The author travelled for two and a half months by canoe and other modes of transport down the entire length of the Mississippi River with the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project. Reflecting on this journey, this essay revisits Catherine Brown and William Morrish’s 1991 essay, The Fourth Coast: An Expedition on the Mississippi River, in which Brown and Morrish document their research efforts to identify coherent anthropogenic structures and systems that could warrant the characterization of the Mississippi River as the United States’ Fourth Coast, alongside the East, West, and Gulf Coasts. The essay moves beyond their spatial reimagining by defining the “distributed nature of home” as a model for conceptualizing distributed spatialities and plural temporalities along the Mississippi River, with the aim of encouraging a flourishing of overlapping multispecies life.
Keywords:
The Anthropocene Review
Mississippi River, Fourth Coast, Anthropocene, distributed habitat, multispecies kinship, migratory ecology, web of care, plural temporalities, spatial differentiation, territorialization
2021, Vol. 8(3) 241–249
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