point us toward an alternative perception and ethic of co-creating the world.

St. Anthony Falls Lock, closed in June 2015.

Introduction to Issue Four

For as long as people have been living with rivers, we have been changing them. Put up a levee to keep water away from where we don’t want it. Build a canal to move water to where we do want it. Put up a dam to stop floods or generate water power. Over millennia, the possibilities have been endless.

Lithograph of Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1874, by Hoffman. Chas. Shober & Co., Proprietors of Chicago Lith. Co. via The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Learning with the flow: My journey as a student working in the “real world” of research and communication

A major piece of Twin Cities news in summer 2015 was the closure of the St. Anthony Falls Lock on the Upper Mississippi. This garnered a lot of attention, and raised many questions from the community. At the time, I was taking a full-time summer course load, and was more worried about drowning in my chemistry and philosophy homework than about local river news.