Here at River Life, we think a lot about what a university like ours should do to be a good citizen of our place. The campus at the University of Minnesota is on Dakota land; that is a responsibility we must take seriously. We are in a national park, on one of the world’s great rivers, and
A year or so ago, when I met with Amélie Allard about her work on the fur trade in Minnesota, I was interested generally in her observations about that contested, fraught place and time. When she mentioned that participants understood space from the perspective of rivers and water, rather
There are lots of reasons for academic professionals to blog, probably as many as there are academics blogging. One of the blogs that regularly informs our work is “Watershed Moments: Thoughts from the
On Thursday October 25, the IAS Thursdays program was “All That We Are Is Story,” highlighting the connections between water, story, language, place, and community. A part of the broader We Are Water MN conversation at the University of Minnesota, the program centered
In Minnesota, there is a growing awareness among most water professionals that water problems won’t be solved in the future simply through better science or engineering. In many cases, specialists argue, the science is pretty clear in terms of what is polluting the state’s waters and what
There has always been a nice play on words within the We Are Water MN project—we are, in fact, largely water, as many people learn in biology class at some point. But we are also, in important respects, the sum of our engagements with water. Nearly everyone has