By the time it reaches New Orleans, the Mississippi River is actually made up of the Illinois, the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Arkansas Rivers. It has drained more than 41% of the Lower 48 United States and collected water from New York to Idaho, from Texas to Alberta. With this water comes a little bit of almost everything else inside those boundaries -- animals, plants, bacteria, industrial waste, the Appalachian Mountains, everything. It is this last category, that of land itself, that has been most important in shaping the life of the American South.

In fact, both the Rockies and the Appalachians are washing down river and into the Delta. So are small amounts of pretty much every backyard, barnyard, courtyard and shipyard in the Mississippi River Basin. In the centuries before European settlement of the area, the effect of this movement was a net positive for the guys on team Land of the Gulf Coast League. The whole process was rather like an English fairytale: the River would steal from the altitude-rich Northern latitudes and give to the altitude-poor Southern ones. Over the eons and through periodic floods, Nature redistributed this land to form much of the states we now call Louisiana and Mississippi.

From the point of view of sedentary America, the problem with real estate that depends on rivers and floods for its existence is two-fold: first, unless you want to keep getting out of the water's way, your stuff needs to get wet from time to time. And second, land made up of unconsolidated sediment tends not to stay that way for very long. The ground creaks and sinks and cracks and settles until it is dense enough to support itself.

As far back as the 17th century, Europeans were piling up dirt along side the Mississippi River to keep it from getting into their stuff. All this piling up got a significant boost when slavery came to the Deep South, another boost when throngs of cheap immigrant laborers arrived from Europe and Asia, and one final boost when the Army Corps of Engineers set up camp at a place called Old River.

Before we started walling it in, the Mississippi was extremely porous along its banks, and water escaped along every mile of the River. Even at relatively low water, the River would leak out into the surrounding country. That's why Louisiana is short and wide, not long and narrow. But since the Corps got down to work, in the two-thousand-odd miles it travels from its source in Minnesota's Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River does not leave its banks naturally until Bayou Baptiste Collette, sixty miles below New Orleans. The Corps' system of levees, dams and locks has rendered the River (with some very notable exceptions) so regular and predictable that it has become the major commercial highway into the vast American heartland. A waterway that over geological time has wandered hundreds of miles to the east, west and back again more than once, now travels as straight and true as Interstate 95.

As General Thomas Sands of the Corps points out, this control has made possible a vast and complex civilization in lands that were once bottomless swamps. "In most water resource stories," he told John McPhee in 1989, "you can identify two sides. Here there are many more. The crawfishermen and the shrimper come up within five minutes asking for opposite things.... Navigation interests say, 'The water is too low. Don't take more away....' Municipal interests say 'Keep the water high or you'll increase saltwater intrusion....' Farmers say, 'Get the water off us quicker," but folks downstream don't want it quicker. As water levels go up, we divert some fresh water into marshes, because the marshes need it for the nutrients and the sedimentation, but oyster fishermen complain. They all complain except the ones who have seed-oyster beds, which are destroyed by excessive salinity. The variety of competing influences is phenomenal." This is to say nothing of the different industries -- oil, plastics, automotive, chemical, paper, mining and dozens of other heavy lifters -- that depend on the River.

While this long-term domestication of the River -- which began in earnest during the late 1920s -- has done much for the economic vitality of its watershed, it has stopped the process of land creation dead in its tracks. Because the land can no longer replenish itself through periodic flooding, the process of subsidence through which this year's dirt settles into the cracks left by last year's now proceeds without its semi-annual top dressing. As a result, the whole operation is literally sinking. And it has been for a while.

As vessels pass through New Orleans on the River, they travel more like blimps than ships with respect to the residents of the city. Even on the relatively high ground of the Superdome, one must look up to see the bottom of their respective hulls. Somewhere around half of New Orleans now lies below sea level, and all of it is below the level of the River. The city is, in essence, a giant bathtub, walled and sealed by a hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls. But unlike most bathtubs, you can't just pull the plug on this one: any water that falls on the city (whether from the sky or through a breech in the levee system) has to be either pumped out or evaporate on its own.

Pumping from one area, however, makes the sinking worse in other areas. Many of the city's suburbs are located in St. Bernard Parish, which, even before hurricane Katrina, was two percent solid ground, eighteen percent wetland and eighty percent water. Rather than watering the lawn, the suburbanites of St. Bernard Parish buy truckloads of dirt to fill the low spots in the yard. Jumping up and down on some lawns can shake the rest of the neighborhood like a bowl full of Jello or a giant waterbed.

As the land continues to sink, the ocean encroaches on the coast. A hundred years from now, Plaquemines Parish and Terrebonne Parish will be lost to the sea. Each year, the state surrenders more than 50 square miles of land, whereas before the levees, the state added land at roughly that rate. The wetlands that disappear take with them essential buffering capacity against storms and surges. A mile of marsh eliminates about an inch of storm surge. Thirty miles is enough to make the difference between levees holding and levees breaking.

The engineering feats that once made human economic life possible in the bayou have now made it extremely tenuous. The arms race between man and nature is one that most people outside of the Corps feel we cannot win. But the next question -- that of what exactly we will be left with if we do win -- has been absent from the debate. The walled city went out of style with Joshua, until we brought it back through our settlement of the Delta.

We are all connected to New Orleans in a way. The water from Lake Pontchartrain that poured into the city last Tuesday fell here in Chicago. It fell in Pittsburgh. And it fell in Asheville and Casper and Jackson and Cleveland. When we start manipulating ecosystems on such an enormous scale, we start making billion dollar tradeoffs. We spend billions of dollars to make it easier for the oil companies and plastic companies and chemical companies of the lower Mississippi Basin to deliver products to consumers of the upper Basin. But we also set ourselves up to spend billions on the repair of communities whose livelihood depends on our engineering feats never once surrendering to the most powerful forces on earth. And as we saw during the evacuation, the people with the most riding on this latter bet are poor African Americans. It's an intricate web we've woven.

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