Drive anywhere along the Mississippi or most any other river and you’ll see a levee, an earthen wall that parallels the river to keep water in the main channel and out of the adjacent floodplain. In this episode, I talk with Nicholas Pinter about levees and the good and bad that has come with them. We discuss the evolution in responsibility from local jurisdictions to the federal government, how levees have altered the ecology of big rivers, and who pays for them. We talk about how levees provide a false sense of security and the concept of residual risk, which is one way to quantify how much of our property and lives is at risk behind levees. We also talk about options for reversing some of the worst damage from levees and the obstacles to putting them in place.

Levees didn’t just rise on their own, of course. In the Mississippi Minute, I give a brief history of who built the levees and the deplorable working conditions that were often present in levee camps, especially for Black workers. And in the end, I offer a playlist of songs about levees and levee camps.