Oct 9, 2026 · 47 min · 9 segments
A conversation with Professor Silvia Secchi (University of Iowa) about the Mississippi River watershed, its sociohydrology, and visioning alternative futures. Released October 9, 2026.
Silvia SecchiGuestMallika NoccoHostFaith KearnsHost
Samuel SandovalHost
I'm, I'm trained as an economist, but I think it's extremely important that we understand the historical roots of our current problems, whether they're social problems, environmental problems, justice issues.
From my perspective, essentially, the Mississippi River has really borne the brunt of the practices of westward expansion.
And it was allotted in squares, which if you know anything about how water flows, doesn't make any sense, right? The water doesn't follow the grids.
It, it seems silly, but every once in a while we talk about boundaries on our podcast and like how we draw these boundaries, or humans draw boundaries, and water does not adhere to those boundaries, especially when they're in little squares.
It's one of the symptoms of this agroextractivism, but it is also one of the kind of like, um, defining characteristics of our management system these days still, right? And so the idea of manifest destiny and westward expansion is we, you know, we're gonna create all these squares, we're gonna put white people largely in all these squares.
You know, in Iowa, we had Black code laws that basically forbade Black people from settling in the state.
And so that's why the, the a- agricultural in the Midwest is largely white, right? And we are gonna farm them in very, um, kinda like, uh, non-native ways in the sense that we're gonna import these, uh, technologies, these approaches, even some of these crops, right, from Europe that does not necessarily work with nature.
And, and farmers were farming in ways that were basically linked to larger production systems.
Uh, so I think the roots of our current problems now, where we essentially produce so much corn we have to come up with ideas like ethanol to use it up, come from this kind of history, a history of working against nature rather than with it, a history of not listening to native practices, native knowledge of this land.
It, it-- so to me, we started extracting then, and we're still extracting, you know, in the sense that how we mine our soils, uh, today, right? So the last bit of profit, how we...
I think the best example I can give, uh, of that is how our conservation activities go down when prices are high, right? From fence row to fence row in the 1970s to the ethanol boom, where we reduced a lot of our conservation acreage in the conservation reserve program.
When prices are high, we wanna farm the heck out of it, and we do less conver- uh, conservation.
When prices are high, because the pressure on the environment is high too, we should do more conservation.
I'm, I'm trained as an economist, but I think it's extremely important that we understand the historical roots of our current problems, whether they're social problems, environmental problems, justice issues.
From my perspective, essentially, the Mississippi River has really borne the brunt of the practices of westward expansion.
And it was allotted in squares, which if you know anything about how water flows, doesn't make any sense, right? The water doesn't follow the grids.
It, it seems silly, but every once in a while we talk about boundaries on our podcast and like how we draw these boundaries, or humans draw boundaries, and water does not adhere to those boundaries, especially when they're in little squares.
It's one of the symptoms of this agroextractivism, but it is also one of the kind of like, um, defining characteristics of our management system these days still, right? And so the idea of manifest destiny and westward expansion is we, you know, we're gonna create all these squares, we're gonna put white people largely in all these squares.
You know, in Iowa, we had Black code laws that basically forbade Black people from settling in the state.
And so that's why the, the a- agricultural in the Midwest is largely white, right? And we are gonna farm them in very, um, kinda like, uh, non-native ways in the sense that we're gonna import these, uh, technologies, these approaches, even some of these crops, right, from Europe that does not necessarily work with nature.
And, and farmers were farming in ways that were basically linked to larger production systems.
Uh, so I think the roots of our current problems now, where we essentially produce so much corn we have to come up with ideas like ethanol to use it up, come from this kind of history, a history of working against nature rather than with it, a history of not listening to native practices, native knowledge of this land.
It, it-- so to me, we started extracting then, and we're still extracting, you know, in the sense that how we mine our soils, uh, today, right? So the last bit of profit, how we...
I think the best example I can give, uh, of that is how our conservation activities go down when prices are high, right? From fence row to fence row in the 1970s to the ethanol boom, where we reduced a lot of our conservation acreage in the conservation reserve program.
When prices are high, we wanna farm the heck out of it, and we do less conver- uh, conservation.
When prices are high, because the pressure on the environment is high too, we should do more conservation.
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