The new school year is upon us, and with it, a fresh start at shoring up the moral levees that keep back the roiling waters of sin. The Minnesota State High School League has banned “midriff-baring” cheerleading uniforms, and we feel conflicted—and not because of any confessed perversion. This is one of those touchy issues where we see both sides of the argument. Despite the “we’re all in this together” vibe of the announcement issued by adults and affirmed by the children, we’re confident that the kids’ assent was strictly of the brown-nosing-while-secretly-rolling-the-eyes/aren’t-adults-clueless variety. Kids, especially teenagers, want nothing as painfully as they want to be grown up, and that’s human nature for you. Schoolgirls do not wear midriff-baring clothes because adults allow them to; they wear them because they want to.
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Birth, sex, and death—that’s nature’s legacy for mammals. Humans, of course, are known to fight against the inevitable at each stage of the game. Last year, the entire federal government decided to fight nature when it intervened in a marriage in order to artificially keep alive a vegetative Floridian. Modern medicine is almost entirely built on the principle of interfering with nature, in order to control our own destiny. Sometimes we get so controlling that we believe we are infallible. Thus we elect governments that grow comfortable with barging into the bedroom.
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Or, on the other hand, not barging in at all. After the tragedy on the Gulf Coast last month, elected humans first congratulated themselves on a job well done; then, when it became clear that the job was not yet done, they began blaming each other. It was a case of everyone complaining about the weather, but no one doing anything about it—not even afterward.
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They say you can’t step into the same river twice, but that would make a lousy motto for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Here on the upper Mississippi, we have been tinkering with the cataracts of St. Anthony since we arrived. The only falls on the entire, 2,500-mile run of the river are here in the city, and that was one of the reasons the city came to be—the better to use gravity to drive the millstones to grind the wheat to make the dough to bake the loaves to fill the world’s bread basket. But harnessing the river required a lot of diversions, tunnels, flumes, jambs, and so forth. The riverbed frequently collapsed, and the powers of entropy fought back. At various times the Corps worked to preserve what was left of the falls, installing concrete channels, dams, and a lock. By the late sixties, the Minneapolis Upper Harbor was finished.
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It is paradoxical, then, that the Corps is poised to help build the Mississippi Whitewater Park—a restoration project ten years in the making that the Department of Natural Resources has inexplicably impeded up to the vanishing point. (If the Legislature’s appropriations are not spent by June of 2007, all bets are off.) It’s not as if the kayaking park will turn back the river’s clock to 1850. But it is ironic that we wish to engage the Corps of Engineers in a fifteen-million-dollar project that will symbolically undo what they have spent a century doing.
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Over in St. Paul, where the bluffs stand farther back at the edge of the ancient causeway, the river has been dredged to allow a channel of passage, and to dry up some of the shallows. Flooding still occurs occasionally, particularly at Harriet Island and Raspberry Island, but it is a mark of great foresight (or perhaps accidental sagacity) that Lilydale and Crosby parks are the perfect buffers—more or less natural floodplains where humans have not been allowed to build much. Crosby and Lilydale, and even Fort Snelling State Park and the Minnesota Valley refuge back upriver, also happen to be great parks—thus preserving both the material and the spiritual well-being of Twin Citizens. On a sunny fall day, you would not be surprised to see a few bare midriffs out on Pike Island.
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In his book The Forest for the Trees, Jeff Forester made it clear that even our most pristine, uninhabited hyperborean environments are changing, have always changed, with or without human agency. Last summer, of course, Northern Minnesota had a significant forest fire, and it pointed up the endangerment of one particular bear—Smokey Bear. It’s not as if the U.S. Forest Service will now encourage you to throw your burning butts into the woods, but aggressive suppression has made fires so rare that when they do happen, they can be catastrophic—not so much for the forest itself as for the larger mammals who own private property. We may push the wheels of progress, and they may roll back over us—but nature marches on.
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True, there is no place on the globe that has not been touched by human activity—they’ve found dioxins in ice core samples from the North Pole. Then, too, there is no human activity that is not somehow adulterated by nature—the selfish gene lives on, for example, in the undying hatred of taxation. Still, nature and human nature are distinct, and sometimes run to cross-purposes. This is especially true where we have insulated ourselves with technology and hubris. It has led to some astonishingly violent weather in the big city. It’s enough to make you pull on your woolens and build a shack and make candles.
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There are one hundred thousand Amish in the U.S. today, and about two hundred thousand Mennonites, and the population of each doubles every twenty years. That’s a lot of horses and buggies out on the road, and it is a lifestyle that recommends itself for its modest coexistence with the more subtle cycles of nature. True, not having pockets or buttons on their clothing may be taking things a bit far, but surely the road rage is manageable.
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In the global struggle against nature, we win some and we lose some. Of course, we have no choice but to continue cheering for the home team. But for God’s sake, let those cheerleaders keep their mini-skirts.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story stated that the Army Corps of Engineers “ripped out the entire St. Anthony Falls.” This was incorrect, and we regret the error. The role of the ACE at St. Anthony Falls can be read at the Corps’ excellent historial website, here.