Column Type
Stewardship, then, is the dialogue we have with stakeholders about their lived experiences with the same things we are studying, developing shared language and concepts, and incorporating that knowledge into our future research and outreach activities. Over time, we all see ourselves as Water People.
Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru, understanding how humans lived in and modified their environment became commonplace. Indeed, the “New Archeology” that took the American academy by storm in the 1960s and strove to make the discipline more scientific made human-environment interactions and the understanding of human-environmental relations one of its central goals…
Almost 500 river miles below its source at Lake Itasca, the Mississippi River tumbles over its only waterfall in downtown Minneapolis. Dubbed the Falls of Saint Anthony by explorer Father Louis Hennepin, the falls were formed by glacial action more than 10,000 years ago. The magnificent waterfall was once over 200 feet high and located in downtown St. Paul. Over the years, the falls migrated upstream to their present location in downtown Minneapolis.
Under the leadership of the US Water Alliance, a multi-sector coalition of leaders from more than 940 industry, government, and community organizations has joined forces to develop and advance practical solutions to the toughest water challenges facing our nation. As part of the “One Water for America” initiative, this diverse group collaborated to create the recently published One Water for America Policy Framework…
In January 2018, residents of the Quad Cities (Moline and Rock Island, Illinois; Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa) attended an open house exploring possibilities for “new” riverfront land left vacant by the realignment of the I-74 bridge over the Mississippi. Bridge replacements happen all the time, of course, but this meeting signaled two things: first, the continued significance of this particular stretch of the Mississippi as a transportation crossroads, and second, the ongoing vitality of the regional riverfront redevelopment programs, begun out of industrial economic crises over three decades ago.
The Lakota phrase “Mní wičhóni,” or “Water is life,” has become a new national protest anthem. It was chanted by 5,000 marchers at the Native Nations March in Washington, D.C. on March 10, and during hundreds of protests across the United States in the last year. “Mní wičhóni” became the anthem of the almost year-long struggle to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River in North Dakota.
In the early 2000s, the idea of giving legal rights to nature was on the fringes of environmental legal theory and public consciousness. Today, New Zealand’s Whanganui River is a person under domestic law, and India’s Ganges River was recently granted human rights. In Ecuador, the Constitution enshrines nature’s “right to integral respect”.