Lee Sandlin

“The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.”
― Lee Sandlin, Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild

“Hersey was describing for the first time the war's true legacy: a permanent condition of helpless anger and universal dread. Hiroshima was the end of the line for the archaic idea that war was something that soldiers did on battlefields, somewhere on the far side of the horizon. The great strategic breakthrough of the war had been the targeting of civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction -- so that for the first time in history everybody, soldier and civilian alike, could share equally in the horror of battle. Now the postwar world was elevating this principle, making it the organizing fact of existence. After Hiroshima, Armageddon could erupt anytime, anywhere on earth, without warning, by accident. Even as people walked heedlessly in the streets, the bombs could be spiraling down from an invisible plane passing in the stratosphere; at dinnertime in the heartland, as the local news droned on about the Middle East, the missiles could already be arching over the north pole, like the ribs of a strange new cathedral.”
― Lee Sandlin