Conservancy Book Review 5
Water and the Complexity of Environmental Experience
The Wonder of Water: Lived experience, policy and practice
247 pages
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Editor
In this slim volume, the editor has gathered twelve essays, framed by poems that explore the essential relationship we have with water. Contributors provide statistics, research data, analysis of current policies related to the containment and treatment of water and, perhaps most interestingly, philosophical reflections intended to link multiple approaches toward the scientific, political and ethical development of best practices. For those of us who dwell on a barrier island confronting the Atlantic Ocean, dotted with ponds and bordered by rivers, the messages here have particular relevance.
Stafanovic points to obvious current problems. The world over, either drought or flood is changing living conditions while contamination of rivers, lakes, oceans and groundwater threatens far too many of us. Her goal, then, is to seek a deeper vision of water which might “inspire more thoughtful policies.”
Several essays focus on phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that approaches phenomena in a way that allows pure intuition of its essence to be analyzed. It is the philosophical approach that encourages an understanding of the lived experience we have with water. The effort here is to see things not only in carefully divided categories but in a more holistic way.
Stephen Harding tells us that our first step is “imaginative visualization.” He takes us back to primordial times when vast clouds of hydrogen existed as gaseous vapor in space. Pressure inside large aggregates of hydrogen caused the atoms to fuse and become helium which emitted light and became stars. Still visualizing, we imagine large stars experiencing gravitational pull which caused fusion into heavier elements including oxygen. As stars exploded from pressures within, molecules of water formed in space. The light hydrogen atoms are attracted to the heavier oxygen atom. Hydrogen also breaks bonds easily and attaches to charged ions like calcium, iron and magnesium making water an excellent solvent carrying ions of nourishment across membranes of living things. Thinking in mythological terms, we see water as an essential part of what the Greeks called Gaia, the earth.
Now focusing on ourselves while envisioning the importance of water, consider that humans are 60% water. Harding quotes Vladimir Vernadsky, “Life is animated water.” Life on land is seen as a great meshwork of water called “Hypersea” by Mark and Dianna McMenamin. Clouds and water vapor are “the most important greenhouse gas, alternately cooling and warming our atmosphere.”
The truly awesome power of water is explored by Stephen J. Smith in his essay, Flow Motion. “Eddies, currents, whirlpools, vortices, spiraling columns of water possess powers that cannot be held back.” Yet even with its dangers, water lures us. Smith argues that humans have developed gestures such as waving to a friend from primordial association with waves along beaches or created on lakes by wind. Imagine rain as a gesture of life. Deserts come to life after only the lightest rainfall. The first moments after a rain event are moments of animation. In our times, the event then becomes a record of millimeters of rainfall, runoff rates and reservoir counts. But that first wave of regeneration is what should not be forgotten. Smith quotes Richard Rojcwicz: “Respect for water…as a precious gift leads to a very different practice than ravaging—to conservation, certainly but, more than that, to something like cooperation with the things and forces of nature rather than opposition to them.”
Smith connects thirst to the politics of water management. Thirst quenching invigorates and restores energy and a sense of well-being, but often drinking water is costly due to privatization of water systems. Unquenchable thirsts are real dangers for people living without available water supply. He asks, “Don’t all, people have a birthright to quench thirst?” Life is affirmed when drink is given to someone whose thirst exceeds that of the giver.
Efforts to control water carry with them a huge responsibility. Water cannot flow unless you let it go. In life as in water management, letting go of our grip in favor of going with the flow is more life affirming. But common practice in recent centuries has been to dam up rivers, inundating farm lands and forests to create energy.
The several instances of damming up rivers to the destruction of anadromous (up running) salmon are poetically described by David Abram. Indigenous peoples understood the essential need of the salmon to return to their birthplace to spawn and die. “Central to all…cultural constraints, along the Pacific Rim, was a recognition of the salmon as a powerful emissary from hidden or unseen dimensions—a form of energetic intelligence that came towards humankind from the sacred heart of the mysterious.” Hard lessons had to be learned in modern times when engineering held sway over natural systems of regeneration.
Abrams describes the migrations of various species of birds and butterflies who know instinctively where to go over thousands of miles. He asks a good question, “What if we were to allow that the animal’s migratory skill arises from a felt rapport between its body and the breathing earth?” We are not likely to allow such speculation, he suggests, as long as we think of our atmosphere or the oceans as passive substrate. He proposes that we recognize the sea, earth and atmosphere as living forces in our lives and he scolds, “Our inability to notice the other creatures among us, our readiness to shove aside the many of our kind who are ailing or dying as a result of our recklessness, seem never to abate. Are we the biosphere’s way of exhausting itself?”
There are cautionary tales of indifferent policies that, for instance, destroyed the marshes of New Orleans and contaminated the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, but the central theme is hopeful. It is a plea for building back moral education that will inform our actions. Then, it will be possible to develop an ethical and communal responsibility to act with respect for the forces of nature from which we are not distinct or separate, but very much a part.
Submitted by Joan Avioli