Planning / Policy

The PulseMay 2, 2019

Disconnected From The River

By Iyana Esters

North Minneapolis resident Catherine Fleming explains her relation to the Mississippi River and her hopes for the Upper Harbor Terminal redevelopment project to reconnect communities of color to the river.

The Water Main

The PulseMay 2, 2019

The Connection Between Water, Justice, and Health

By Amanda Abrams

Radhika Fox, CEO of the US Water Alliance, talks about ways to build stronger communities and create sustainable, just water futures.

Shelterforce

Engagement Environmental Justice Planning / Policy Public Programs United States

In ReviewApril 24, 2019

Storying Pinhook: Representing the Community, the Floods, and the Struggle

When They Blew the Levee is a fierce love letter to the power of community, one encoded to Black sociality, the broader American social imaginary, and the mythical power of the Mississippi River. In praxis, it is a political tool—a lyrical baseball bat—for the residents of Pinhook, Missouri to wield in a rally against the sustained structural violence of a biased justice system and racialized world.

Environmental Justice Middle Mississippi River Planning / Policy Policy

The PulseMarch 7, 2019

2019 Will Be a Big Year for Water

By Tara Lohan

In the last few weeks of 2018, the Trump administration set the stage for a big battle over water in the new year. At stake is an important rule that defines which waters are protected under the Clean Water Act.

EcoWatch

Planning / Policy Policy United States

The PulseNovember 15, 2018

‘Environmentalist’ Doesn’t Just Mean White and Wealthy

By Linda Poon

A new study from the National Academy of Sciences finds that many members of minority groups think of themselves as environmentalists, only maybe not in the ways that “mainstream environmentalism” sees itself. Article from CityLab, the urban issues platform from The Atlantic Monthly.

CityLab

Engagement Environmental Justice Planning / Policy United States

The PulseNovember 15, 2018

Can L.A. build new parks and public spaces without gentrifying away low-income residents?

By Jon Christensen and Allesandro Rigolon

As plans move forward for revitalization of the Los Angeles River, questions arise about the potential for “green gentrification.” Waterfront redevelopments often do not serve everyone in the community; many eyes will be on LA to see if this problem can be solved.

Los Angeles Times

Design Engagement Environmental Justice Planning / Policy Policy United States

Teaching and PracticeNovember 12, 2018

Putting Suppliers on the Map

While there are many ways of approaching community-engaged research, the way that research projects are set up rarely provides the time and resources to create a research deliverable for community partners. This needs to change. Creating research products for academia and partners advances both science and the conservation work of communities.

Planning / Policy Public Programs

PerspectivesNovember 12, 2018

Rivers Flood Regularly During Hurricanes, But Get Less Attention Than Coastlines

Hurricane Florence, now a tropical depression, has dropped record-setting rainfall on parts of North Carolina. Many river gauges show waterways above flood stage. Flash and long-term flooding, as well as a risk of landslides, are expected to continue for days.

Geography Planning / Policy

ForumJuly 25, 2018

New Orleans Was Once Above Sea Level

Early one September morning in 1975, in a quiet Metairie subdivision west of Transcontinental Drive, a ranch house suddenly exploded in a fireball so powerful it damaged 20 neighboring buildings and broke windows a mile away. The house plus four adjacent homes were reduced to rubble, and 11 people were seriously injured.

Civil Engineering Design Engagement Lower Mississippi River Planning / Policy Policy

ForumJuly 25, 2018

Water, Conflict, and Peace

We live on a water planet. As the writer Arthur C. Clark noted, if we didn’t happen to be land-dwelling creatures, we would call our planet Ocean, rather than Earth. And for humans, fresh water is critical for life, health, our economies, and vibrant ecosystems. The vast majority of water on the planet—more than 97 percent—is salt water, in our oceans.

Environmental Justice International Development Planning / Policy Policy International

Issue Contents

Introduction

Introduction to Issue Thirteen

Simi Kang agreed to guest edit this issue of Open Rivers, moving our work toward questions of environmental equity and justice, and by extension coming to understand their opposites: environmental inequities, injustices, and racism.

By Laurie Moberg, Assistant Editor

Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Thirteen: Water & Environmental Justice

The work collected here was written about and on the sovereign land of many First Nations. The place it was assembled—the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—is a land-grant institution that operates on Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota), Dakota land, and alongside and over the Mississippi River whose watershed is the major artery of Turtle Island (called North America).

By Simi Kang

Feature

“Contraband” Practice: Doing Environmental Justice with Water

When I asked the following six artists, theorists, community advocates, organizers, and members to contribute to this issue, it was primarily to share a reading or practice related to water and environmental justice (EJ) in our Primary Sources column. In soliciting these citations, I also asked them to answer a series of questions (which you will find below)...

By Karen Bauer, Merle Geode, Simi Kang, Chika Kondo 近藤千嘉, David Naguib Pellow, 심제현 Jae Hyun Shim, and 신 선 영 辛善英 Sun Yung Shin

Feature (Peer Review)

Life Otherwise at the Sea’s Edge

As part of a longer project on sea edges and coloniality, this essay studies ways of being that exceed the human, nonhuman, and colonial divide, and that find historical nodes of power and affective density at the boundaries of the Americas oceanic...

By Macarena Gómez-Barris

Feature (Peer Review)

The Political Binds of Oil versus Tribes

In late 2018, while researching the connections between environmental justice and Indigenous womxn’s activism[1], I was invited to story about how water might respond to environmental injustice and racism. In preparation, I thought about how the lands and peoples to which I belong struggle against “slow violence” brought on by the toxic effects of uranium contamination and nuclear pollution...

By Yvonne P. Sherwood

Feature (Peer Review)

There’s Something in The Water

This essay is a collage of images and writing from an ongoing project "Reading the River: Yemayá and Oshun." I am approaching it as is an experimental documentary that looks at the relationship between Blackness and the Mississippi River as a collision of ideas, cultural practices, political geographies, and intimacies...

By Tia-Simone Gardner

Geographies

Resonant Rivers: Water, Indigenous Relationality, and Other Futures

Two sets of rivers in what is now known as Canada are vital actors in urban landscapes. The McIntyre and Kaministiquia Rivers in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in Winnipeg, Manitoba are sites of colonial violence and disappearance: in both cities, dead Indigenous people have been pulled from their depths.

By Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez

In Review

Storying Pinhook: Representing the Community, the Floods, and the Struggle

By Lisa Marie Brimmer

Perspectives

the river

something in the river haunted the island between the city and the border. she felt it, when she was on the waves in the little boat. she didn’t say anything, because what could be said, and to whom?

By adrienne maree brown

Perspectives

Extract: Locating Indigeneity in Immigrant Experiences

When the first major wave of Chinese people voyaged to the United States in the mid-19th Century, their collective journey was not yet a tale about belonging somewhere. It was about extracting resources—namely gold.

By Adriel Luis

Primary Sources

What Helps You Dream?

To create this list of “contraband” practices (forwarded by David Naguib Pellow in our feature of the same name), our contributors responded to the following question: If you were to gift someone one thing (reading/practice/site of engagement) to guide them to environmental justice or a different relationship with water, what would it be?

By Simi Kang

Teaching and Practice

“The Soul to See”: Toward a Hoodoo Ethnography

In his book, How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz (2011: 5) contends that “race is produced by space,” and that “it takes places for racism to take place.” While Lipsitz focuses primarily on the intersection of race and space in urban settings, racialized spatial practices in rural environments can be just as devastating to communities of color, if not more so.

By David Todd Lawrence

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