HN Explorer

The Mississippi is dying, and I want to record it.

3 points by mercuryrising ↗ HN
Humans don't do nice things to the environment. Before we populated the Midwest, you could actually catch fish and eat them out of the Mississippi river. Now you can maybe eat one a year due to the Mercury in the water. We neglect the river, we destroy it, and we treat it like a toilet, not nice like the faucet it could be.

I just graduated from college, I don't have a job (by choice). I want to do something awesome. I want to ride a boat from the start of the Mississippi (Lake Itasca) down to Lock and Dam #1 (the first large amount of human control exerted over the river, and conveniently located near my house). I want to take water samples the whole way down (hopefully with some kind of real time chemical sensing equipment). I want to collect this data, put it online (raw data), and build a visualizer for it overlaying Google maps or something. I'll put the raw data up so you can do something cooler with it.

I would like this project to spark interest in other people to take care of their water sources, I want other people around the world to take on similar projects. I want people to realize that the environment is not an unmovable object, but humans may be an unstoppable force until we go too far.

1 comment

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 8.8 ms ] thread
maxharris
The human environment is a lot better today than it ever was before. That era that you could catch and eat fish out of the river? It's the same era where medicine was primitive (no antibiotics, no anesthetics, no chemotherapy), food was comparatively scarce (and most of the population toiled to produce it), etc. Everything was much harder to do, and life was generally shorter on top of all that.

You say "before we populated the Midwest, you could actually catch fish..."

But that presupposes that I exist in the first place. If you somehow repealed the industrial revolution, I and millions of other people would not exist. Without modern industry to transform it, the natural environment could not sustain the majority of people alive today. (So there might be lots of fish, but not many humans to catch and enjoy them.) Nature as you hold it does not represent any kind of ideal, because under that view, I (and nearly everything I hold dear), do not exist.