“Radical Impermanence”: Riverine Environments in the Politics and History of the U.S. South

Near a looping bend carved out by the Alabama River at Montgomery, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has erected the new National Monument to Freedom.The human rights organization seeks to lay bare the history of slavery and struggle in and beyond the American South.Powerful forces in the United States are trying to rewrite this history and block its teaching in classrooms today.Though the recent radical shift in the American political landscape may have hit with shocking speed and intensity, the Freedom Monument reminds us that competing forces of oligarchy and democracy have long coexisted.Historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted this central paradox in U.S. history: that those who founded a nation upon human equality "also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior." 1 Through unrelenting struggle over more than two and a half centuries, marginalized and oppressed constituencies have countered oligarchic currents, expanding democratic rights in the United States.American rivers, as everchanging markers of empire, expose a contested history of environmental injustice.Political scientist James C. Scott wrote in his final book, In Praise of Floods, about river history, that we are living in a geopolitical moment of "hyper-radical uncertainty." 2 Water, perhaps above all things, is the physical embodiment of that uncertainty, of radical impermanence.Through flooding, seasonal change, and course alteration, rivers shape and reshape the landscape, modifying the context for human activity.Shifting an interpretive lens to consider riverine pathways reinvigorates questions of culture, power, and scale.Considering alterations in the flows of rivers-both natural and humanengineered-over long timeframes, using firsthand accounts and technical data sets reveals that rivers can be routes of exploitation and injustice and also key sites of restorative efforts.On the one hand, rivers map the historical record of extreme extraction of both human labor and environmental wealth, from Indigenous dispossession and slavery forward.At the same time, standing on the shoulders of the Black freedom struggle, multi-site, multi-constituency environmental justice groups have taken action to protect human health and fragile ecosystems, achieving some success in restoring watersheds, even in conservative locales.Current shifts in federal environmental policies severely threaten those advances.Bubbling up out of the southern Appalachian mountains, the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river system, known as the A-C-T, waters the land-based empire of the Alabama Black Belt before I am grateful to Gaetano