Weekender: take me to the rivers
A few good stories on rivers
Happy almost-weekend, y’all! Lately, there’s been a rash of good writing on rivers (and fish). Here are a few pieces worth your time as you relax this weekend.
The river primeval
Last year, I wrote about my weekend adventures on a secret location within the Pascagoula watershed. Now my good friend Jason Christian has another dispatch from this river system, a lovely ode to river getaways, in Country Roads.
The lost wild river
Connor Sheets—who recently decamped from Alabama to join the staff at the L.A. Times—offers a lovely account of an annual tradition that is, for obvious reasons, right up my alley: a group of friends set out on the little-known wilderness that is the lower Mississippi River. Read and be inspired.
An ancient, imperiled beast
The New York Times Magazine has an excellent story by Andrew S. Lewis about how the Endangered Species Act has failed to protect the Atlantic sturgeon. The story, I’ll note, is about New Jersey, not the South, but sturgeon as a class are, as Andrew notes, “the animal group most at risk of extinction in the world,” and the Atlantic sturgeon lives down here, too, as do other threatened cousins. Besides, the questions raised here about why we care so little about species that have been around so long should be of interest to any reader.
The cost of our eggs
I’ve got a new piece out this week myself, in The New Republic, on egg mania: there have been a lot of stories exploring how the current bird flu outbreak has raised egg prices. Here, though, I question whether our cheap eggs already had hidden costs. I typically try not to get too opinionated in my journalism, but my time reporting on poultry production has me convinced we need the system changed.