| This thesis explores the historical relationship between the Mississippi River and the human environment of the Twin Cities metropolitan region. How cities exploit their immediate environments and how urban residents have sought to sustain a relationship with nature over time are among the primary questions this thesis seeks to ask. A variety of scientific, municipal, and historical sources are used to document local ecology and cultural history. The first chapter, “Land of Sky-Blue Waters,” begins with a physical geography of the Twin Cities region and then portrays the transition from Native American to Euro-American uses of the Mississippi River. Chapter two, “The Managed Mississippi,” discusses the region's response to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century industrial contamination and pollution of the river by building sewage treatment plants and navigation locks and dams between St. Louis and Minneapolis. The third chapter, “Rachel Carson, Pesticides, and Urban Ecology,” puts the effects of the “green revolution” in agricultural science and technology in an urban perspective. The argument presented is that the postwar economic boom based on consumption, suburban growth, and blind faith in the benefits of pesticides and other chemicals was a dangerous experiment played out on urban Americans as well as those in agricultural communities. Chapter four, “Tapping the Wishing Wells,” examines the water supply of the Twin Cities. Although the Mississippi River is an important source of water, over one half of the water supply for the region comes from groundwater. Regional groundwater supplies are especially susceptible to long-term pollution from sewage and industrial contamination. This precarious situation is one the metropolitan region shares with much of the rest of the world. Chapter five, “Nature's Instruction,” explores the development of a more ecologically centered understanding of nature in land use planning, park acquisition and construction, and nature education in the Twin Cities. The thesis concludes by observing the desire by Americans to live in “sacred” space and with a discussion of the conflicting economic, political, and social limits urban Americans will face in constructing such lives in the twenty-first century. |
