essay available in english and polish
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We get the Dialectic fairly well,
How streams descending turn to trees that climb,
That what we are not we shall be in time,
Why some unlikes attract, all likes repel.
But is it up to creatures or their fate
To give the signal when to change a state?

– W.H. Auden, 1940

Rivers unite; they make life possible. 

Rivers divide; they make life precarious. 

The river’s dialectic demands respect: it cannot flow without floods. Yet humans in pursuit of profit have sought to pry its dimensions apart. The Odra and the Mississippi, which surge through two different continents, are witnesses to our own duality, in which the limitless capacity to build is shadowed by the drive to destroy. Today, the age of the Anthropocene has revealed the hubris of humanity’s belief that we are masters. If we and the waters that sustain us are to survive, the will to power must cede to an ethics of care.   

The Odra runs south to north, from the Czech mountains to the Baltic Sea. The Mississippi runs north to south, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. For millennia each has attracted humans. In and around the water, ancient communities found a solution to their thirst, fish to fill their bellies, fertile soil for growing, and ways to connect with each other. They built settlements that became villages, and boats that floated to faraway towns. On the Odra, the Amber Route brought treasures from the Baltic coast, while the Salt Route carried flavor from Scythian steppes to Germanic tables. Along the Mississippi, Indigenous tribes built mounds and pyramids where neighbors would gather to deliberate and feast near fields of corn, squash, and sunflower. Native peoples embraced flooding as a gift that allowed fish to flourish and the soil to be revitalized. 

With the rise of centralized states that ruled over far-flung domains, rival powers tried to claim rivers as their own. In 1541, the Mississippi was “discovered” by Hernando de Soto, a Spanish conquistador in search of gold. De Soto’s arrival inaugurated a race among the Spanish, British, and French empires to settle the river’s shores and enslave the locals. The Mississippi’s name is a remnant of colonial seizure; the French appropriated it from the Ojibwe tribe’s words for “long river.” After the United States won its battle for the Mississippi in 1812, the river was channeled into the national myth of America’s “civilizing mission” as it spread West. A 19^th-century mural in the US Capitol building depicts subservient natives submitting to de Soto, who rides in on a white horse, on the shore of the gleaming river. 

Along the Odra, various kingdoms—including the Duchy of Moravia, the dukes of Silesia, Brandenburgers, and Pomeranians—coexisted along different sections of the river. From the early 18^th century, Prussia ruled it alone. Twentieth century nationalism hardened the river’s wavy line into an existential divide. With the reemergence of independent Poland after World War I, Germany began to guard the Odra (its eastern edge) with bunkers and trenches, and German patriots hailed it as “the carrier of the German spirit.” After World War II, when the Allied leaders at Potsdam made it Poland’s western border, Polish patriots asserted that it had been Polish all along. This fiction required the removal of the millions of Germans who inhabited Silesia and their replacement with Poles transferred from the East. 

As the peoples surrounding them changed, so did the rivers. Modern capitalism brought management practices that exploited humans and endangered water, plant, and animal life. Both the Odra and the Mississippi powered trade, industry, and large-scale agriculture. In 1912, a German folk poet depicted the Odra as a “noble peasant woman” draped in “lime and coal dust.”¹ Such fables obscured the extractive industries that were brutally transforming rivers and their ecosystems. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Prussian statesmen and German industrialists eager to seize Silesia’s deposits of lead, zinc, silver, gold, and coal polluted the Odra, as did the sugar refineries built by its shores. Along the Mississippi, enslaved Black laborers were forced to hack down trees and replace them with “King Cotton,” a crop that brought fabulous wealth to plantation owners and immiseration to those who grew it. Both European and American governments sought to turn the rivers into easily navigable routes for shipping commodities by installing locks, dams, and levees. These measures cut the rivers off from the tapestry of fields, forests, wetlands, and marshes that had allowed them to thrive. In the 20^th century, fertilizers used in industrial farming dumped nitrogen and phosphorus into the water. 

Rosa Luxemburg recognized capitalism’s exploitation of nature as part of its relentless search for new resources. Luxemburg was certain that as empires exhaust themselves, nature fights back. The Odra and the Mississippi have fought as best they can, with erratic and overwhelming floods that show the folly of attempting to separate rivers from their floodplains. But as they struggle to assert their rights, rivers and the communities they support have endured rising devastation. Along the lower Mississippi, chemical processing plants have caused cancer rates to spike in the poor farming communities whose enslaved ancestors once planted sugar and cotton near its shores. In the Odra, the combined effects of industrial contamination and climate change created algae blooms that caused the mass death of fish, snails, and mussels (which naturally cleanse its waters) in summer 2022.  

Just as chemicals run through rivers, so right-wing populism poisons the body politic. In an echo of the states and companies that have divided up the Odra and the Mississippi, depriving them of the diverse ecosystems they need to be healthy, authoritarian politicians separate and demonize those they label as “other” to fulfill an artificial vision of national purity and progress. Their mission to isolate and suppress minorities is paralleled by their delusional insistence on trying to subjugate nature. In the US, Donald Trump’s administration has stripped away environmental protections, ended green energy programs, and downsized and defunded the organizations that respond to floods, with fatal effects for river communities. Poland’s Law and Justice government defended the coal industry and was the only EU country that did not support the bloc’s decarbonization goals. During the Odra fish die-off, the party’s politicians barely responded to the disaster, failing to notify the German government and ignoring the polluters who were responsible (including the Polish mining industry). Forsaken by the state, local fishermen and volunteers took care of the cleanup themselves. Authoritarians’ opponents, who tend to be more loyal to capital than to equality, often fail to step up and offer protection for the vulnerable. Rivers, like migrants and LGBTQ+ citizens, are not recognized as community members with rights. Their paths are violated and narrowed, their bodies abused. 

How to maintain hope in the dark? Rivers can be a guide. Their slinking shapes, which link individual bodies of water to a greater oceanic whole, resist the modern inclination to atomize and discipline. They anchor us to the land and to each other. “It is not time and space that govern the river, but the river itself that governs them,” Olga Tokarczuk once wrote. “It establishes a soothing continuity, keeps the entire land in a constant, safe place.”² Rivers teach us to discard the practices that do not work—the strictures that tell us time only moves forward through ceaseless conflict, when in fact it loops backward and ties us with what has come before. They remind us, as the American poet Mary Oliver wrote about wild geese flying home, of our “place in the family of things.” ³

Communities who seek to heal the Odra and the Mississippi revive forms of care that predate artificial boundaries between states and species. The Mississippi is still home to tribes—the Ojibwe, Dakota, and Chitimacha—that follow the practices of their ancestors, who respected the river’s agency rather than attempting to rule it. In 2013, a group of Indigenous women walked 1,500 miles along the river to call for clean water. Participants in the annual Nibi Walk pray for the Mississippi and express thanks for its “life-giving force,” which includes floods. In 2022, lower Silesian activists created Osoba Odra (The Person Odra), a movement that calls for the river to be granted legal personhood. The group takes inspiration from the Maori people, who achieved legal recognition of New Zealand’s Whanganui River as a person in 2017. Members of Osoba Odra identify themselves as “the tribe of the Odra” and repeat the Maori saying, “I am the river and the river is me.” 

These groups advocate for respecting rivers’ rights by reconnecting them to their floodplains and reducing the man-made structures that violate their sovereignty. Such local initiatives have already made change. In 2015, seven kilometers of embankment were removed along the Odra to increase flood safety and bring back the riparian forest, resulting in the restoration of over 600 hectares of floodplain. Together, movements focused on the health of rivers are part of the broader call for degrowth, which dismisses capitalism’s ruthless commitment to profit. Instead of destruction and waste, it seeks regeneration and equity. 

The obstacles to repair are great: Luxemburg observed that capitalism rejects any attempt to restrict its appetites. A botanist as well as a radical economist, she felt deeply how all life forms are interconnected. In a letter from prison, she described the grief she experienced while reading about how modern agricultural and forest management had caused songbirds to vanish from Germany: “I was so much distressed at the idea of the stealthy and inexorable destruction of these defenseless little creatures that tears came into my eyes.” ⁴

Despite the “stealthy and inexorable destruction” Luxemburg diagnosed, rivers and the many beings they support—catfish and crabs, beavers and hedgehogs, herons and ducks—have endured. So, too, have the Indigenous communities who were killed, enslaved, and pushed onto reservations by rapacious Europeans. People like the Ojibwe offer a more empathetic and sustainable model of living that puts all humans in their proper, humble place as members of an ecosystem. “Our lives are possible because of all these other lives,” Rosina Philippe, an elder from the Grand Bayou Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe, once observed while walking along the Mississippi. “Any one thing you take out, its absence will be known.”⁵

BIO