The Great River by Boyce Upholt

Author:Boyce Upholt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

That report was one salvo amid the latest fight on the rivers. The Corps had grand plans to replace Lock and Dam No. 26, which spans the river at Alton, Illinois, just upstream of St. Louis. The concrete was disintegrating. Scour holes ran along the riverbottom. The dam had become a crumbling old wall, ready to blow.

The Corps wanted to build a supersized new lock. Cargo loads had kept on growing, and for a pilot in a modern townboat, the river’s original locks seemed tiny. The crews had to stop and break apart their barge trains, going back and forth to push everything through. At Alton, the Corps could take the first step toward an even better river system—a channel twelve feet deep that could accommodate even more cargo. By then, though, such ambitions faced a new obstacle: the environmental movement that was born in the age of Mark Twain and John Muir had, after a hundred years, reached its maturity.

The scale of the crisis had become impossible to ignore. Rivers were so soaked in oil that the water caught fire; birds were dying, poisoned by pesticides before they could emerge from their shells. The Mississippi’s tributaries were seen, not incorrectly, as cesspools. For years, cities had seen the flow of their rivers as a convenient method to carry off waste: slaughterhouse refuse, the gritty effluent of steel mills and ironworks, even human feces. By the mid-twentieth century, once industrial chemical wastes were added to this slew, the water had turned toxic. Five million dead fish floated to the Mississippi’s surface in Louisiana in 1963. As such horrors began to crowd newspaper headlines, Congress passed a wave of environmental laws.

Some of these laws—the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act—are iconic. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed on New Year’s Day in 1970, was a bit less glamorous, but it’s essential to the story of the river. NEPA requires that federal agencies complete comprehensive studies, examining the wider impacts of their projects. They have to hold public meetings to share what they find. The law, then, was one more assault on the Corps of Engineers’ hegemony—not from rival engineers now, but from historians and archaeologists and biologists, people with very different ideas about rivers. A wave of lawsuits halted many of the Corps of Engineers’ so-called “improvements,” including Lock and Dam No. 26 in Alton. In the wake of NEPA, amid this legal chaos, Congress failed to pass any major law authorizing new work on rivers and harbors for fifteen years.

What broke the impasse was a compromise. In 1986 the omnibus Water Resources Development Act authorized a laundry list of new navigation projects—but in a new wrinkle, it tasked the Corps of Engineers with environmental projects, too. The military engineers were entering the ecosystem business.

The Mississippi River earned its own full attachment. The Upper Mississippi River Management Act declared the river to be both “a nationally significant ecosystem and a nationally significant commercial navigation system.” Officially, this “system” was to be “administered and regulated in recognition of its several purposes.

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