What we Learned from the River
What happens when you leave the confines of the classroom, step away from the whiteboards, data projectors, and PowerPoints, and move into the richness of the world itself? In August 2015, a group 17 students, staff, and faculty from Augsburg College loaded four 24-foot voyageur canoes with their gear and started paddling down the Mississippi River as part of the first River Semester.
Observing the Water Landscape in German-speaking Countries
I have grown especially interested in water issues. I care about the Mississippi riverfront in Minneapolis, the effects of agriculture on water quality, and the connections people have to their drinking water, lakes, and rivers. So when I went to Germany to study, I took a good look at how the places I visited treated water as part of the landscape.
Community-Engagement and Loss
Agriculture and the River: The University’s Role in Societal Learning, Innovation, and Action
By Nicholas R. Jordan, Carissa Schively Slotterback, David Mulla, and Len Kne. Rivers are critical connectors across our communities, states, and national boundaries. They offer essential benefits in the form of drinking water, recreation, transport, food, and aesthetics. At the same time, human activities, from agriculture to urban land use, affect rivers profoundly…
The Lab on the River: The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota
When viewing the Minneapolis skyline, one generally doesn’t think of hydraulic research laboratories. Indeed, from the Stone Arch Bridge… the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory building looks rather nondescript. Yet, this facility, associated with the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, is an interdisciplinary research facility whose work is focused at the intersection of fluid dynamics and major societal challenges in energy, environment, and health…
Making an Icon out of the Los Angeles River
Rivers have long been the spines of our greatest cities. Regardless of your geography prowess, you have no doubt heard of them—Thames, Seine, Potomac, Tiber, Ganges, Nile. These names twist through our history and culture in ways that imitate their own billowing shapes. They feed our wells and our fields. They clean away our rubbish. They are the arteries of our civilization…
Forgotten Places and Radical Hope on Philadelphia’s Tidal Schuylkill River
By Bethany Wiggin. How do we see an urban, industrial river? How do we hear its stories? Who gets to tell them? I first got on the lower, tidal Schuylkill River on October fifth, 2015. With a boat captain, a first mate, and a photographer, I was helping push a floating lab for experiments in sustainability into position. Since that day, these questions about how to see and to listen for Philadelphia rivers’ stories have occupied me, a historian trained originally in European literature and in the print culture of the colonial Atlantic world…