This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 26, 2013 - On his way to show a Dutch visitor the Gateway Arch, Derek Hoeferlin pulled over for a few minutes on Tuesday morning to talk about the weekend’s events.
Hoeferlin was one of the organizers of MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers," a symposium hosted jointly by the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University and the Netherlands Embassy in Washington, D.C. Hoeferlin was excited about the public presence at the event, the work accomplished by the working groups, and the participation of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The weekend brought together experts from several interests and disciplines from both the Netherlands and St. Louis to look at climate change and the Mississippi River.
The Corps had never participated in a workshop like this one before, Hoeferlin said, and found it eye opening, “and they want to continue.”
There was also a reframing of how we look at floods. Now, we talk about a 1 in 100 year event, Hoeferlin says, but those are happening every few years. What if, instead, these events were looked at in terms of someone’s chances of experiencing it in their lifetime and the lifetime of their mortgage?
Stijn Koole, a landscape architect from the Netherlands, came to St. Louis for the first time and got a new perspective on the city, he says, and how important St. Louis is, economically, ecologically and culturally as the center point of the nation.
The weekend helped people from a variety of disciplines integrate their work, and he thinks that will continue.
In the Netherlands, he says, living with water is in people’s DNA. It’s also a fact of life in St. Louis, and Koole thinks that provides not just challenges, but opportunities.
“You should use this river as a broader identity for St. Louis and give the identity back to the city as well,” he says. “It’s not only the Arch, which I’m going to look at right now. But it’s also the river.”
Next, Hoeferlin expects organizers will put out post-workshop reports on their findings, and a research agenda will be laid out, identifying experts at local, national and international levels to work with moving forward.
The timing of the weekend turned out great for several reasons, as well. As the group met in St. Louis, officials from river cities, including Mayor Francis Slay, were in Washington presenting the Mississippi Rivers and Towns Initiative, advocating for federal investments.
And as the group in St. Louis looked at climate change and the Mississippi, they got to experience an extreme weather event as a huge spring snow storm dropped about a foot of snow throughout the region.
Sunday, participants at the symposium had a working day as the snow piled up outside.
“And it’s spring,” Hoeferlin says. “It was pretty fascinating.”