Open Rivers

Open Rivers editor went behind the scenes into the collections at the while attending the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) conference in St. Paul this week. Thank you to the SMM team for a wonderful and educational visit!

Food systems planner Lynn Peemoeller walks us through the cultural, botanical, and culinary history of pokew**d, a resilient native plant with a distinctive ability to thrive in disturbed and polluted areas. Peemoeller calls for us to be in kinship with, not in opposition to, w**ds like poke – to see them, in all their complexity, as "partners in place." **d

Read more at

Pokelore: How a Common W**d Leads Us to Kinship with Our Mid-River Landscape By Lynn Peemoeller “A w**d is a plant growing in a place where we don’t want it, and I have seldom seen a poke plant that I wanted removed.” Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus[1] It’s certa…

How do we create a space that inspires engagement and action around water no matter where we engage with community members? Aron Chang writes about his work with the Civic Studio and the Water Leaders Institute, explaining how installations of big river drawings using painter's tape are designed to invite people into conversations and environmental learning. Using these building-scale graphics can drive engagement, education, and action by demonstrating the connections between upstream actions and downstream conditions. Read more at https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/big-river-drawings/. We Are Water MN

Big River Drawings: In Support of Learning, Welcoming, and Community Engagement By Aron Chang A common directive in community engagement is to “meet people where they are.” One way to do that is to locate activities where the community already gathers. This might mean organizi…

Looking for some reading that will give you hope, joy, and connection to people and place? Download your copy of Open Rivers Issue 28 | Mississippi River Open School now! This collection of articles draws together practices and strategies for social connection, action, and restoration that reinvigorate social and ecological communities along the entire Mississippi River. PDFs of each article and the issue as a whole are available now at openrivers.lib.umn.edu/.

The Mississippi River is ranked #1 in this year's list of most endangered rivers from American Rivers. Check out some of the ways people along the full length of the river work to inspire connection and engagement with people and place in the latest issue of at openrivers.lib.umn.edu.

🔊 America’s Most Endangered Rivers® of 2025 report is here!

From Alaska to New Jersey, and from extreme weather like drought, logging, mining, and flooding, these 10 rivers all have one thing in common: they are all at a tipping point, facing an urgent decision in the coming months.

The threats facing are imminent, but not inevitable. Take action today and speak up for greater investment in rivers and clean water.

🔗 Take action: https://mostendangeredrivers.org/?utm_campaign=MER&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_content=1744812044

Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community welcomes participants from any university and any graduate program to join its Graduate Student Committee. Members will gain practical professional experience in digital media, editing, and publishing while exploring public scholarship in their own practice. Participants will gain skills that serve both academic and non-academic career paths. Learn more at https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/gsc/.

In his introduction to the issue and the Mississippi River Open School, guest editor John Kim explains the power of solidarity programs to help people reconnect with each other and with other-than-humans. Based on his experiences with these kinds of programs, Kim argues for transformations in educational practices to respond to and resist the challenges of the Anthropocene and what he argues is "the geosocial disaster that unfolds around us." Read more at: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/action-camps-everywhere/
Welcome Water Protectors Center at the Great River

We are pleased to announce Issue 28 | Mississippi River Open School, featuring work from the Mellon-funded Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange. With seven long-form essays and nine toolkit columns, this ambitious collection offers strategies for reimagining the possibilities of education, invigorating our connections to place, and fostering supportive communities to confront environmental challenges across the entire length of the Mississippi.
Foundation
https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/

Never miss an issue! Open Rivers Issue 28 will be released to our subscribers in early April. Subscribe now (for free!) at z.umn.edu/ORsubscribe to be sure you receive these stories fresh in your inbox.

As we approach the publication of Issue 28, let's look back through the wide-ranging, thoughtful work from last fall in Issue 27 | Prospect. As editor writes in her introduction, the articles offer us "the prospect of seeing the conditions of our environment a little differently, widening our scope, and animating potentials for the future." Read more at: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/introduction-to-issue-27-prospect/

Flying out of MSP for Spring Break? Be sure to check out poet and author 's two exhibits in Terminal One – Minnesota Waters, at gate E8, and Minnesota Landscapes, at gate F10. You can read "Do You Know Where You Are?", her moving meditation on the Indigenous place names and ways of seeing that inspired her poem "Confluence," in Open Rivers Issue 27 | Prospect: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/do-you-know-where-you-are/

To commemorate International Women's Day, we invite you to explore these articles from Issues 21 and 22, our Women and Water series. Through scholarly inquiry and personal testimony, across geographies and disciplines, these authors challenge and deepen our understanding of women's relationship with waterways.

"Storying the Floods: Experiments in Feminist Flood Futures," by Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Margot Higgins, Tamara Dean, Eric G. Booth, and Rebecca Lave, from Issue 22: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/storying-the-floods/

"Formless Like Water: Defensoras and the Work of Water Protection," by Natalia Guzmán Solano, from Issue 22: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/formless-like-water/

"Washed Up," by Shannon LeBlanc, from Issue 22: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/washed-up/

"Open Water," by Aizita Magaña, from Issue 22: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/open-water/

"Floodplains and Hurricanes: Mapping Natural Disasters to Uncover Vulnerable Communities," by Kristin Osiecki, from Issue 21: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/floodplains-and-hurricanes/

"Water as Weapon: Gender and WASH," by Becky L. Jacobs, from Issue 21: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/water-as-weapon-gender-and-wash-2/

"Women Landowners and the Language of Partnership Needed for Water Quality Change," by Linda Shenk, Jean Eells, and Wren Almitra, from Issue 21: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/women-landowners/

"How the River Moves Us: Women Speak Their Story," by Victoria Bradford Styrbicki, from Issue 21: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/how-the-river-moves-us-women-speak-their-story-2/

"Collaboration for a Common Goal," by Mollie Aronowitz, Jennifer Terry, Ruth McCabe, and Mary Beth Stevenson, from Issue 21: https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/collaborationforacommongoal/