The fourth coast, revisited

Abstract

The author traveled for 2.5 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 a Fourth Coast. To encourage a flourishing of overlapping multispecies life, 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.