Mississippi River Anthropocenes: The St. Louis Field Campus

• In Event: Quotidian Anthropocenes

Abstract

The Mississippi River and sites along it are anthropocenic in particularly acute ways. It is a complexly engineered, overextended, soiled, and stratified landscape, often referred to as the backbone of America. It is both intensely agricultural and intensely industrial. It is highly subject to extreme weather and floods, and to risks of active as well as abandoned coal, nuclear and chemical facilities. The effects of the Mississippi River are also far reaching. In the summer of 2017, for example, the deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River was the largest ever recorded.

The Mississippi River region is also populated by creative communities and educational, research, and arts institutions that have mapped, visualized, and planned for the future of the region in impressive ways. This paper draws on the experiences of the St. Louis Anthropocene Field Campus (March 7-10, 2019 convened by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Drexel University (Philadelphia), and the University of California Irvine) to argue for the usefulness of field campuses as a method for developing tactics for analyzing the “Quotidian Anthropocene.” During the field campus, scholars, artists, educators, and other representatives of the greater St. Louis region shared their tactics, findings, and visions. Together, field school participants asked questions that required interdisciplinary collaboration: How has the Mississippi Region been documented, analyzed, and described thus far, and how have these practices set the stage for further work today? How can “the Anthropocene” – and particularly local, quotidian anthropocenes – be usefully measured, narrated, and visualized? What kinds of civic institutions are needed to develop, share, and archive Anthropocene research in different places?

Author

• Jason Ludwig, Drexel University