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The Great River - Boyce Upholt · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:15
SPEAKER_03: How do I look?
0:16
SPEAKER_03: How do I look?
0:17
SPEAKER_03: You look uh as good as you've ever good, but Chris, you are very esteemed, my friend.
0:28
SPEAKER_03: The esteemed Mr.
0:29
SPEAKER_03: Chris.
0:30
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
0:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you're you're doing well, man.
0:32
SPEAKER_03: You're doing well.
0:33
SPEAKER_03: Uh Chris, okay.
0:34
SPEAKER_03: This interview, we talked to Boy Sophole, author of The Great River, which is a book about the Mississippi River and is an amazing, amazing read.
0:43
SPEAKER_03: I loved this book.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: I loved this interview.
0:46
SPEAKER_03: It brought me a new appreciation for the scale and the geology and the problems with the Mississippi River and great rivers, big rivers in general, I guess.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: I agree.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: I said this at the end to Boyce because I wanted to thank him because it I liked the read too.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: I thoroughly enjoyed it.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: There were clear distinctions in in what he was talking about.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: And I enjoyed all really three parts of the book to me.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: That's how that's kind of how I I view it.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: But it deepened my connection to a river that I've always felt connected to from a very young age.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: And so I I love that because I think like that's what we need.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: This podcast, we talk about things that are important to us, and you know that's that's our outreach, right?
1:31
SPEAKER_01: Is we want to try to connect people to the planet we live on so that they care about it.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: They give a crap about it, so they want to take care of it.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like this book does that.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: So we both give it a resounding endorsement.
1:44
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, big endorsement.
1:45
SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, go buy this book and read this book.
1:47
SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
1:48
SPEAKER_03: You, Chris, you guys have vacationed down in this this part of the world for a long time.
1:53
SPEAKER_03: And I guess I've never really asked you this.
1:55
SPEAKER_03: Why?
1:57
SPEAKER_03: Why?
1:57
SPEAKER_03: Oh, I gotta make it.
1:58
SPEAKER_03: What draws you to it?
1:59
SPEAKER_03: Like, what's the I mean, because you this has been consistent for 20, 25 years, right?
2:03
SPEAKER_03: High school spring break, the bull heistes are down in and around New Orleans, Lake Pontchatrain, like that region, right?
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: My answer is kind of simple.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm a teacher, and spring break has always been sacred to me and my my three favorite people on the world.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: And so I want to go on spring break and not see anybody from my hometown.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: And so but I also want to go somewhere warm, but I want to go somewhere too where I can recreate.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, Jenny and I we run, we bike, and we kayak all the time when we go down south.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I can get all of that.
2:39
SPEAKER_01: Plus, here's the thing Louisiana has great food, they have great music, and you know what else?
2:46
SPEAKER_01: They have great culture, and I love that.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: I love the people.
2:51
SPEAKER_03: I I I was yeah, I okay.
2:53
SPEAKER_03: The recreating is is good.
2:54
SPEAKER_03: I um and the food, I know you guys are are areward-winning chili people, but you know, that it doesn't compare to to food down in Louisiana.
3:02
SPEAKER_03: Uh, I remember you and I were at AGU in New Orleans a couple years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or something, and we were out where'd we go?
3:09
SPEAKER_03: We went to Bourbon Street, I think you and I did one night, and you were like, all right, Jesse, here's what we do.
3:15
SPEAKER_03: And I was like, okay, this is the Chris Boys experience.
3:18
SPEAKER_03: You get a big one of these beers that's like three beers big or whatever.
3:21
SPEAKER_03: I don't know, some big beer, and you have a cigar, share a cigar, and you just stand there and watch the get the activities on Bourbon Street, and we went to a little jazz show.
3:29
SPEAKER_03: It was great.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: I mean, did I disappoint?
3:31
SPEAKER_03: I I did a good job.
3:32
SPEAKER_03: Here's what we do.
3:33
SPEAKER_03: You did a great, you were a great tour guide.
3:35
SPEAKER_03: I've sp I've spent very little time in that part of the world, and uh, you were a great tour guide.
3:40
SPEAKER_03: So I appreciated it.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: I love the I love the area.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh there's so much about it that I love.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: So I could go on and on.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: We could do a whole episode on why Crisple Heist loves that part of the country.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: So that'd be a terrible episode.
3:53
SPEAKER_03: Um but the Great River is definitely part of it, and definitely part of the reason why that culture is so great and why it's so such a unique place.
3:59
SPEAKER_03: So I can I can definitely see the attraction to it.
4:01
SPEAKER_03: And and you know, it's an important place for a whole range of of modern geoscience issues that are kind of all brought to focus in Boyce's book, The Great River, and just in this region geologically.
4:13
SPEAKER_03: So it's a great place to learn the basics, definitely.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: Yep, 100%.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, Jess, all right, shall we get to it?
4:19
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it, Boyce.
4:20
SPEAKER_03: Oh, coming at you.
4:22
SPEAKER_03: So I don't know, Chris, take us away here.
4:25
SPEAKER_03: You're grid at the intro.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: So, Boyce, um, like Jesse said, thanks for being here.
4:29
SPEAKER_01: Really looking forward to this interview.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: But um, we always start with this kind of question.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Like, how did you get into this topic?
4:36
SPEAKER_01: We always ask, you know, if it's a geoscientist, how did you get into geoscience?
4:40
SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, Jesse and I have our own stories and our our kind of moments where we had.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: How did you get into the topic of the Mississippi River?
4:48
SPEAKER_01: What what led you down this path?
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually, this is where I always start because I think it's important context for the book I wrote because I am also a northerner.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Born in Chicago, grew up in Hartford, Connecticut.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, you know, I always dreamed of being a writer, and if you had told me back in sixth grade when that dream started, you're gonna do it.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: And you write a book about the Mississippi River, I'd be like, that doesn't that doesn't make any sense.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: But um being a writer uh is not there's there's you I guess there is grad school, but it's not like a straightforward path.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: So I kind of kicked around for a couple of years after college trying to figure out what it took to be a writer, and part of that part of my theory was like maybe living an interesting life and going interesting places.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: So I moved around a couple of times, took a job with a nonprofit in rural Mississippi in uh what geologists call, I guess, the Yazoo Basin, um, popularly known as the Mississippi Delta.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's where I did start writing, right?
5:39
SPEAKER_00: That's where that dream started to kick off.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: And so I've always been interested in place.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: I always try to understand the place where I am.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: I write about the environment a lot.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: So that eventually over time led me to the Mississippi River.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: That was so essential to the place where I was living.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: Went canoeing and camping out on the river for a magazine assignment and was struck by the river.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: It was so gorgeous, so beautiful, so different than I assumed it might look like.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of the beginning of it.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: I just was obsessed and kept going back and back and back.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: Let me ask you about that, boys.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: What do you what did you imagine it would look like?
6:09
SPEAKER_01: What did you, you know, and how was that different from what you really saw?
6:13
SPEAKER_00: I could try to.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think it's it's sort of like now I I I don't remember precisely.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: One of the memories I have was early on moving to Mississippi.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Some friends and I were walking in a state park that's along the Mississippi River and seen it, right?
6:24
SPEAKER_00: And but one of my friends was walking on the log, it must have been flooding because it was like right on the edge of the water, and he fell in and we were choking, like, oh, you're gonna grow with third limb, right?
6:32
SPEAKER_00: It was just like, I do not want to touch this river, it must be so toxic.
6:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh beyond that, I think I have this that had this picture that uh, you know, I'd seen it in St.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Paul, Minnesota.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: I'd probably seen it in Memphis at some point in New Orleans.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: So I thought it was all like that, right?
6:46
SPEAKER_00: Just a giant industrial facility, a giant canal for boats, um, and not a still wild and geological entity.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And so that was what when you go out and get away from the cities, you see immediately that this is a wild place, and you see sort of like the curving shape of the hydrogeology.
7:05
SPEAKER_03: So So I can I I want to build on that a little bit.
7:09
SPEAKER_03: I didn't know you're you were born in Chicago.
7:10
SPEAKER_03: So I have this being from Michigan, you know, Lake Michigan is is kind of what we grew up with as water.
7:17
SPEAKER_03: I'm guessing from Chicago area, kind of similar.
7:19
SPEAKER_03: So I think I have this preconceived notion in my head that clean water, like clear water is good water, and not clear water is bad water.
7:28
SPEAKER_03: You know, that that can that like, oh, I don't want to touch it because it's muddy, but like that's not accurate, and the muddy part of the Mississippi is like is the huge part of the game for the Mississippi.
7:38
SPEAKER_03: It's very natural, and this is like the great parts of it.
7:40
SPEAKER_03: So is that do you think that was part of your because I I think I still have that preconceived notion of like clear water is good water, muddy water is is not good, even though that's that's not I know that to be not true, but I still kind of have that.
7:51
SPEAKER_03: It was that part of your experience, or is that like Yeah, I'm kind of thinking about that.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to say, you know, like I definitely growing in New England and and Chicago, the two of them got accustomed to clear running strenium, so that did feel like clean water.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: I feel like this is more true, like if I was on a seeing a bayou in the Delta, right?
8:05
SPEAKER_00: One of these old sluggish creeks.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: And when those are brown or they're often green, right?
8:09
SPEAKER_00: They're literally like you had that people have to put motors in there to churn them to make sure algae is not growing on them.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: And that was striking me.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: There's something about the Mississippi, the brownness seems native to, like, it's just like seems to write somehow.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think the the big muddy, those names like that, that never really disturbed me.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: It was just more, you know, inherited stories of pollution and industry that that had this misconception in my mind of what it was.
8:34
SPEAKER_03: So, how long was that process then?
8:36
SPEAKER_03: You know, once you said, okay, I think I could write a book about this this amazing place.
8:40
SPEAKER_03: I mean, uh, you know, take that for it to be a good thing.
8:41
SPEAKER_03: That's such a good question.
8:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
8:43
SPEAKER_03: You know, what what what was that?
8:44
SPEAKER_03: That I I'm always curious by this.
8:46
SPEAKER_03: Like, that is such a massive topic.
8:48
SPEAKER_03: And you've written a a really I mean it's a big book, but you do a great job of distilling down this entire history of this thing.
8:54
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's a that seems overwhelming to me.
8:57
SPEAKER_03: How how long did that take you?
8:58
SPEAKER_00: It is overwhelming.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: Like there it depends on how you want to measure it, right?
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So I first sort of fully met the Mississippi River basically 10 years ago, yeah, spring of 2015.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: I wrote this profile of this canoe guide.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: And I immediately knew I wanted to go back because I that story I just told.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: And so I did started to do another assignment, another assignment.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think pretty quickly by the next year, I was like, you know what, I'm pretty obsessed with this river.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: I think I can write a book.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: But I was, you know, just starting as a journalist.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: I was nobody back then.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, from there, you know, I got an agent in 2017, kind of saying, like, this is what I want to do, and he saw some promise.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Worked with him for a year and a half.
9:36
SPEAKER_03: Can I interrupt real quick on that?
9:37
SPEAKER_03: Is that yeah, do you get an agent with this idea in mind?
9:39
SPEAKER_03: Like, I want a book about the Mississippi, and is the agent like helping you narrow that, or or you just did you come into it full-fledged, like, here's what I want to do, and and and that's what it became.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: The agent for the literary writer, it depends, right?
9:51
SPEAKER_00: If you're like going to some fancy MFA program like Iowa, and like then the agents show up and they read some of your work and they're like, I'll represent that you, but that wasn't me.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh I knew I wanted to write a book about the Mississippi.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: By the point I got the agent, I had actually canoed from St.
10:05
SPEAKER_00: Louis to the Gulf of Mexico.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: So it gave me like I was like, I have some sort of expertise or uh direct exposure at the very least.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: So I came to him just you know, saying, I want to write this book about this.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: And he my agent had published a great book about the Great Lakes called the there, he had represented a great book called The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Um so I knew this agent would would be interested in this kind of stuff.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: And so uh he worked with me to sort of help me.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: We went through different iterations of how much of the travel on my trip should be in here, how much this and that.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: And so sold the book in 2020.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: The book came out in 2024.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: So those are some of the sort of stop points.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a long process.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean it there's I mean, it's a big river, right?
10:48
SPEAKER_00: I enjoy a lot of I was curious why this book didn't exist.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, because only someone who had never written a book before would be dumb enough to think this was practically a good idea.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: It's great, yeah.
10:58
unknown: Yeah.
11:00
SPEAKER_03: Well, great things are is you know people without experience tackle them, right?
11:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: A couple things.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: First, real quick, if we could back up, where you said this started with a um a guide with a canoe trip, right?
11:13
SPEAKER_01: Where was that?
11:14
SPEAKER_00: That was we launched in southern Mississippi, and we actually so did one day on the Mississippi, and then we went into the Shafalaya River.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: So we went by this thing called the Old River Control Structure and went through this loch.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: It was a very it was a really interesting way to first meet the Mississippi River because again, the first the first night was such a beautiful island, and then we're like, there's these shots of us going through the lock, and that's an incredible experience too.
11:35
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's so cool.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: So um can I ask the second part of it, Jess?
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: You good?
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: All right, good.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: So, boyce, um our listeners know our backgrounds, Jesse and I.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: What's your background?
11:47
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us a little bit about that and and maybe you know how your background helped or hindered the the project?
11:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a good question.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And I uh I'd like what is my background?
11:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm I in some ways I just think of myself as a guy that like is curious about the world and jumped in a canoe once.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: And that, you know, I've gone through different stuff.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: Like I worked in education for a long time in K-12 education, but I again I always dreamed of being a writer.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: I've always been really proficient at math and science.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: And my father was a scientist, my grandfather was a scientist.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: So I think that does help me in a project like this.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: It's just like a world, it's not, you know, I don't have a PhD, but I feel capable of picking up a journal and figuring out what the heck's going on.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: That's part of it.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: But and I already shared the background of like not, you know, like I am I now consider myself a southerner.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: I've lived in the South for 16 years, but you know, the Mississippi wasn't necessarily my river growing up, but that was also a useful background for this project because there's so many people I know in Mississippi that basically just like had no interest in ever going to see the Mississippi because of the stories that they just received.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: So again, I inherited some of those, but I think it was a little more curious as sort of someone trying to get to know my adopted home and embracing the river.
12:56
SPEAKER_03: That's really cool.
12:57
SPEAKER_03: So, how much geology did you learn along the way?
12:59
SPEAKER_03: I mean, Chris and I are biased, be careful because you speak to a biased audience here, but but like you you you focus a lot.
13:06
SPEAKER_03: So your book is you have a lot of natural or you have a lot of human history, a lot of natural history, naturalist kind of stuff, but there's a lot of geology and geological engineering is a part of this story.
13:16
SPEAKER_03: And so how was that a fun learning experience to get to know the field of geoscience in a way?
13:23
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, and it's true.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and this project is the biggest project of my career by far, but I think maybe it started with this, and now you know I'm always writing about a place in one way or another.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: And um, whenever I get a place, I think the first step for me is like I gotta figure out the geology because it's not not necessarily destiny, but like that shapes so much, right?
13:44
SPEAKER_01: So uh everything, boys.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, literally change everything, yes.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: And you can't get in the Mississippi River I don't know, rivers are geological agents, right?
13:54
SPEAKER_00: You guys know that, probably a lot of your audience knows that, but it's not what I was thinking at first.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Um and then particularly like the hydro, right?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Like the mud in this river.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And so it was really fascinating to, you know, like even the question of like what is the Mississippi River, when did the Mississippi River, when was it formed, right?
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Those are there's a geological way of answering them and understanding that geology also like raised some of the nuance for me of of right these different you know hydro regimes in the past and that like it's like I had to unpack all that, but I found it all really fascinating.
14:23
SPEAKER_03: The scale of this thing, can we touch on the scale of this thing?
14:26
SPEAKER_03: Because I remember the first time I ever drove across the Mississippi River, and you're just like, holy crap, this thing is huge.
14:33
SPEAKER_03: And you you had a turn of phrase.
14:35
SPEAKER_03: I think I'm getting this right.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: Did you I think you there's one line where you called it the at the mouth of the Mississippi, you called it the bottom of the continent, I think it was.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: I think that's a the exact that phrase stuck out to me as like, oh, this is an amazing turn of phrase.
14:47
SPEAKER_03: Can you describe what you mean by that and and why it's like a powerful phrase?
14:52
SPEAKER_03: I I think it I thought that was a great turn of phrase.
14:55
SPEAKER_03: The bottom.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean a lot of things, right?
14:57
SPEAKER_00: It's like um what is a river, right?
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Like like in the uh sense of physics, it's just like the path that water has formed going across the continent, right?
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Also geology, the but the physics part of geology.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: And so part of you know, like as I was trying to understand how the Mississippi River came to be, I mean this is some geology that I had to like I had to leave out a lot of details.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: So this book was three hundred only three hundred pages, so not like five hundred.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: But the story of why this river, why so much of the United States drains through this one piece of the middle of the continent, has to do with like continental drift and geological hotspots, and it has to do like if you look at a relief map of the US, you can see the Mississippi River and the Mississippi River Delta, right?
15:37
SPEAKER_00: The or the alluvial plain around the river, because it is just almost literally a trough in the middle of North America.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: And so it is both in terms of the cardinal compass north-southeast west, we're at the bottom of the continent, but like in terms of altitude, it's it all comes down to here.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And you can't really understand the greatness of the Great River without grasping that.
15:56
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's draining that whole central part, and it and it's apparently standing on a levee in New Orleans or where you're driving across the bridge, you know, up in Missouri or whatever.
16:04
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's huge.
16:06
SPEAKER_03: This thing, I I I I Chris and I were in New Orleans uh what was that, Chris?
16:11
SPEAKER_03: Three years ago together, maybe something like that.
16:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, two or three years ago at a conference.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
16:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right through sort of downtown area, and we're just like, you know, it's huge river.
16:20
SPEAKER_03: It is amazing and you can that that phrase really rings true.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: It is the bottom of the continent.
16:25
SPEAKER_03: It's draining a huge amount of area.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh I recommend is sorry, it is Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: It's just like that's where you're like, oh my god, this is right.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: Like you can look up one way, you can see the different water, like the turbidities or the amount of sediment in the two different waters mixing, and you're just like it's a mile wide because of those two rivers, and it's yeah, yeah.
16:44
SPEAKER_03: Wait, so where is this?
16:44
SPEAKER_03: Where did you say it?
16:45
SPEAKER_03: Cairo, southern Illinois.
16:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
16:47
SPEAKER_03: Southern Illinois.
16:48
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I was just through there.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: Um it's like I love it that you just said this and you brought this up because I was literally there a week and a half ago.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I I went my wife and I went for a long bike ride along the levee.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: We parked in Kenner and just biked into downtown.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: And it makes me I want to ask you this question because I have an answer to to my question, but I want to know what yours is.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: You wrote a lot about the you know, the human history, you wrote about the geologic engineering and you know, all these different aspects that that make the Mississippi mighty, right?
17:22
SPEAKER_01: What was the favorite part that you learned about as you're putting this project together?
17:27
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that there was a favorite part.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think interestingly, the evolution of this book, how it came to be, right?
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Like I at first my intention was just to write a little book of essays about the the Batcher, as it's called, the Land Between Levies, where I lived in Mississippi.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: And I had to be sort of convinced by several mentors that if I wanted to publish a book that could get me on podcasts that would be in bookstores all across the country, I had to be a little more ambitious.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: And so the middle of the book, the 200 years of engineering, is like that's not what interested me.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, which is how to say is my least favorite part of the book.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Um I like had to find part of it, I think it's a better it's better written in part because I wasn't inherently interested in it, and so I had to find a way to like make that a compelling story for me.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing that comes to mind.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like the like process-wise, my favorite thing was is getting out and being on the river.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's my favorite part of the book though, because I don't know that I would manage to convey as clearly as I wanted just like how crazy and beautiful it is out there.
18:19
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it comes across in your in your writing in multiple different ways, I'd say.
18:23
SPEAKER_03: So if you're gonna recommend people who who have not seen the Mississippi ever, where's one place, if you're gonna recommend one place to go see it, where's the most awe-inspiring, or where's your favorite place to go?
18:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll tell my favorite part.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: It's like not a very realistic proposal, but um there's a place.
18:40
SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's fine.
18:41
SPEAKER_03: We're gonna talk about realistic proposals.
18:43
SPEAKER_03: We tell people to go check out remote northwest territories all the time.
18:46
SPEAKER_03: Okay, then we're good.
18:47
SPEAKER_04: Well, this is easy this is easier than that.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: In Arkansas, where it you have the Arkansas, or you have the White River come in, you have the Arkansas River come in, and they get so close that they all pinch together.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: So there's this thing called uh Big Island because it's surrounded by the white, the Mississippi and the Arkansas.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And so that generally, but then there's a piece of the the old mouth of the White River is now just a back channel, and you can take that.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: It's not very long, it's maybe 10 or 12 miles total.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: It's a very great, like over simple, quick and fast overnight trip if you launch from the right town.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: And so that is a place where you it's in part I like that because it's it's still pretty big.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: It's it's not as big as the the main channel, but it's still a large back channel, and but it's too small for the tow boats.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: And so you can go back there and get this feeling of like, okay, like this is and part of why I say like well, I preface this was it's not easy.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: It's like you can't go to Memphis or New Orleans or Minneapolis and see the power of the river because it the part of the power to me is when you leave those cities, how quickly it changes and becomes this place to feel like the middle of nowhere.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: What do you mean by that?
19:52
SPEAKER_01: That you have to leave these places to see the power.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Can you describe what you're what are you trying to convey?
19:58
SPEAKER_00: And it's a sense of, again, like here in New Orleans, I love going to the river, it's beautiful, but um I can't see beyond I can because I've learned about history, but it's hard to see beyond the port and the levees and the revetment and all these things, and to really see, right?
20:13
SPEAKER_00: Like it's still it here in New Orleans, it still kind of looks like a canal for boats to me.
20:17
SPEAKER_00: It's so uh it actually feels small to me at this point compared to the rest of the river.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: But you go to uh between Memphis and Vicksburg, Mississippi, every between Memphis and Baton Rouge, that's hundreds of miles of river.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: You don't see a single town in those hundred miles.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: There's like three or four bridges.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: And so you get out there and you're like, oh, this is one of the biggest rivers in the world, and it still remains.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a poet, Gary Snyder, he talks about why what makes something wild is its self-willedness, right?
20:44
SPEAKER_00: And you can see that there of like these islands are changing shape, and you can kind of know that you can tell the migration of the sand and the sediment.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: And so I think it helps you understand the scale of this river.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: It feels like being in the Alaskan bush, is what someone told me once.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, that does feel right, right?
20:59
SPEAKER_00: But you only get that feeling of truly how big and mighty the Mississippi remains when you get away from the obvious intrusion of all the human engineering and human industry.
21:10
SPEAKER_03: There's a figure in your book that really struck me.
21:12
SPEAKER_03: It was kind of midway through.
21:13
SPEAKER_03: I think you were you you had a map of the levee system compared to what was the term you just used for the the area between the levees and the Batcher.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: The Batcher?
21:23
SPEAKER_03: Batcher.
21:25
SPEAKER_03: So that's the distance described that for the the distance between the edges of the floodplain and the levees, the the sort of natural flood area and the levee system.
21:33
SPEAKER_00: Is that that what the I mean it's the natural flood system, except for it's the natural, it's like the it's what's left of the floodplain, right?
21:40
SPEAKER_00: It's like you once you put up the levees, you've defined the batcher.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: The batcher is it's not the river, but it's everything else that's between the levees, which in many places is many, many miles park.
21:49
SPEAKER_03: Can you kind of paint us a picture?
21:50
SPEAKER_03: That that image struck me as like, oh, the the levees have taken this really big floodplain and shrunk it down to I I don't know what the area is, but it's tiny.
21:59
SPEAKER_03: Like that.
22:00
SPEAKER_03: That map just really struck me as as how far the levees have how much the levees have constrained this river in its flooding ability.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: Can you throw some numbers on that or paint us a visual of what that looks like?
22:11
SPEAKER_03: Because you're describing getting out of the cities and viewing this and seeing this.
22:14
SPEAKER_03: Like what does that feel like when the river is less constrained in the the few places that it is, maybe?
22:20
SPEAKER_00: The floodplain in its natural state was as much as like 90 miles across, right?
22:24
SPEAKER_00: It's huge.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: And we've lost on the lower Mississippi River on the order of 90% of that floodplain.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: But interestingly, in the question of like how it feels when you cross that again, in New Orleans, Louisiana's different.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: The river is geologically quite different here.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: The river is a little bit straighter.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Like if you come to Louisiana, you're kind of seeing this narrow, defined river, and there's a little bit of battery there.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: But up in Mississippi and Arkansas and northern Louisiana, it's like entering a whole new territory, right?
22:54
SPEAKER_00: The levees are as much as 14 miles apart up there.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: I think it's two million acres of wetlands, relic floodplain that are still left between levees on the lower Mississippi River, so from Cairo, Illinois South.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: So it's a huge amount of land.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Um and that's what part of the power to me is like feeling like even though we've we've destroyed 90% of the floodplain, and that's really impacted ecosystems, that's still a much bigger sort of floodplain than anything else in the country, I believe.
23:21
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
23:22
SPEAKER_03: I mean, just that that scale 14 miles between the natural, between the the uh man-made levees.
23:26
SPEAKER_03: The man-made levees, yeah, it would have been like 90 but miles between the natural.
23:30
SPEAKER_03: So you're going from 90 miles wide floodplain to 14 miles, and even that's huge, but but you're shrinking that in a massive amount.
23:37
SPEAKER_03: I mean, the scale of this is just it's probably very hard to see unless you're you know in an airplane to really above it to take that in.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, is that to really understand the scale of what I'd recommend your viewers do, and if you have show notes, you can link this.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: But if you Google NASA Opique View, Mississippi River, it's a photo that I wanted to get in the book, but it you have to see it in color, and so we couldn't get it in there.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: But it's a shot from the International Space Station of the lower Mississippi River, and it's so striking to me because you can both see that the former flood once those levees came up.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Great, we could turn these wetlands into farm.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: And so all of the trees have been cut down, and so most of the south is is green, but then there's this thick brown band that represents the the historic floodplain.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: Um and then you can still see a band of green within that, which is this what's left of the batcher.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And so that it's just a phenomenal view of what we've done to the river.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Jesse.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: Um Boyce, is that the most I don't know how do I how do I phrase this?
24:35
SPEAKER_01: Is that the most uh striking uh human engineering issue that you see with the Mississippi?
24:43
SPEAKER_01: Um because I I appreciate what you're saying.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: I I also think about pushing the Delta out into the deeper parts of the Gulf and how it's just shocking when you view this again from a satellite photo.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: You can see that the Delta looks so pathetic compared to what it used to be, right?
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Because the, you know, all those wetlands are getting deprived of the gift of the river, and it's just getting shoved out into the into the deeper parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: And that's a what's the most shocking part of this to you?
25:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I mean I think both of and those things are really related too, right?
25:18
SPEAKER_00: The reason why we built the levee, right?
25:20
SPEAKER_00: The levee acts differently in the alluvial floodplain than it does in the deltaic floodplain, and right both of these things are because we built this levee and constrained the river.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: And so in the north, it like affects ecosystems, it affects uh interconnectivity to back channels, and and down here in Louisiana it affects it like causes this very paltry delta that we're gonna face.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we'd probably be facing problems no matter what because of sea level rise, but making it worse because of of the way we've kept the river in this one narrow channel.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: The most shocking thing.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like, I I like tried to think about this beforehand.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: I do think like to me, I don't know the most shocking, but like the biggest thing in terms of impact on human is gonna be what's happening here in Louisiana.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: It's just we're gonna have to completely rethink over the next century or two what life looks like here um in a way that's uh is different than than up north.
26:09
SPEAKER_03: But uh why and and why is that?
26:11
SPEAKER_03: Like for the for the people who haven't read the book uh and and and thought about levees, can you explain what you mean by that or why that is the case?
26:19
SPEAKER_03: You know, yeah, in basic sense.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: In some ways it's it's beyond just what we've done in the Missity River.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean I I've done uh sub done some subsequent writing of like with some of these sea level rise projections, sort of like the age of having large river deltas is coming to an end.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: Generally, the river deltas we have all across the world are eight-ish thousand years old, right?
26:40
SPEAKER_00: They have to do with climate and when didn't the sea level rise settled into place.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so now the oceans are changing entirely, and so there are very few rivers that are going to be able to keep up land building in the face of sea level rise.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: And then our engineering on the Mississippi and elsewhere is just making that worse.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: So there's like a big project that I discussed in the book about the you know, trying to fight this, but I note in the book it's kind of at best sort of slowing down a process that we can't totally stop.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: And that project, since I published the book, has basically been killed by a new governor in the state.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: And so it's sort of even worse circumstances.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: So it's just in part sitting here living in New Orleans, like this city will exist, but it's gonna exist in a very different context, and there's a lot of other places that will not exist.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Um and this coastline, this delta, like many deltas, is a really important human economic place, but it it has to change.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that's sort of what I mean.
27:34
SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
27:34
SPEAKER_03: Okay, so it's not okay, so it's partially due to the levying, but not entirely.
27:38
SPEAKER_03: I mean, sea level rise is is a is an extra added uh effect to this.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: The levies made us notice land like we were losing land here earlier, I think, but um now it's just gonna get exacerbated by sea level rise as well.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: So, boys, uh one of the you you outlined a lot of problems that the Mississippi faces.
27:57
SPEAKER_01: Um a depressing amount, frankly.
28:04
SPEAKER_03: As interesting as the book was, it was also like a little bit uh not so fun to read in some ways.
28:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I really get that.
28:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, some of the Amazon reviewers in your stomach.
28:14
SPEAKER_03: Yes, Amazon reviewers noted that.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: So, boys, um can you pick a couple that stand out to you that you want to kind of highlight portions of the book here about the problems that the Mississippi faces?
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, again, I mean like it's it's kind of a third of the right of the book, is one third the geology and the ancient history, one third how we spent the past couple centuries, and then one third, like, oh man, here's all the problems with those those centuries.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: And so and I try I did it to that section of the book.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: If you think suppressing that, it used to be twice as long in my editor.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: It's like we got to cut this in half.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: I had to find some organizing principles there.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of think about you know, there are problems in the channel, there's problems in the old floodplain, and so to run through, I mean it's like flooding's getting worse.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh the engineering that we built really can't do its job anymore because of that changing in the flooding.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: We've got the land loss that we talked about.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Again, I think land loss is is one of the ones that I am most worried about.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to tell to what extent that's because I'm here, but but that is a huge thing.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: But the other thing that comes to mind when you ask this is like the economic issues that were discussed in the book.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: Um and I do think those are deeply related to questions of geology and ecology.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: It's like not precisely, but um, you know, this is where geology is not entirely destined to you kind of layer on top of that what do societies and cultures decide to do without geology.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: But if you look at a map of high poverty counties in the United States, there is basically a wound at the bottom of the continent, right?
29:45
SPEAKER_00: The lower Mississippi River like sticks out as this dark red band because there's so much poverty along the lower Mississippi River.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: And that has a lot to do with like these things.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: We we built levies, but we built levees so that large landowners could protect their land and didn't think about the fact that there were sharecroppers.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: Like it's just like how we pass these around.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: And that becomes right.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: I wrote about something called the um Yazoo Pumps, a really controversial project in uh southern Mississippi, where they're trying to figure out, right, like in this highly engineered state, how do we go about uh preventing flood just like rippling effects of flooding on flooding?
30:20
SPEAKER_00: And so uh basically the Yazoo Basin is a bathtub and water collects in there, and there's supposed to be these pumps, but they haven't been built for ecological reasons.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think you can parse, you know, like you need to think about geology to parse that project, you need to think about ecology to parse that project, but you also really need to think about this Aquina County where this will be built, is the poorest county, uh at least east of the Mississippi, and one of the poorest counties in America.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: And so to me, that's the one thing that really sticks out here is like as we're thinking about all this work on this river, how does this socioeconomic thing layer over the top?
30:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
30:50
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it brought to mind to me that that I really like that that um chapter that you're discussing this.
30:56
SPEAKER_03: Uh it's heart wrenching in many ways to to read some of the stories, but it brings to mind the value of the intersectionality to all this stuff, you know, to have a societal conversation, right?
31:06
SPEAKER_03: Of of how do we value, how do we deal with these, in some ways, directly competing interests um of as you said, geology, society, economics, ecology.
31:16
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's really requires a conversation.
31:18
SPEAKER_03: It's tough to tough to do, and it requires a lot of nuance.
31:21
SPEAKER_03: And I think Chris, you know, Chris and I have done uh episodes and we've talked a lot about dams in the past and how there's all these old dams that were built in the the sort of era of engineering that you spend a lot of time in this book discussing, Arby Corps of Engineering, this kind of stuff, which in some cases it's really simple.
31:37
SPEAKER_03: The solution is just undo that engineering, but this is such an you described you just said an over-engineered area or a highly engineered area, I guess.
31:46
SPEAKER_03: How much of the engineering problems that you describe can be undone?
31:53
SPEAKER_03: Or do we have to is it is it are the solutions more often like adding another layer of engineering on top of this already engineered river system?
32:02
SPEAKER_03: Like this the I guess what struck me is the scale of engineering in the long history.
32:06
SPEAKER_03: I had no idea how long this history was and how how far up it extended, and what the interactions of this whole like ecosystem of just nav you know managing water in the Mississippi Delta is a huge job.
32:21
SPEAKER_03: Um is there any way out of the engineering sloop, or do we just do more engineering to fix the problems?
32:26
SPEAKER_01: So, boyce, hold on a second.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: That actually was a question that that Jesse just asked.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, it was really long-winded.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: So if you forgot, like it's he wants to know if we have to do we have to engineer our way out of this engineering mess that we created.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that it isn't difficult.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll say that's what we've been doing, right?
32:48
SPEAKER_00: There's a great phrase.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: Um Elizabeth Colbert, the uh is a pollster prize-winning science writer, talks about sort of how we we are now building control structures for our control structures, right?
32:57
SPEAKER_00: It's like we put we put some things in, like I talked about this old river control structure, and that's in place to make sure that the uh misphere does not evulse into a new channel, and that is at like has all these other effects.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Um and so that has both been sort of what we have to do.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: I still what we have to do.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I make a point at the end of this book that um at this point it's kind of impossible to determine what is natural, what is engineered.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: Right, these things have been there so long.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: Old river control structure is one of the newer things, but it's been there for 75 years, and we have so many dams uh and locks and levees, and so we've altered the hydrogeology in ways I note that like in some things are sped up, some things are slowed down.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: This is particularly Shaffalai Basin, right?
33:40
SPEAKER_00: There's sort of sedimentation is is speeding up in some places, and that um anything we do is more engineering, right?
33:47
SPEAKER_00: I also talked to a modeler who is looking at these issues of land loss, and he says, right, there's no there's very few, like the less we tinker, the better, but at this point we have to tinker because you can't can't pull down the levees, right?
33:59
SPEAKER_00: I I'm in this house would not be here if the house I'm sitting in could not exist without levees.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Um the Mississippi Delta, this place that I love, right?
34:06
SPEAKER_00: This place that the blue use came from of so much history, a place with so much poverty, right?
34:10
SPEAKER_00: It would just be destroyed if we took out the levees.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: And so there is no it's a really hard thing.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: Like my my feeling at the end of this book is the more we can let the river have its will and let the river do what it needs to do, the better.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: But we're that's just we won't live on this river anymore without having some kind of human interventions because we can't again, less the geology and more the social stuff.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: It's just like there's so many people that live here and depend on it, and and we can't just be like, well, the 70 million people on the Mississippi River don't matter anymore.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: It's just wild again.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: Boyce, Jesse, I gotta touch on something.
34:45
SPEAKER_01: Um Boyce, you said something that our listeners might have a question about just now.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: You said that the Achafalaya basin is experiencing increased sedimentation.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: Can you explain that and and what's the cause for that?
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Forgetting some of the things.
35:02
SPEAKER_03: Give us a visual of where this basin is a minute.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: Just yeah, if people think of like Cajun country where you're gonna go eat gator on a stick or something, which people actually eat, but but only a fair.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: Like the place where you'd think you'd go do that.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: That's the Chapelai Basin.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: This is the swamp Cajun place, it's just west of it.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: It's this big, big lowland that is uh west of the Mississippi, west of New Orleans.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: 500 years ago is actually mostly uh open, fresh water, I believe.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: And so it was already, right?
35:30
SPEAKER_00: It was this place that was being filled with sediment much later than many of the other parts of the Delta, and the rest of the Delta was mostly um brackish water because it was they were more open to the coast.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: And so it was already like it was the that was just the the current geology.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: It was like that's going to slowly fill in and and and kind of get more and more land and reach out further, further south.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: It's really complicated why it's a problem now, because now we put this control structure into Gichafalaya, which is the distributory of the Mississippi that drains the Chafalaya basin.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh and so it's a very strictly regulated.
36:06
SPEAKER_03: Can I interrupt?
36:07
SPEAKER_03: A distributary is as opposed to a tributary.
36:11
SPEAKER_03: It's not one that joins, it's one that branches off, right?
36:13
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
36:14
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: And so that's and that's what the delta is.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: Right?
36:17
SPEAKER_00: The delta is sort of the place where a set of distributaries flow.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: So the Chafalai is the last, basically the last distributary that gets any water at all.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: When it's strictly regulated through this control structure, it is also a designated floodway.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: So when the Mississippi River gets really big, we intentionally send flood waters down the Atchafalaya to protect other places.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: So there are levees that run, right?
36:38
SPEAKER_00: So the same issue we talked about before with the narrowed floodplain of the Chafalaya basin itself has been narrowed by these guide levees.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: And so that means all of this sediment that is coming with all these floods is in this narrower space.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: And so it just doesn't quite spread out the same way.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: So actually, you get parts of the historic Chafalaya basin that I think are subsiding because they're not receiving any sediment.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: And then within the this the guide levees that exist for the spillway, you're getting these craw fishermen that work out there just like within decades, they're seeing ponds that they're used to working kind of entirely fill in.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: And so it's just this, it's a really interesting sort of living laboratory for both just how naturally dynamic and ever-changing wetland ecosystems are, wetland geology is, but also then when you throw in things like linear dive bubblees, how you can kind of change that process as well.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: That's so interesting.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: Um it's like uh, you know, you engineer a river, and then you have to try to predict what are what what are the ramifications gonna be.
37:39
SPEAKER_01: And we don't seem to be very good at that.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: No, and I I quoted the textbook that basically said right as like that that said any kind of at least on a river the scale of the Mississippi, any engineering structure we put in cannot help but be an experiment, essentially.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's gonna alter, and there's such a complex set of different flows happening that our models are getting better and better, but historically have not been very good at predicting sort of like the long-term effect.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: And we don't look, right?
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Like the levy or the dams you mentioned earlier.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: The Army Corps usually does like a 50-year project life spill.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: Like this is we're building this, we're looking forward to 50 years, and we have you know lots of dams that are 100 plus years old, and so we we're not even bothering to think about what what they'll do in that timeline.
38:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, it's so I I I I want okay, I'm gonna ask a two-parter here, Chris.
38:26
SPEAKER_03: So don't get on me for extending this question too long.
38:29
SPEAKER_03: But boys, feel free to take notes.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, yeah.
38:33
SPEAKER_03: Or just answer only one of them.
38:35
SPEAKER_03: Um, but I I'm interested in your description of the engineering and of uh the flood control mechanisms really drove home for me that a flood is really just getting like the river's just it's getting jammed up.
38:50
SPEAKER_03: The water can't get out fast enough, and so they're trying to find other ways around it.
38:53
SPEAKER_03: So can you paint a picture for what these levees, like you said it, you know, they're they are engineering water out into this distributary.
39:01
SPEAKER_03: What does that look like?
39:02
SPEAKER_03: Can you just give us a visual of what the mechanism is?
39:05
SPEAKER_03: What's happening when they say, oh, we need more water going out?
39:08
SPEAKER_03: What is that like decision process and the actual mechanism looking like when that happens?
39:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the decision process is is pretty it's a pretty clear flowchart of like there's kind of then well, we the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that does all our waterways work, um, sort of created what they call a project design flood, which is sort of the statistical worst-case scenario.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: Like this is the worst flood we can imagine.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: And then they've decided all what all these different components of what's called the Mississippian tributaries project.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: They decide what happens when.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And so there's kind of a generally a sort of certain amount of cubic feet per second.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: If X amount passes this gauge, then this component will kick in.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: And so the chaff, there's the chaff a lot.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: There's four different spillways essentially.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: And and um, I don't I don't remember the triggers for all of them.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: The one here's New Orleans, it is 1.5 million cubic feet per second if that much water is coming towards New Orleans.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: They open up the body carry spillway.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: And so basically, what they there's an astonishing amount of water.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: It is so much water, yes.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, it's amazing.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: And so the levees, right, they they those are what contain the river, especially when it's at that flood stage.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: And they're in certain and the levees are just big piles of earth.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: But in certain places, uh in instead of earth, there's like big concrete structures with various kinds of gates.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: So the one by New Orleans is actually just a bunch of like pieces of timber that are they could kind of pull them out one by one, and the water flows through those the bays that they open that way.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: But the Chafalaya, the old old river control structure, and some others have tanner gates, right?
40:36
SPEAKER_00: So these just like metal gates that they can open and close.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: But that's literally it's they say it's it's hitting the amount of water we're worried about.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, someone goes to an office and hits a button and some gates open, or they pull out, you know, like send the team out to pull these things.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: And so then the water pours through kind of a spillway, like a specific area.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: And again, these are all really different.
40:54
SPEAKER_00: Each half a light spillway is I don't know, a hundred miles long, I think, at least.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: And then it composed so the body carry spillway in New Orleans New Orleans is maybe a dozen miles and then it hits like Pontch Train.
41:05
SPEAKER_00: So different, different things like this, but it's kind of like yeah, opening gates so that there's new passageways for the water outside of the levees that constrain it.
41:14
SPEAKER_03: And then part two of my question is that signal comes upstream, like what you know, what is the prediction uh time frame for um this type of stuff?
41:25
SPEAKER_03: Like usually if it rains a bunch in Illinois, do they have a pretty good understanding of of what is gonna have to happen downstream in a couple days or in a week or something like that?
41:35
SPEAKER_00: Or yeah, better, better.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: Like the forecasts go out, I think, 30 days, and they're generally generally good.
41:40
SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, right?
41:41
SPEAKER_00: Like this past couple weeks, there was sort of a record level rise.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: It was supposed to go up three feet a day for 10 days straight in some places.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't quite that was what the models predicted, and it didn't quite hit that.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: So it's still a little bit of an imprecise science.
41:55
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, generally, right?
41:56
SPEAKER_00: So here in New Orleans, they just engage the phase one flood fight today in New Orleans, I think, because the rivers hit a certain level level, and that just means they send engineers out to patrol to look at the levees, make sure they all look fine.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: But when they're gonna open the big spillway, usually, you know, there's an announcement three days before.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: It's like we think we're going to, you know, we think into three days.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: And I I note in the book, 2019 was a really, really big, really big and really long flood year.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: And it was one where, you know, it was hard to even predict this.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: And so they like were having to keep moving up timelines and saying, like, oh, we're gonna open it in three days.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, actually, we're gonna open it up tomorrow at noon because the the river's not acting the way we thought it would.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, boys, you you touched on it, you know, at the time we are recording this, a couple weeks ago, they had some pretty big events happen, you know, big storm events and so on.
42:42
SPEAKER_01: What was the response this time?
42:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, so far, I don't think people in New Orleans know, right?
42:47
SPEAKER_00: It's like we are deeply disconnected from the river, and so like people, nerds like me are like, oh, cool, like river's coming up.
42:53
SPEAKER_00: And the canoe guy that I'm that kind of got me into this whole project was like, I'm going out for two weeks.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love seeing the river at high water.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: And so he's just going around these backwaters in the Mississippi Delta.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: But the levee system has protected us so well and so long that uh, you know, I'm I live two blocks from the river, can't see it because the port rise like we just we're just here plugging away.
43:11
SPEAKER_00: And so so far, I mean, again, this is a really those were really big storms.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: This is a really rapid rise, but we are um still a ways away.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: It's such a big system that uh we're still a ways away from needing to engage in any sort of like this year, it's the first big water since I started right uh, you know, finished up the book essentially with that low water years, but it's not yet big enough to really be notable, nothing.
43:33
SPEAKER_00: We're just keeping an eye on it for now.
43:36
SPEAKER_03: That was actually going to be my question is like, what is the public perception of people near the Mississippi?
43:41
SPEAKER_03: What's the public perception in response to these things?
43:43
SPEAKER_03: And you're saying most people don't even know that this engineering is happening at any given time.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
43:49
SPEAKER_00: That's generally I mean, like so when they open the spillway near here, the the Army Corps makes an announcement, and usually there's like a nice there's a the certain people are just fans of this kind of stuff, and there will be a big crowd to watch them.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: open it up.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: But I think uh this city, New Orleans, is here because of the Mississippi border.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: It's just kind of background to us.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: We don't see it because of the levee.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: And so most people have no idea.
44:11
SPEAKER_00: So interesting.
44:12
SPEAKER_02: Very cool.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean I get it.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean I I just came back from a you know 25 mile long bike ride along the levee.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: I I if you're on the other side of it, you really have to make an effort to see the river.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: So exactly yeah that's yeah very interesting.
44:25
SPEAKER_03: So interesting.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: Well all right so boyce I have a a question that I don't know if this seems odd to you or not, but um if if we if we put you in charge of the Mississippi River, okay, you you're king of the Mississippi River.
44:41
SPEAKER_01: Tough question.
44:42
SPEAKER_01: What what do you do on day one?
44:44
SPEAKER_01: What does Boyce Uphold have to say?
44:47
SPEAKER_00: I I take off the crown and hand it to someone else.
44:49
SPEAKER_00: It's just funny because um the crowd well the the Army Corps of Engineers, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers is undergoing this sort of five year very many multi-million dollar study that's trying to they basically trying to ask every question they can about the lower Mississippi River.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: And I was doing a reading in a library here in the city and someone in the back raised their hand and was like if you and he looked very military and he's like if it was taking notes and he said you know if the Army Corps asked you what you what you want them to do in that study, what what would you say?
45:20
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of hand in hot and he came up to me later he's like I'm the head of the New Orleans district.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's the colonel in charge he invited me to come to speak at their office.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: And I just I don't have again we talked before about like there is no there's no way to engineer out of it.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: And so the and the the answer that I give there's no policy I could give I think I guess if I was king and I could make anything it'd be like I would magically force everyone in New Orleans and everyone in the watershed to like go and see it and like weep for a night in a tent on the banks of the river really far away and go out and canoe on the big river on their little tributary, whatever it is to me that is the biggest thing I think what I was just saying is like we nobody in New Orleans knows that the river is rising.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: We should.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: Like it did it's not going to impact our day-to-day life but it's geology shaped everything.
46:07
SPEAKER_00: And so I think if we want a better future for the river, we need more people that love the river that like intimately know it not as just the thing that the boats move on but like as a as a living being that has behaviors and desires and a will and yeah so that's what I would say.
46:25
SPEAKER_03: That's a good answer.
46:26
SPEAKER_03: Get everybody to to go be aware of it and appreciate it and and have some nuance in it.
46:30
SPEAKER_03: What has been uh and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to but what has been the reception to this book from the policy sort of people in charge category um has it been are people interested are people you know reaching out what I don't know generally what's been the reception of this?
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah people are definitely interested um I've been really affirmed by like people people seem to really enjoy the book right it's I I tried to make it comprehensive but fun at the same time and definitely hopefully comprehensible and I think that people have appreciated that.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: So like I said yeah the the sort of command colonel of the local district of the army corps had me in I know there's sort of different powerful people from different agencies I know have read the book which is just my again mind-blowing to someone who 10 years ago is like Yeah let me get in this canoe and see what's up with this I mean to I can't point to any policy changes but uh but but yeah but I think the book to me read very much like this is a great read.
47:27
SPEAKER_03: It's very interesting it's great storytelling and great writing and interesting science embedded in it.
47:32
SPEAKER_03: But more importantly it's thought provoking and important and maybe conversation starting which is which is I think the what I don't know may we I'm putting words in your mouth here but maybe as like a goal when you're kind of in this policy this really complicated societal topic it felt like to me that it should be starting conversations and that people should be reading it and like if you're working at the Armic engineering assign this to your staff to read this thing right and gain an appreciation.
47:58
SPEAKER_03: It struck me as as that so I'm encouraged to hear that that's the case.
48:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah I think that's happening and we had one of the someone came up to me at book festival a couple weeks back and was just like oh you know I just when I'm at the bar I just can't keep talking about the Mississippi River to people.
48:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm like great that's what I that's what I want I want to you know like that's right I don't want to be asked what the policy should be but I do want to like yeah get this river more loved and more talked about.
48:19
SPEAKER_03: So yeah absolutely I think that's and that because uh these are tough answers right there is no clear if there's a clear answer we would have done it a while ago.
48:28
SPEAKER_03: Right.
48:28
SPEAKER_03: But it's mostly just having an informed conversation about this stuff.
48:31
SPEAKER_03: So that's really great.
48:32
SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm I'm happy to hear that.
48:34
SPEAKER_03: Okay what's next after this and uh where can people maybe find out more about you?
48:39
SPEAKER_03: What are you working on now?
48:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah two two big projects both too big one and I'm trying to wrap my head around the next book but it it it almost certainly is looking like it's going to be another very even larger book.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm interested in in sort of the human relationship with meat with eating other animals and both like as a meat eater if that's is really conflicted about its impacts I might want to look at what it's meant to our species and then look and see if I can chart some kind of maybe a little more policy in this woman what would be a way to keep doing this on a global scale that won't destroy the climate and bring another pandemic.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: So more uplifting stuff.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: Great you want to put another pit right in my stomach that's that's awesome and then I'm crazily launching a magazine a print magazine on sort of falling in love with Miss City River has been part of falling in love with this adopted region of the South and so putting together a magazine called Southlands it's about sort of our relationship to nature and outdoor sport culture in the South and so that'll that'll be coming out in September.
49:39
SPEAKER_03: Oh very cool.
49:40
SPEAKER_03: Okay so South Lands with an S Southlands with an S.
49:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah so people can find me at voiceapple.com is my website and that will point you to to these various projects.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: To these things.
49:48
SPEAKER_03: Okay cool.
49:49
SPEAKER_03: So so on that on that part I mean it's a part of the world that I've spent very little time but is uh from my understanding becoming more popular for not from the outdoors perspective.
49:59
SPEAKER_03: Do you think is that accurate?
50:01
SPEAKER_00: People are are visiting that does the South for the outdoors more just because it's I think parts of it yes parts of it no I mean I think it's been left out I mean this it's just such a distinctive region in so many ways and and like we think of the West as being the center of so much recreation.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean the New York Times just had an article about how the Arkansas it was our mountain biking capital of the world thanks to the presence of the Walmart and Walton Mighty and so I think they're probably like North Carolina for sure but there's issues there with Hurricane Helene, Arkansas.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: So there's there's some pockets of it but I think there are other pockets there are other like really beautiful places that remain under the radar which I like and now here I am and I try and publicize that and get them from under that's what we do.
50:41
SPEAKER_03: We go mess it up yes yeah more people like the Bullheis family the Bullheis family you know has vacation come on now that's not fair we've been going down there for 25 years ever since my kids were born we've been going down to Louisiana Mississippi um I was just gonna say that and tell you say that you've been ahead of the curve but also that nobody wants more bullheistes vacationing in their area like nobody wants more of you so that's true that's true.
51:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah that's true.
51:11
SPEAKER_03: So all right well boys we've taken up too much of your time we just have one one final question.
51:15
SPEAKER_00: What was the best day in writing researching publishing this book what what's e you know any at any stage in the last 10 years what was the best day yeah I'm trying it was definitely one of the days in 2017 when I commit all the way down probably when I'll narrow that probably one of the days that was in the the Delta the one that sticks out in my memory was just Easter Sunday that year.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: We were on this uh big shelf of sand the river's kind of low and so there's like this 20 foot drop and like sitting and watching the sunset sitting and watching uh a thunderstorm come in across the mouth of the Arkansas River and we had the cadoo guy John Rusty that I work with kind of did a uh his spiritual ceremony and my father had passed away a little bit before this trip and it felt like I could like feel his presence so there's just this like beautiful day that epitomized so much of that trip on on that river.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: So it was beautiful.
52:06
SPEAKER_03: That's great.
52:07
SPEAKER_03: How how long of a trip is that you said you went from where did you say you started St.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: Louis a couple miles actually a couple miles up the Missouri River.
52:15
SPEAKER_00: So it's uh around 1100 miles and it took us we actually had to split it up into two tricks because the weather got really dicey when we were almost in New Orleans but kind it basically took six ish weeks in total.
52:26
SPEAKER_03: Wow that's amazing what an experience it was an incredible experience yeah yeah yeah yeah that's awesome well all right thanks boys this has been really great people can can find your book like you said boysupbolt.com we'll put a link in the show notes um and thanks for your time this is in this is a great book I I really enjoyed this read I learned about that a lot about the history and and a lot about the geological engineering that's going on here and the problems with the Mississippi so thanks for joining us this is a great conversation I want to add I want to add just one thing to that too um I've felt connected to the Mississippi for a long time in my life but reading your book deepened that connection and like I think that's what that's what we need.
53:04
SPEAKER_01: We need people to feel connected to these things so they care about them.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: And I just want to thank you for that because I feel like your book deepened that level for me which was already substantial.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate it.
53:15
SPEAKER_00: That's thank you so that's that my friend asked if you put the book in that will with success be and it was like things like getting people to know the river or getting known deep more deeply so thank you for sharing that.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
53:24
SPEAKER_03: All right appreciate it thanks boys we'll we'll we'll be in touch.
53:27
SPEAKER_03: Awesome thanks on all right hey that's a wrap you can find all of our podcasts on our Planet Geo website planetgeocast.com YouTube page search Planet Geo.
53:36
SPEAKER_03: You can download our mobile app first link in the show notes that you can get access to all of our visual podcast series including a bunch of free content the basically the intro class that Chris and I teach intro to geology first college class you would take uh you can also purchase access to the geology of a bunch of our national parks and the series on our soldiers rocks amongst others so go to that link first link in the show notes send us email plan geocast at gmail.com or reach out at any of the social videos at like you're