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Check My Pulse: The Anthropocene in Reverse

BRIAN HOLMES DEEP TIME CHICAGO is an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at HKW in Berlin, Germany. The initiative’s goal is to explore one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of disrupting the earth system and inscribing present modes of existence into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, we hope to develop a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chica- go area inhabitants can grapple with the crucial questions of global ecological change.

DEEPTIMECHICAGO.ORG Check My Pulse: The Anthropocene River in Reverse

Brian Holmes Mama alligator, Lake Martin, Louisiana (photo BH) . An Anthropocene River was a continental-scale experiment in distributed perception. All the participants began at a particular place, somewhere with water in a territory. As artists and researchers, we tried to open up the expressivity of those places. You could travel to the differ- ent field stations, and there was also a river journey. Claire Pentecost and I would go to Lake Itasca and paddle the Headwaters, and then after our own field station was complete we would rejoin the river travelers at the conflu- ence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, get in the long voyageur canoes, and follow the currents to a town called New Madrid. Everyone who possibly could was going to meet again at the Human Delta event in New Orleans— or somewhere else downstream. Floating over all this was the idea, or the dream, that we could take one of the central concepts of Earth systems sci- ence, the hydrological cycle, and turn it into something subjective, intimate, and shareable within particular communities.

The thing that inspired me most were the swamps, and a scientific paper called “The -Pulse Concept in River- Systems.”

Here’s the idea: a river is not a linear continuum stretching from source to sea. Instead it’s a fluctuating “aquatic/terrestrial transition zone.” Its ecological significance lies not within its established , but in its capacity to overflow its banks according to a seasonal pulse determined by snowmelt, rainfall, and the intrinsic conditions of the floodplain itself. The authors speak of a “moving littoral” or mobile shoreline, offering the image of a dynamic process that does not disrupt, but rather, defines the river. This concept is beautiful to the mind and verifiable with the eye—but you’ll see that the moving littoral immediately runs into walls constructed by human beings. Moving our own bodies between the temporal variability of the flood and the vast, frozen system of engineered and that attempts to contain it, a group of us tried to touch the pulse of the Anthropocene River. At our field station, called Ecologies, we held an exhibition devoted to the theme. The hope was that traveling by canoe would provide, Check My Pulse 2

not only a vantage from which to observe these dynamic relations, but also a context in which to discuss them.

So what happened? As often, the experience was full of unexpected events, and at times overwhelming. As the entire program reached its close I real- ized there was something involved that I hadn’t understood. What’s more, this was the fundamental thing, the core idea of the Anthropocene. Nature itself is political, not by definition or essence, but because it is everywhere infused with the consequences of power relations between human beings. For sure, all of our field station groups discussed such power relations con- stantly, in conversations that ranged from Black and Indigenous histories to the legacy of synthetic nitrogen or nuclear weapons. The difficulty for me was connecting the conversations to the contours of the territory, which are both cultural and psychic. There are forms of unconscious resistance that are transpersonal, and that act to maintain the paralyzed structures of Anthropocene society. These resistances not only block one’s perception: they block us from really living. They leave us incapable of responding to the tragedy of global ecological destruction. This difficulty is something I want to share in retrospect. I kept thinking back to the refrain of a famous 1959 avant-garde film by Alain Resnais: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.”

Everything goes ahead in advance. In the light of recent street protests for Black lives throughout the world, and in the more intimate light of local realities presented by so many fierce and tender collaborators during the Human Delta program in New Orleans, it seems obvious that the story of the Anthropocene River should be told in reverse. The journey started up north, but the postscript has to begin at river’s end, with a social form of the not-so-distant past: the forced labor camps known as plantations. Their ominous or trivialized remains are preserved behind high levees that now protect, not sugarcane or cotton, but oil and chemical plants, in a place that everyone in America knows as Cancer Alley. The water itself flows differ- ently there. The pulse, not only of the flood, and not only of our own bod- ies, but of the entire planetary metabolism, has been influenced by power relations that took both social and ecological form just upriver from New Orleans. These are race relations. You can see them in yourself, you can see them in the land. The point is to work through them and change their unjust consequences. The history of racism can become a hermeneutic, or process of interpretation, whose application to the past can transform the pres- ent. It can help a collectivity to perceive how a specific struggle has been 3 Brian Holmes

inscribed in the landscape, in the flow of the river and in myriad present-day social and natural realities that are increasingly staring us all in the face.

Mud Work

So the idea is to begin the River Journey in reverse, from its sharpest per- spectives. Stand on top of the looming levees to see the oil refineries, synthetic nitrogen plants, and ethane crackers on the landward side, and the ports in the river. Go down to street level and wander through small towns like LaPlace, where the German Coast slave uprising began in 1811. Everywhere that hasn’t been leveled by industry will reveal to you the property structure of the forced labor camps, which fanned outward in narrow strips from the riverfront where the sugar was shipped to market. Agriculture for profit was impossible here without great earthworks to sep- arate the land from the water, and to protect the crops from the seasonal surge of the . The levees were the responsibility of riverfront land- owners, but they were initially built and maintained by enslaved people, brought mostly from Africa on European ships as commodities for sale. We should never forget that Indigenous people were also being enslaved, and dispossessed continuously. Historians now say that this double blow—sei- zure of land plus labor forced by violence—is what made possible the spin- ning industry in both Great Britain and the Northeastern United States, at the moment when industrialization first took hold. Yet there are so many other consequences. The gaze of our roving seminars, under the guidance of the local conveners, focused on the ways this social relation of violence shaped the landscape and society’s relations to nature. The word shaping is literal. The earth-moving tasks that the enslaved people performed were known as “mud work.”

In 1731 the French colonial governor Étienne Boucher de Périer explained that “the lands can be drained and freed from water only by those who have negroes, since the work on levees and drainage is difficult and hard.” The sentence, with its core concept of possession and its corollary of imposed suffering, is so repulsive that one hesitates even to continue thinking about what it means. Domination—exactly what a US president recently demanded of the country’s governors—consists of an exercise of force condensed into a threat of death. When pushed to its extreme, it takes the form of a hunt with a weapon, which is exactly what confronted Black people when they escaped. The reality of this threat, concretized by mounted slave patrols and dogs, is what drove the captives to the slow, painful labor of packing Building a . By J.O. Davidson, 1884 , , and soil into continuous hillocks, or digging ditches into watery forests, and then using them to float cleared cypress trees back to the riv- erfront. That’s how the long-term transformation of the flood pulse and the aquatic/terrestrial transition zone got underway. The threat of death is what built the plantation landscape, against the rebellion of the captured Africans.

In a text distributed by the seminar on “Un/Bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability,” historian John Dean Davis recounts the planters’ avidity for free labor after the Civil War, when the early levee system lay in ruins and cotton production had plummeted. Enslaved labor had been abol- ished, but the planters still expected their Black sharecroppers to rebuild the levees, just as they had been forced to in the past. These landowners, according to Davis, thought that the freedmen simply did not realize how much their own profit as sharecroppers derived from the collective labor of maintenance. “In reality,” Davis writes, “freedpeople were asserting politi- cal power and refusing to do the brutally difficult and dangerous work done previously under threat of the lash, or worse. Across the South freedpeople refused ‘mud work’ of this kind without commensurate wages, causing par- oxysms of rage among the planter class, who obstinately felt entitled to the 5 Brian Holmes

labor of black men and women to sustain the precarious landscape they had created and profited from.” Ultimately the sharecropping system collapsed, like the plantation system before it. What remained was the social function of entitlement, specifically land ownership. The demand for servile labor would be fulfilled in the mid-twentieth century by fossil fuels and mecha- nized equipment.

Davis’s insight is that Black refusal of forced labor created a void that was ultimately occupied by the state, in the form of the and Project of the 1930s. Yet the project was completed without any rethink of the initial land-use pattern. “The original conception of the Mississippi Delta as a carceral landscape, held together by coerced labor, curtailed any ability to imagine a radically different technical environment,” writes Davis. It’s as though itself had become a form of Jim Crow: the tacit maintenance in fact of a set of violent relations that have supposedly been abolished by law. To understand how the carceral land- scape was modernized, I want to take you to the spot where large-scale federal engineering began on the Mississippi. This place was on the River Journey’s initial program, but another direction proved more relevant.

Shreve’s

Cypress-choked swamps and seasonally flooded marshes are all that remain of Upper Old River, through which the Mississippi used to flow. You can enter the area by car, no one will stop you. The scene is beautiful, deserted, invigorating, ominous.

Here in early colonial times a great oxbow bend of the Mississippi swung west, intersecting with the Red River at the northwestern edge of its arc, then releasing a more turbid and sluggish , the Atchafalaya, to the south, before finally turning back toward its point of origin. Indigenous navigators showed European settlers how to shorten their voyage by haul- ing their canoes over the narrow neck of land that the French dubbed “Le Portage de la Croix.” But after the Louisiana Purchase made the territory part of the US in 1803, the river would carry a lot more than just canoes. By 1830, the heavy keelboats traveling to New Orleans had been largely replaced by steamers. Meanwhile, the agricultural boom set off by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had supplanted the sugar economy. Enslaved people were forced to build levees and drain agricultural land in the Atchafalaya Basin, as planters started cotton production far from any Check My Pulse 6

reliable transportation. Meanwhile, further up the Red, unsettled territories could still be expropriated. But the Mississippi in those days was choked with sandbars and logjams. An emergent frontier economy demanded some unknown power—a quasi-geological force—that could clear the for commerce.

Henry Miller Shreve was a keelboat captain who piloted an early wood- fired steamboat from the Ohio River to New Orleans in 1815. He went on to build new, more river-worthy craft with high-pressure boilers, making him “the father of the Mississippi steamboat.” After obtaining the title of “Superintendent of Western River Improvement” from the War Department in 1827, he designed a double-hulled, double-boilered boat called the Heliopolis. Outfitted with steam-powered windlasses and a battering ram, this snagboat could dislodge or crack a sunken tree trunk, then hoist it onto braces between the two hulls where it would be sawn into harmless pieces, to be burnt as fuel or cast ashore. With government backing Shreve began clearing the Mississippi between New Orleans and the Ohio. In January of 1831, he took a decision with unforeseeable consequences: he would cut the neck of the oxbow bend at the Portage de la Croix.

Using black-powder charges to break up the ground, Shreve directed a gang of pickaxe-wielding laborers, likely dispatched from the slave quar- ters of the nearby Angola plantation, to dig across the narrow neck of land. An iron scraper was attached to the snagboat’s windlasses to drag the excavated soil to the water’s edge, dispersing it into the . Thus a new channel just a few feet deep was etched into the earth, ready for the ero- sive force of the water. If successful, the shallow channel would become the river’s deep bed. The cut would then be the equivalent of the portage, but for steamboats. It would shorten travel time, and, Shreve reasoned, it would pull the water of the Red toward a deeper and more swiftly flow- ing Mississippi. This would clear the that continually formed around the Red’s mouth, impeding commerce. An open interchange between the Mississippi, the Red and the Atchafalaya would then take form, allowing steamboat traffic in all directions, plus further settlement of valuable cot- ton-growing land to the northwest, up the Red. The captain of the Heliopolis was attempting an integrated solution, based on the convergent calcula- tion of multiple dynamic factors. Yet there was only one way to find out if his reasoning was correct. That was the act itself, the decisive cut. 7 Brian Holmes

A week after the work was complete, the Mississippi had shifted its course. A new and shorter route had opened. What’s more, the sandy shoals at the mouth of the Red River began to disperse, as predicted. Yet as the water level sank in the abandoned channel later known as Old River, the behav- ior of the Red began to change. When the Mississippi ran low, most of the Red’s flow would wrap around the bend of Old River to join the main- stem. But when the Mississippi ran high, the Red would seek a lower out- let in the Atchafalaya. What’s more, the that formerly gathered in shoals around the mouth of the Red had merely shifted, settling in the lower reaches of Old River. This new sedimentation blocked the free interchange between the three, to the point where was soon required. It also encouraged the Red’s flow into the Atchafalaya. At the end of a long chain of unforeseen consequences, what appeared on the horizon a few decades later was a possible jump, an of the Mississippi. In the midst of some great storm the river would rage over its banks, tear through the low-lying marshes, and transform the narrow and sluggish Atchafalaya into its new pathway to the sea.

Shreve’s cut set the pattern for federal control of the river. But it also has- tened the natural trend toward avulsion. Today, the former portage site is dominated by the immense system of cement-and-steel engineering works known collectively as the Old River Control Structures, whose function is to hold back time and preserve the present course of the Mississippi, while diverting thirty percent of its flow (and supposedly, of its sediment as well) to the Atchafalaya. Since their construction began in the early 1960s, these structures have been a ticking time bomb. When they are finally swept away by some unprecedented flood—as they almost were in 1973—the resulting catastrophic damage to the Atchafalaya Basin and the loss of the deep- water ports along Cancer Alley, plus the ensuing saltwater , will constitute a disaster foretold in detail since the 1980s. It is difficult to move through the uncanny silence of Old River without feeling, by anticipation, the shuddering vibration that will likely precede the breakup of one or more of the control structures.

Just south of Old River is the Angola Ferry Landing, now abandoned. It con- nected the river’s sparsely populated western to the former Angola Plantation, now the Louisiana State Penitentiary or “Angola Prison,” the largest maximum-security facility in the United States. This was the site that the canoe travelers chose to visit, in order to better understand themselves Source: Army Corps of Engineers 9 Brian Holmes

and American history. A series of plantations had been established here from 1826 onward, through separate land purchases by Francis Routh, apparently acting as a secret intermediary for the powerful interstate slave trader Isaac Franklin, who took full ownership in 1838. Franklin died in 1846, and in 1880 the land was sold by his widow to a former Confederate officer, Major Samuel Lawrence James. Since 1870 James had adminis- tered the privatized convict-leasing system that replaced the Louisiana state prison in Baton Rouge. Under that system the prisoners, most of them Black, were used alongside recent Irish immigrants to fill the absence of enslaved labor, notably for “mud work” on railroad embankments and levees. Founded in 1879, the Mississippi River Commission used convict labor extensively, for instance on the ten-thousand-foot Morganza levee constructed in the mid-1880s. James himself ran the Angola Plantation with hundreds of convict laborers, while continuing to make a fortune off the leasing business.

As historian Matthew J. Mancini writes about this abominable program: “All of the major themes of the period in Southern history were clustered together in that institution: fears of a labor shortage, racism, the dearth of capital, hair-trigger violence, the courageous efforts of humane reformers, and, through it all, the struggle to modernize.” Convict leasing was out- lawed in Louisiana in 1901, and the new State Penitentiary was founded on the premises of the former Angola Plantation that same year. The peniten- tiary subsequently operated (and according to many, still operates) as a forced labor camp where prisoners worked on the levees or in the surround- ing fields. More broadly, convict leasing prevailed throughout the South for thirty years as part of a twisted transition to sharecropping. By the turn of the century, however, the sharecropping system was fully established and agricultural modernization could begin. Sharecropping brought a deeper and more integral transformation to the landscape.

Delta Blues

In the canoes, we experienced the beginning of the Wild Miles: long stretches of the Mississippi south of St. Louis, where at times there is prac- tically no sign of human civilization on the tangled batture lands between the main channel and the levees. I will never forget camping on sandy islands draped in sparse forests combed into linear strands by recent floods. Nor will any of us ever forget the constant of heavily motor- ized tugs on the river itself, belching black diesel exhaust and pushing Check My Pulse 10

laden with grain, coal, drilling equipment and disassembled pieces of giant wind turbines. At one point, three armored military helicopters cut low over the camp. Wild miles indeed.

When we arrived in Memphis we visited a museum located on the site of the former Cotton Exchange. It promotes a self-serving myth mixing curios- ity cabinets of the blues with an open glorification of all the money that has been made off the cotton plant’s white blossom. The National Civil Rights Museum, built around the motel balcony where Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, is the opposite reality. After beginning with Africa and confronting 400 long years of US history, you end up in King’s room, contemplating that terrible moment. Then you exit the museum proper, to visit an annex across the street. There you’re invited into another hotel room: the one where the white gunman drew a bead on the civil rights leader.

The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta is an agricultural region between two riv- ers, built on the deep alluvial soils of the Mississippi Embayment, which is believed to have formed as a vast salt-water over sixty million years ago in the Late Cretaceous. The uniquely fertile soils of this region attain their widest extent south of Memphis, somewhere around Greenville. Before colonization this was an impassable swamp, filled with cypress trees, twisting waterways and shallow, lingering pools: a classic aquatic/terres- trial transition zone whose precolonial configuration can be imagined by comparing it to the Paraná River Delta in Argentina, which despite massive interventions retains an emerald world of , braided channels, and wooded isles, visible from the air as a distinctive bioregion. The Delta today, by contrast, is dusty, dry, and laser-flat, covered almost entirely in cotton fields and dotted, in the fall, with large cylindrical bales the size of a truck trailer, wrapped in bright pink or yellow plastic. If you look, somewhere you’ll always spot a distant line of scraggly trees snaking through the land- scape, hiding a stream. Here and there, groups of cypresses rise from pools contained behind low berms. The emerald world has literally gone under- ground, channeled into a maze of ponds, , ditches, and pipes. It’s an Anthropocene transition zone—not just because of its specific composition, but because of the forces that have driven its creation and maintenance.

There is not much human labor to be seen in the Delta these days. Most Blacks left for the North; others gathered in the towns and cities. Machines now do most of the work. But in the early twentieth century, during the heyday of the blues, it was a different story. This was a tightly packed 11 Brian Holmes

landscape of small plots, company towns, shotgun shacks, juke joints, cot- ton gins, and prosperous riverports, divided strictly by race and unified by the overarching project of a New South built on highly capitalized but only partially industrialized agriculture. Sharecropping gave tenants a direct benefit from their own labor on self-managed parcels ceded temporarily by the owner in exchange for a share of the harvest; for that reason it was more attractive to freedpeople who did not want to work in gangs under direct orders. But the system tied them to debt-dependency at the company store as well as supervision and exploitation by the landowner. As in the antebellum South, all this depended on Northern and foreign markets, both for sale of the crop, and for capital to finance further swamp clearance and infrastructure. What’s described in shorthand as a landscape was a whole way of life—or, as the historian E.P. Thompson once put it, “a whole way of conflict.”

If you can imagine that this dry and dusty flatland was once a living wet- land, it’s pretty shocking to see it today. If you imagine what the whole way of conflict was like in the first half of the twentieth century, then you start to understand America. There is also an ecology of the Delta blues. In a brilliant book entitled Rising Tide, historian John M. Barry begins by describing the engineering program of the Mississippi River Commission. After a period of intensive research, the federal approach had crystallized around the “levees-only” approach to promoted by Andrew Humphries and Henry Abbot of the US Army Corps of Engineers. This doc- trine refused the idea that artificial outlets could ease flooding, and indeed, it suggested that natural outlets should be closed. It also rejected oxbow cutoffs. However, as Barry shows, the levees-only doctrine took perverse inspiration from the work of St. Louis native James Eads, a self-taught engi- neer and a fervent admirer of Henry Shreve. Using sunken made of woven willow mats, Eads was able to concentrate the flow of the Mississippi at its mouth, dispersing the sandbar that blocked the entry of ocean-going ships at South Pass. His success became an implicit justification for the idea that levees alone would create a “self-scouring river,” deepening the chan- nel with the abrasive power of its own current and increasing its capacity to carry floodwaters to the sea. But there was a flaw: the levees, often set back at great distances from the channel, could never produce the concentrating effect of jetties sunken directly alongside the central current. What they did instead was to raise floodwaters to catastrophic heights, by totally eliminat- ing the aquatic/terrestrial transition zone. Barry makes it clear that the engineering of the Mississippi River Commission did not only serve to preserve the market city of New Orleans, where many downtown streets are six feet below sea level. It also served to open up a new agricultural space for the South’s most profitable export crop. The col- onization of the Delta, still almost wild at the end of the Civil War, began in earnest with the extension of the Illinois Central Railroad into the region in the late 1870s. Other railroads followed, encouraging further swamp clearance and the perspective of a vast increase in cotton production. Yet despite the privately and publicly financed improvements, still less than a third of Delta had been cleared by 1900. It remained a frontier, a “precari- ous landscape” in John Dean Davis’s phrase, providing no guarantees to its inhabitants.

Rising Tide chronicles the prodigious expansion of the Delta economy in the 1910s and ’20s, as Black labor poured in from across the South, and capital from across the world. The book culminates with the story of the 1927 flood fight in Greenville, Mississippi, where the liberal veneer of the New South shattered and Blacks were forced at gunpoint to carry out futile repairs on rapidly liquefying levees. Barry links these dramatic scenes to the Great Migration of African Americans to northern industrial cities. Exodus to places like Chicago and Detroit would finish what the water had begun, and over the course of the next two decades the social form of sharecropping would disappear along with the capital investment schemes of the New South. But the traumatic character of the Great Flood of 1927—which left roughly a thousand people dead and a million more displaced, with major impacts on the national economy due to damages, disruption of transportation, failed harvests, and so on—opened the door to systematic large-scale interven- tions into the landscape by the Depression-era government, including the Shelterbelt tree-planting campaign that attempted to build a leafy green wall around the Dustbowl, the electrification of the Columbia River Basin, the launch of the Tennessee Authority, and, well ahead of all the oth- ers, the Army Corps’ Mississippi River & Tributaries Project. The effect of the MR&T, in addition to protecting New Orleans, was to provide reliably dry for rapidly mechanizing agriculture. Today, what’s easiest to rec- ognize in the Mississippi Valley is not social form, but eco-technics.

Known at its beginnings as the Jadwin Plan, in reference to the general who was then at the head of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the MR&T sought to provide an integrated solution to both flooding and navigational issues, 13 Brian Holmes

somewhat like Shreve when he prepared his oxbow cut. But this time the project was on the scale of the Mississippi Basin, and it included levees, bank , strategically placed floodgates, pumps, upstream dams on far-flung tributaries, the Bonnet Carré just above New Orleans, plus a system of three emergency floodways designed as territorial diver- sions to temporarily relieve the pressure of rapidly rising river stages. Entire floodplains were walled off to federal specifications, from the river’s mouth all the way to the city of Cairo in the Confluence region. In parallel, the head of the Mississippi River Commission, an Army Corps engineer named Harley Ferguson, returned to Shreve’s idea that the belt of the river could be deliberately straightened and made to flow more swiftly. Sixteen oxbow cuts were carried out by the end of the Second World War, shortening the Mississippi by some 150 miles. Only now are the long-term consequences emerging, notably in terms of increased bed-load sediment deposits in the Old River area—exactly where the avulsion is likely to occur.

The MR&T passed its first test with the high water of 1937, when the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway was activated. A major challenge came with the 1973 flood, which damaged and nearly destroyed the original Old River Control Structure, prompting the construction of a supplementary instal- lation just downstream. Further significant floods came in 1993 and most recently in 2011, when the Birds Point levee was blown again. For nearly a hundred years, long after the disappearance of the slave and sharecrop- per economies, the MR&T has defined the ecology of the floodplains, to the point of favoring corn, soybeans, cotton, and rice over any other life- form. The result, complete with copious amounts of diesel fuel and syn- thetic nitrogen, is one of the major components of global climate change: a completely industrialized agricultural system, based on fossil fuel inputs, oriented toward foreign markets, and exported to the rest of the world as a development model. Could the hermeneutic of racial history touch the pulse—or better, actually move the shoreline—of the industrialized floodplain?

Into the Breach

In the winter and of 2019 Claire and I made repeated trips to Carbondale, Illinois, where the Confluence Ecologies field station was located. Sometimes half a dozen other members of Deep Time Chicago would fill the home and even the deck of our collaborator Sarah Lewison, radiating outward during the day to different research sites, gathering at Check My Pulse 14

night with sketchbooks and laptops and tape recorders and whatever else might be needed to go on interpreting the landscape. Meanwhile the water kept rising. Just fifty miles further south the ruptured Len Small Levee (a so-called “farmer levee,” not maintained by the Corps) had inundated large areas around Horseshoe Lake, leaving two hulking barges stranded in farmers’ fields. River transport was paralyzed for three full months: you could see the tows and barges moored near the Ohio River floodwall at Cairo, a martyred city whose economy and civic services had largely collapsed in the wake of racial strife and antiblack resentment during the late 1960s and ’70s. Driving south- west from Cairo toward the Bootheel region of —a rich agricultural zone on the opposite bank—I would cross the narrow highway bridge as slowly as possible, peering down at Fort Defiance State Park, eight feet underwater, where we planned to hold our closing field station events. One afternoon behind the floodwall at Cape Girardeau, Missouri—birthplace of Rush Limbaugh, the bigoted pioneer of right-wing radio—the river looked impossibly close under the bright afternoon sun, as though it were about to overtop the twenty-foot high structure. Parts of the city’s suburbs were in fact knee-deep in water, like many other cities and towns on the Middle and Upper Mississippi River. As so often in the United States these days, you could feel the confusion everywhere, the dis- array, the slow inexorable decline, the grinding collapse of empire.

The Bootheel story is characteristic of what happened to the floodplain eco- zones. Formerly known as the Big Swamp and considered an impassable jun- gle, the land was transferred from the federal government to the state, and then down to county level, for improvement and sale under the provisions of the mid-nineteenth-century Swamp Acts. Valuable oak, hickory, and bald cypress were extracted toward the end of the nineteenth century, but the reclamation projects collapsed after the trees were cut. Only in 1907 was the Little River Drainage District formed by a group of large landowners in Cape Girardeau, amid the surge in steam power technology that surrounded the building of the Panama . Their plan was as extreme as the terrain: using the new machines, the Bootheel landowners would cut off the flow of swamp water at its sources in the Ozark Plateau and St. Francois Mountains to the north. To do so they created the Headwaters Diversion Channel, which is a broad open ditch flanked to the south by a levee, conveying the combined flow of the Castor and Rivers to the Mississippi just downstream of Cape Girardeau. South of the Diversion Channel, a filigree of canals and ditches drained the land almost completely, allowing the cultivation of cotton, rice, corn, wheat, and, more recently, soybeans. The Bootheel remains the most profitable agricultural land in Missouri. But here’s the question no one thought to ask in the 1910s: What 15 Brian Holmes

are the consequences of injecting all that Ozark mountain water into the tightly coiled and intensely constricted Mississippi below Cape Girardeau?

The answer became obvious in 2011, the worst flood year since 1927. As prodigious rainfall swept snowmelt into the northern watersheds, the lev- els of the Mississippi and the Ohio rose ever higher around Cairo, until on April 25 sand boils began erupting at the base of the city’s defensive works, heralding levee failure. Three days later the Ohio River reached a height of fifty-eight feet on the Cairo gage: that’s the legal threshold for activation of the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. But Bootheel landowners, acting through Missouri’s Attorney General, went to court to demand a stay. In the press and through their elected representatives they pointed to the high value of their agricultural economy, flour- ishing on the soybean trade with China. Why should they be sacrificed in favor of an impoverished, half-ruined city? Never mind that thousands of Cairo’s inhabitants would lose their homes, and perhaps some, their lives. The majority of the farm- ers on the Missouri side had long ago moved their dwelling places off agricultural parcels whose prosperity was built by federal investment in the levees, and whose title deeds include “flowage rights” purchased by the Army Corps in the 1930s. In a book with the absurd title Divine Providence, Army Corps historian Charles Camillo describes the tense scene in the operational center at Cape Girardeau airport, where the deus ex machina, Major General Michael Walsh, finally broke his ago- nizing hesitation and ordered the dynamiting of the Birds Point levee. Explosions flashed against the sky shortly after 10 pm on May 2. Just in time: the water stood at 61.72 feet on the Cairo gage. Another few hours and the city would have been destroyed.

Earth’s history is typically measured in the millions of years, arranged atop each other in a stratigraphic table. Understanding the Anthropocene River takes 500 years of human and natural history, entangled into the forms of the land and the people. That entanglement is the distinctive subject/object of Earth systems sci- ence, from my outsider’s point of view anyway. Today, both the social and the nat- ural relations appear frozen in the ghostly system, the MR&T. Still the most relevant thing to interpret is the way the shoreline actually moves—not only through explo- sive detonation, but also through seepage.

There are many remnant wetlands in the Mississippi Valley, and particularly in the Confluence region. But the places where the aquatic/terrestrial transition zone reaches an ecosystemic scale often involve aberrant functions of the engineering works. One example can be found at the base of the Delta, just north of Vicksburg, where a federal levee system defends against both the Yazoo River to the east, and the Mississippi to the west. The double wall sweeps around the bottom of the Check My Pulse 16

Delta in a great arc, creating a kind of enclosing bowl with a floodgate for a drain. When the Yazoo runs high the floodgate is closed, and then rainwater seeping down from the north pools inside the levee system, causing major flooding that can last throughout the summer and into the fall, as it did in 2019. Obviously this is hard on the farmers, who expect dry fields by June. Everywhere on the back roads, small hand-lettered signs read “Finish the Pumps!” They refer to an Army Corps project that would have installed some of the most expensive waterworks on earth, just to drain the lingering pools. But so far the pumps have not been finished, because environmentalists care too much, resulting in a veto of the project by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. Industrial dryness would destroy a rare remaining stopover for millions of birds migrating along the Mississippi Flyway. The seasonal pulse of riverine flooding plays a vital role in planetary metabolism.

The Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway presents a similar situation. A front- line levee defends against the Mississippi; but this is the one that can be dynamited at Birds Point. A setback levee a few miles east of the first is designed to contain and channel the diverted Mississippi waters; but it too has a floodgate at the bottom that must be closed against high water. That high water comes from the Mississippi River backflooding into St. John’s , a former meandering stream now transformed into a wide agricultural ditch. As in the Yazoo Basin, the initial plan was to place a gate at the mouth of the bayou, seal it against the high water from the river, and install pumps to drain the swamp for agriculture. The Army Corps tried no less than seven times to complete this plan; but each time, the ecological values of this sea- sonally flooded transition zone prompted resistance. The result is that every year, St. John’s Bayou backfloods into the territory immediately northwest of New Madrid, filling the base of the floodway. This means that the floodgate on the setback levee must be closed; and at that point, the whole intricate system of pipes and ditches and channels that drains the Bootheel can do nothing but inundate the land behind the setback levee. At the peak of the season, usually in late spring, the inland flood rises to levels only marginally lower than the backflooding river. What results is a panorama almost unbe- lievable for those who don’t see it every year: great sheets of water drowning farms and forests on either side of a thirty-foot protective levee that was built to keep everything dry and secure. This is the industrial version of flood- pulse ecology. Yet there’s another result, which is equally amazing: despite all the grumbling and disappointment, the farmers return to their flooded fields every year, and with some help from small, tractor-powered pumps, 17 Brian Holmes

they manage to get a crop of beans in the ground by July, ensuring a success- ful harvest from the incredibly fertile soil. Contrary to industrial expectations, these soybean farmers are beginning to live with the seasonal pulse, along- side all the birds, animals, insects, and fish that inhabit the aquatic/terrestrial transition zone.

In New Orleans, one of the presenters in the “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” seminar, the environmental planner Richard Hindle, showed us an extraordinary flood-control scheme that has been gathering dust in a patent office for well over a century. It proposes, not single levee walls dressed against the river, but rather an entire sequence of fully contained cells, much like the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. These cells can be opened and closed to support multiple overlap- ping conditions: natural marsh, dry agricultural fields, great pools of floodwater, or a modulated transition between all three. Like the Wild Miles, utopia is where you find it. As we approached New Madrid on the voyageur canoes, I expected to find something like the utopian condition that was later exposed to us in New Orleans.

I had been to the area many times before, wandering around on roads and path- ways that usually ended abruptly in pools of standing water or agitated currents surging through the forest. Now the idea was to paddle directly from the river to St. John’s Bayou, through the only remaining breach in the entire Lower Mississippi levee system. It was a beautiful sunny day with seven or eight of us in a single canoe, and the fatigue of the river vanished as we moved up the channel, with egrets crossing our bow and big fish (probably Asian carp) jumping high out of the water. We reached the floodgate, pulled the canoe onto an extremely muddy bank, and went running up to the top of the levee where I knew we would see wall-to- wall soybeans, green like money on the world market. In fact, there was nothing but bare, dark earth on both sides. That summer, the floodwaters had persisted too long to plant. My spirit went reeling around this great wheel of black earth, fur- rowed in many places by the plow, but barren of any crop. An extraordinary feel- ing struck home: this way of life will also pass, like King Cotton. I just might live through the dissolution of the American empire.

Horizons

This essay ends where it began, with the massive street protests for Black lives unfolding in the United States and around the world. The uprisings demand that we reexamine our histories, our present societies, and our selves. They ask us to change, not just the narratives, but the facts of coexistence. In the US, this demand is directly political. It concerns the administration of daily life: by whom, for whom, and above all, for what? Those questions coalesce around the figure of a fascist president, but they are spurred by a more ancient form of domination. Check My Pulse 18

Just go out on the street and look at the cops, mounted on horses, guns strapped to their sides. Do you see it?

Those who topple the statues of slavers, conquistadors, and imperi- alists seek the end of a 500-year-old hierarchy that stretches back to the period when heavily armed Europeans began to colonize, or simply pillage, the entire world. The same hierarchy stretches forward to the corporate extractivism that is now destroying the biosphere and curtail- ing the future of millions of species. The climate struggle is not about better energy systems, or not only: it’s about ending the imposition of a power to command, with deadly effects on the river pulse as I’ve shown here, and more broadly, on the planetary metabolism that includes our own heartbeats. At a moment of profound crisis at every level—social, cultural, medical, fiscal, economic, technological, and ecological—it is obvious, for those who see, that life is at a turning point. If we cannot seize the occasion of this crisis to reshape the operating systems of our civilization, then our only legacy is fire. There is no way to achieve this transformation, politically, technologically, or spiritually, without forming new and more profound alliances across many barriers of racism that our own actions, and failures to act, have maintained. Now I’m addressing you, fellow white people. Just seeing is nowhere near enough. It is time to begin reversing the damage our civilization has done.

Mississippi River backflooding into St Johns’ Bayou (photo BH)

For all the footnotes: www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/check-my-pulse. This work has been published as part of the Deep Time Chicago pamphlet series, with generous project support from the Goethe-Institut, HKW and the Max Planck Institute. Designed by Dan Mohr / yesIsaid.com Typeset in Gravity, by Vincenzo Vuono: https://www.behance.net/gallery/3407691/Gravity-Free-sans-typeface; and BPTypewrite, by backpacker: http://backpacker.gr/fonts/10