Perhaps this is the summer that finally renders climate change real.

Flooding and soaring temperatures across the nation have made global warming indisputable. The problem, as always, is how to reach political consensus on an action plan. Republicans want to plant a “trillion” trees; Democrats want to limit carbon emissions.

If the nation’s response to the Midwest’s Great Flood of 1993 is any indication, we will remain paralyzed by apathy and conflicting agendas.

Thirty years ago this summer, one of America’s worst floods caused more than 1,000 levees to fail, $15 billion in damage and 50 deaths while leaving more than 70,000 homeless.

Fifth-generation farmer Jim Reed of Hull in western Illinois lost 700 acres of crops that summer. He had no federal crop insurance. “I had farmed for 37 years and didn’t think I’d ever need it. But the river just kept coming. It never gave up,” he said in an interview.

He carries insurance now.

Since then, flooding has increased with greater frequency on the Upper Mississippi River. Downstate Illinois witnessed perilous flooding in 2008 and 2019.

“With all these floods, you may ask yourself what has been done to maintain our region’s level of flood protection during this time? Amazingly, almost nothing,” Mike Klingner, chair of the Upper Mississippi, Illinois & Missouri Rivers Association, said in a statement.

To combat that stasis, Klingner and the association’s executive director, Tim Maiers, met with congressional staff members in Washington last month seeking support for a bill that addresses climate change’s impact on rivers. The legislation, aimed for 2024, asks the Army Corps of Engineers to update flood frequency levels and streamline approval processes allowing water districts to upgrade and maintain their levees based on the new data.

“Weather has changed; we’re getting more water; our levees are less safe than when originally built in the ’50s,” Maiers said.

Individual drainage districts feel hamstrung by red tape and a lengthy approval process required by the Army Corps to get permission to improve the levees, said Louis Goodwin, superintendent of the Sny Island Levee Drainage District, which oversees 54 miles of levees in Adams, Pike and Calhoun counties.

Meanwhile scientists and environmentalists recommend less reliance on levees and flood walls and more investment in green infrastructure such as floodplain conservation. The problem is the levees constrict the river, and that containment causes increased water and flood levels, said Jonathan Remo, a geoscientist and expert on river science at Southern Illinois University.

There’s also the issue of fairness. If one district builds a higher levee, that water will flow downstream to another community.

“More levees, more wing dams, more rain and more snowmelt equals a torrent of water making its way from Minnesota southward to Illinois and beyond. With natural floodplains blocked, the water is funneled farther south, spilling out where it finds openings — often in the unprotected territory or where the levees have not been raised as high as the other side,” the Tribune reported in 2019.

Almost everyone agrees there needs to be better government coordination. An ad hoc approach to flood management has clearly proved ineffective.

“The rubber is meeting the road. Something’s got to give,” SIU’s Remo said.

Study after study, beginning with the one President Bill Clinton ordered in 1993, have stated there needs to be an overarching vision of floodplain management, an understanding of fragile ecosystems on the Upper Mississippi River Basin and cooperation among federal, state and local agencies.

That has not happened. Tension and conflict among government, environmental agencies and drainage districts has only increased.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi River ranks among America’s 10 most endangered rivers, according to a 2022 report by the environmental group American Rivers. Development, pollution, lost floodplains and climate change contribute to making the river less stable and more prone to flooding.

“There’s no easy or quick fix. So much ground and land that used to be farmland is now asphalt. Timber has been cleared. The flooding just gets here so much faster,” said Tom Dunker of Hull, who was assistant lock master in Quincy, Illinois, in 1993.

Back then, cornstalks were hanging on power lines, Reed recalled.

Despite losing his soybean and corn crops that summer, he considers himself lucky. Unlike many others in the area, “My bed never got wet,” the farmer said. But navigating the months of flooding was “like reading a book with a damn poor ending.”

In the end, the effort to contain North America’s longest river may be fruitless. Climate change solutions can’t wait another 30 years. Without a holistic plan of what is needed to prevent catastrophic flooding, the Mighty Mississippi will rear its rage again, and again.

Mark Twain, who navigated the river as a steamboat pilot before the Civil War, called it a “lawless stream.”

“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise,” he wrote.

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