“The river is a very literal sense of that.” People lack a connection to the Mississippi River basin “I don’t think that’s a bad thing, for us to have a lens beyond the ‘me,’ beyond what is happening to myself in this moment,” Anderson said. Michael Anderson, the owner of Broken Paddle Guiding Co., in Wabasha, Minnesota likes to think his company has been a small part of a change in how the river is perceived.Īnd he hopes that once people forge a relationship to it, they’ll be able to learn one of the biggest lessons the Mississippi River can teach: that it connects all of us, and what happens in one place has impact downstream. River advocates are finding their own ways to help people connect. Meanwhile, the environmental challenges the river faces continue to stack up. While the Great Lakes have benefited for years from a billion-dollar program to protect and restore their health, legislative efforts to set up a similar program for the Mississippi have stalled. Worse, they might not think too much about it at all. People may view it as a working river, not to be played with, or a source of problems, like flooding and pollution. It doesn’t adorn car bumpers or keychains like the image of the Great Lakes. (Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)īut it seems to carry less reverence than other iconic water bodies across the country. The basin drains 42 percent of the continental U.S. Approximately 70 million people live within the Mississippi River basin, representing approximately 27 percent of the nation's population. It also holds an important place in America’s cultural history, from the Indigenous communities that built their lives around it, to the development of the Mississippi Delta blues, to Mark Twain’s classic tale about Huckleberry Finn’s river journey.Īs writer Albert Tousley put it in his 1928 book, “Where Goes the River,” an accounting of a canoe trip from the Mississippi’s headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, “It’s all the best and worst of these United States … it is more American than any other thing.”īroken Paddle Kayak Tours guide Isabel McNally, right, helps a client during a paddling trip on a tributary of the Mississippi River Sept. One of the world’s great rivers, it hosts an abundance of wildlife habitat, provides drinking water for almost 20 million people and carries more than 500 million tons of freight per year, including 60 percent of all grain exports from the U.S.
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