U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cartographer Harold Fisk published his interpretations of the Mississippi River in 1944. The hand-drawn maps captured a living being in motion. The Great River, as it’s known by the Anishinaabe who named it, is depicted as a dozen snake-like ribbons that cascade down the page. Each ribbon represents the river and its tributaries at different life stages as they’ve moved hundreds of miles in each direction, making a way for itself from the mountains to the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico—all the while changing course. Because that’s what a river is supposed to do. 

The subtext of these maps is clear: A river needs freedom of movement to shape its own path. However, this message has mostly fallen on unsympathetic ears. For nearly a century, federal law has mandated control of the river through levees, locks, dams, and pumps, creating what is essentially a massive riverine highway on which commerce can thrive. But the river moves—as it is wont to—and when it does, it floods. Historically, this is why the river is seen as both a tool and a nuisance. With the Flood Control Act of 1928, the Army Corps was vested with the primary responsibility of executing a plan known as the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the goal of which is to maintain this thoroughfare and prevent farmland and cities from water inundation.

Later this year, the Corps is expected to release an Environmental Impact Statement regarding a proposal almost as old as the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project. The project is straightforward: the construction of a pumping system along the banks of the Yazoo Backwater Area in Mississippi that would siphon water out and put it downriver. Known as the Yazoo Pumps, the project would affect an area about 10 miles north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and encompasses nearly a million acres of alluvial floodplain that, on a map, looks like an inverted triangle. Without those pumps, farmland and some homes would suffer repeated flooding, creating huge financial challenges for those who own the land.

The proposal has sat on the back burner for decades. It wasn’t a priority for the Army Corps, and local governments couldn’t meet the cost-share threshold. Federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) also declared the project harmful and potentially deadly to local ecosystems. But in the last five years, two things happened that changed the trajectory of the Yazoo Pumps. A 2019 flood in the Yazoo Backwater Area that lasted upwards of 200 days put the conversation back in the public sphere. Secondly, a 2023 ruling by the Supreme Court undercut Clean Water Act wetland protections, which long stood in the way of the pumps getting built. 

Those on both sides of the pumps project are now working to sway public opinion and influence policymakers ahead of the release of the environmental report from the Corps. Large environmental organizations call the Yazoo Pumps proposal a “zombie” project, media hails it as “controversial,” and proponents say completion of the project would represent the fulfillment of a promise made by the federal government to a Deep South community. The strangest claim surrounding the project is that building the pumps would be an act of environmental justice—a line that flies in the face of the river’s ecology and relationship to wetlands and uses the area’s Black residents as a political pawn. 

“The Yazoo Pumps have become part of this huge infrastructural system where it’s not like you could just undo what’s been done in the Yazoo and fix the problem,” said Hannah Conway, an assistant professor of history at Duke University and an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. “There are environmental justice conflicts in the Yazoo Delta. The pumps [are] not a solution to that.”

The present moment is never so far from its history. If the recent story of the Yazoo Pumps can be told in terms of political power, financial power grabs, and racial hierarchies, then it’s only because that’s how all of this started.

The Mississippi River and the Yazoo—how one created the other 

The Mississippi River is one of the longest rivers in the world, connected by streams, creeks, and smaller rivers spanning provinces in western Canada through to Colorado and the southern edge of New York’s Allegheny River. These veins of water carry snowmelt from Montana, silt from Iowa, and mud from Virginia all the way to New Orleans. 

“Where we do or do not decide where the Mississippi River is is a human construction because so many other rivers run into that,” Conway said. 

Over thousands of years, these deposits of earth and mud sculpted the walls of the river, the uneven tendrils of the Louisiana coast, and the rich soils of the Delta. All told, the Mississippi is a massive drainage system—41% of the contiguous U.S. interacts in some way with the river, and 32 states and two Canadian provinces transport nearly 300 tons of dirt down its canals each year. Throughout history, at times when the water would subsume the bounds of the Mississippi, water would seep into nearby wetlands and swamps, eco-regions that evolved with the pulses of the river. 

The entire Delta is a byproduct of the Mississippi—not just what it is, but how it came to be. Settlers in the early-mid 1800s coveted what the Mississippi built: rich soil ripe for planting. When commercial tobacco fields along the Atlantic coast depleted the soil of its nutrients, plantation owners sought viability in the Delta, the Western Frontier of its time. With help from federal intervention, motivated in part out of concern for protecting the legality of chattel slavery, an 1824 Supreme Court ruling made Mississippi River traffic an issue of federally managed interstate commerce. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 also allowed plantation operators to claim the riverside acreages in the Delta as their own. 

This settlement marked a turning point in the history of the Yazoo region. Enslaved people constituted the majority of the Delta’s residents: In 1850, for every single white resident there were 14 enslaved Black people, clearing the land of its forest, draining wetlands, and planting and picking cotton. The region flooded annually, often in springtime when the rains came and winter snow melted, so levees were needed to keep the water out. As Conway has written in her research, “The rush to extract wealth from the Delta’s rich alluvial soil ‘reinvigorated’ American enthusiasm for chattel slavery and shifted its geographic concentration.” 

Post-Emancipation, the following half-century is pockmarked by federal policies to bolster white farmers. Regional levee boards advocated for federal funds to build more structures to straighten out the Mississippi and hold water back, Department of Agriculture-funded research and innovation largely excluded Black sharecroppers, and through the Depression-era Agricultural Adjustment Act, white-led committees excluded Black farmers from receiving payments, even going so far as blacklisting them from future land tenure.

Because of colonial influences, researchers say the river bears little resemblance to versions from generations prior, the kind that Fisk would have drawn on his maps. This is in part due to farming in the Delta. Specifically, the 3,700 miles of levees, numerous floodways, locks, and dams, and hundreds of miles of concrete padding that keep the river at a navigable level and prevent erosion. All of that is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, an agency legally bound to keep the land as separate from the water as possible.

Agricultural handout in disguise 

Louie Miller, director of Sierra Club Mississippi and a longtime advocate against the Yazoo Pumps, said that the pumps project amounts to little more than an agricultural subsidy that will drain the land in the early spring to allow for an increased yield of corn and soybeans. 

“The way the water is going to be managed is going to be based on planting seasons,” Miller said. 

As it stands, seasonal flooding blankets the farmland for far too long, and farmers can’t apply for crop insurance if they’re unable to plant. “Not a seed goes in the ground over there unless there’s crop insurance. That is the failsafe mechanism, [and] that is a federal program. And there’s disaster payments on top of that,” Miller explained. 

Miller’s assessment, that the “planter class” wants more access to land to beget more access to insurance payouts, mirrors public comments made by state officials. Last year, Mississippi’s Department of Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson told federal officials, “We desperately need reliable access to this South Delta farmland so our farmers can continue doing the work to keep America fed and clothed.”

Locals say that the relationship between federal agencies and agricultural interests is tight-knit. “I know one thing, that the state of Mississippi and the Corps of Engineers will bend over backwards to accommodate [agribusiness],” said University of Mississippi ethnohistorian Robbie Ethridge. 

The line often parroted by pump proponents like Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic Biden Administration officials is that the pumps are necessary to mitigate flooding and protect homes. However, the Corps’ own data shows this claim is questionable at best. 

The 2019 Yazoo Backwater flood—the one that reignited the fight for the pumps—blanketed more than 550,000 acres in water, including 230,000 acres of farmland. And while proponents claim the pumps would be a cure-all, journalist Boyce Upholt reported in 2019 that the state’s own Levee Board conceded that even if the pumps had been in place, flooding still would have covered 350,000 acres of land, including 100,000 acres of farmland. Even Army Corps data shows the pumps would have kept floodwaters at 92.3 feet, a flood stage that would have subsumed nearly 100 residences and more than 400 miles of roads.

Jill Mastrototaro, the policy director of Audubon Delta in Mississippi, which opposes the pumps, said that only 17% of the Backwater area would be “flood free.” The residential area that stands to benefit the most is the majority-white retirement community of Eagle Lake, according to Mastrototaro.

Even if pumps were in place to pull water from an inundated Yazoo Delta region, the Audubon Delta policy director explained that the water would likely get rerouted to an “already flood-stage Yazoo River that then flows into an already at flood-stage Mississippi River [where] there are downstream communities of the Backwater.” These are predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods.

The 2019 floods came as a surprise, but future floods shouldn’t. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2019 was the second wettest on record. Without immediate and severe action, climate change will continue to cause extremes in our seasons. Greater storms in winter, earlier onset of spring snow melting, and more rain from longer and hotter spring and summer months portend 2019-level flooding—or worse.

The Army Corps doesn’t really have an answer for future outcomes based on climate change modeling, only a political directive. And because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Sackett, the Corps has more leeway than ever to ignore the eco-regional and environmental claims that Mastrototaro’s organization has spent years sounding the alarm on. 

According to the National Park Service, the Mississippi Delta is one of the “most important” bird and waterfowl migration corridors on the continent. Mastrototaro said nearly 30 million birds stop over on their way to South America every year. About 450 other species also call the Backwater home. According to the EPA’s 2008 determination, which vetoed the Yazoo Pumps project before it was revived, 4% of the continent’s fish species are endemic to the Lower Mississippi, a region critical for the preservation of biodiversity. 

At the time, the EPA mirrored what the Fish and Wildlife Service found, namely that the project “would significantly degrade important bottomland forested wetlands” and “result in extensive and unacceptable adverse effects on wildlife and fishery areas.” 

A 2007 letter to Department of the Interior and EPA officials signed by 541 wetland and aquatic scientists and professionals claimed that the area subject to destruction by the pumps had already lost 80% of its original wetlands, which can be essential for drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and replenishing groundwater. “The majority of those losses have been traced directly to the effects of federal flood control and drainage projects,” the letter said. “This pattern of abuse must end.” 

While the same environmental concerns that led to the shelving of the project three presidential administrations ago remain, they no longer play a significant role in the latest iteration of the fight. Like the predicted loss of healthy wetlands, evidence of the past doesn’t seem to hold much sway either. Many scientists conclude that levees, locks, and dams make flooding worse by building up water pressure and that keeping the river from flowing and depositing mud has contributed to the unprecedented landloss off the coast of Louisiana. It’s also true that flooding is an important and inevitable part of the ecosystem. 

But none of this seems to matter. 

A fight of political power and environmental justice  

With nearly a century of Army Corps construction along the river and its tributaries that keeps the water at an artificial level, it’s in some ways difficult not to keep building. After all, levees break, dams and locks need updating, and the concrete barriers that push water into other places eventually lead to even more water management issues. There’s also the issue of settlement. During the same time period that the Corps built levees, cities like New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Memphis, ​​Tennessee, grew in tandem. Now millions of people are reliant on the river systems that stifle wetlands and other ecosystems.  

“You can’t just let the river do whatever it wants to do now,” said James Karst, director of communications and marketing at the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. 

But the problem remains that everything done by the Army Corps upriver has a literal downstream impact, Karst said. Not enough consideration is given to these “unintended consequences” or the fact that future generations will have to clean up the mess caused by the countless environmental struggles resulting from the loss of land. Karst said he’d like to see coordination between different communities that sit along the river so that places like the Louisiana coast aren’t saddled with the worst climate and environmental impacts. 

There has to be a way to prioritize wetland ecology, or at least consider factors outside of commerce and navigability, according to Karst. 

Part of the problem is that the Army Corps has instituted itself as essential to its flow and function. But this contrived necessity doesn’t negate the reality that installing the pumps won’t be as structurally effective as federal officials claim, and they certainly won’t amount to any kind of racial or “environmental justice.”

In the face of looming injustice, conservation organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Delta are proposing a slate of alternatives that they say will address inevitable flooding impacts. Some of those recommendations include utilizing federal funding through the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for residents of the Yazoo Backwater Area. Critics say agency funding is difficult and lengthy to acquire and often ignores the needs of Black residents and homeowners. Until 2021, a FEMA policy largely excluded Black homeowners from receiving federal support after weather disasters. To address issues with aid disbursement, the Biden Administration recently directed FEMA to change the application process and raise the cap on the number of eligible applicants for disaster aid. 

The organizations are also advocating for the Department of Transportation (DoT) to mitigate flooding by elevating roads, which would cost “far less” than the pumps, according to economists. The Department of Agriculture could also offer funds through its conservation and floodplain easement programs. This has already been done along the Mississippi River in Illinois, where farmers and landowners are paid to help restore wetlands. Mastrototaro said there are “tens of thousands of potential conservation investments” that can be made in the Backwater through existing programs.

If the pumps are the answer to an environmental injustice as its proponents claim, it raises the question: What is the injustice the pumps seek to rectify? So far, the pumps’ proponents cite demographic and income information, though it’s unclear how pumps will address the “persistent poverty” experienced by the region’s Black residents.

Ethridge said that if the federal government really wanted to help what it calls “environmental justice communities,” then it could subsidize grocery stores to move into the Delta, fund hospitals, and address pollution from commodity farming operations that use chemical fertilizers. 

For Conway, history is the place to look for answers about the injustices that need correcting. Therefore the pumps have little to do with the problem or the solution. What’s needed is “reparative and reformative justice,” according to Conway.

“These systems that have created inequality cannot be the systems under which we create equality,” she said. In other words, more construction projects by the Army Corps are unlikely to result in different outcomes for the people long intentionally deprived from their benefit. 

“Justice is returning land to Indigenous peoples in Mississippi,” Conway said, and justice is also accounting for the racist practices and tax regimes that took land from Black farmers, she added. 
Convway’s visions for the future are not currently being considered, and the best option for moving forward is also the least likely. “Returning the floodplain of the river to itself,” Conway said. “The river needs its floodplain back.”