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Will great rivers die? Of course; some have already died and been reborn. Some have died to never be again.

The simplest defense frames the question in two inter-related limits:

1. If the question is asked in light of Geologic Scale.
2. If the question is asked in light of Philosophical Scale

In the first case, Great Rivers, if defined by names like Congo, Amazon, Sacramento, Rhine, Yangtze then there was a time when these rivers did not exist. Rivers are a function of geology and weather. As plate tectonics and weather combine, water is transported from its lowest point to some elevation and flows back to its lowest point. Rivers exist, ignoring ice rivers, as the liquid state of matter. Liquids, ignoring liquid helium, are governed by gravity.

All our current great rivers are simply following the rules of physics and occur where they are because of weather patterns and local geology. Are these rivers dying? Of course.

To illustrate this point, consider rivers in the geological region between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Some few rivers that flow off these western and eastern slopes, respectively, simply disappear into the desert of Nevada. (Where does the Truckee River flow to the sea?) These rivers once flowed into the Tethys Sea. Plate tectonics cause what was once a great sea to become an arid desert where sand and heat brought rivers to their euphemistic knees and finally to their death. On another river, the Mississippi, the New Madrid seismic event stopped and reversed this river. Surely, this was a mere instant in geological time, but it was also a picture of geologies power over the course and existence of one of the world's mightiest rivers.

On a more human' scale, we can look at Democrates in a literal sense. Democrates tells us: You cannot step into the same river twice.
Of course, he was speaking to us at a much deeper level, but, allow me to take a literal interpretation.

When the first Europeans arrived at the Hudson River, it was fairly pristine. By the mid twentieth century, there were major portions of the Hudson River that were dead. So dead, in fact, that it was unsafe to bathe in its water. Possibly, in a larger sense, the river was not dead. In the larger definition of a river, it certainly was dead. It had become a waste transport system, a sewer.

The Hudson has been and is being cleaned up. But, is it the Hudson River? Or, is it a water course that follows where the Hudson River once flowed?

Look at any of the great river systems. The Sacramento and Mississippi, the Yangtze and the Rhine are controlled ditches lined with dikes and levees. The sources of these rivers are governed by dams and reservoirs. Is a river that can no longer control its destiny alive? The greatest river in China carved the Three Gorges. Was that amazing feature not part of the river? Yet, the Three Gorges are no longer, they are simply a reservoir. Dams have stopped the ceaseless carving of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river flows to the Ocean in Los Angeles, courtesy of Metropolitan Water District, killing what was once a bountiful estuarine environment in the Gulf of California.
Will our great rivers die? The answer is yes on both geological and human scales. They will die because it is their nature to die and they are dying because we are killing them.

Learn more about this author, Kelly Piercy.
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