Living with Environmental Change

Waterworlds

Kirsten Hastrup, Cecilie Rubow, Kirsten Hastrup, Cecilie Rubow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317753612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

Climate change is a lived experience of changes in the environment, often destroying conventional forms of subsistence and production, creating new patterns of movement and connection, and transforming people's imagined future.

This book explores how people across the world think about environmental change and how they act upon the perception of past, present and future opportunities. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork of expert authors, it sheds new light on the human experience of and social response to climate change by taking us from the Arctic to the Pacific, from the Southeast Indian Coastal zone to the West-African dry-lands and deserts, as well as to Peruvian mountain communities and cities.

Divided into four thematic parts - Water, Landscape, Technology, Time – this book uses rich photographic material to accompany the short texts and reflections in order to bring to life the human ingenuity and social responsibility of people in the face of new uncertainties. In an era of melting glaciers, drying lands, and rising seas, it shows how it is part and parcel of human life to take responsibility for the social community and take creative action on the basis of a localized understanding of the environment.

This highly original contribution to the anthropological study of climate change is a must-read for all those wanting to understand better what climate change means on the ground and interested in a sustainable future for the Earth.

PART ONE WATER

INTRODUCTION

In this first part of the volume, we focus on water as a principal configurative force in society. The idea is to show some of the ways in which social life and community building are constituted by the access to water and to the resources that come along with a particular water body in the immediate environment. Whether water derives from rain, rivers, or wells, and however it is reached, the actual materiality of water – such as its liquidity, its variable quantity, its possible scarcity, its sudden absence, and its occasional solidity – all of it premeditate water’s power at infiltrating social forms. This applies not only to freshwater, though access to clean drinking water is essential for survival and often subject to social regulation; also oceans and lagoons have the power to shape society by their being part of the larger resource space upon which social communities depend for their livelihood. Presently, many communities are experiencing notable changes in their immediate water resources that have become less predictable, both in terms of seasonality and quantity. This troubles people’s perception of the immediate resource space and creates a sense of an uncertain future, as we shall see in some detail in the narratives below.

Concerns about water are always social concerns.

Generally, through the short descriptions from many different places, we show how water is not only the sine qua non of life in general, but also of community-making. Water configures societies in particular ways and generates its own standards of value. Rivers, canals, wellsprings, and oceans are complicit in the making of particular social worlds. Focussing on actual water issues reveals that its formative force is not mechanical, and not even causal in any direct way, because human ingenuity and social responsibility always enter into the equation. This is a key point in what follows; humans play an active part in taming, channelling, and distributing water according to their social and moral horizons. It is a question of a complex entanglement rather than a unidirectional causal link between water and society.

Before moving on to present concerns, it is interesting to recall Leonardo da Vinci’s view of water as ‘the driver of nature’, and ‘the vital humour of the terrestrial machine’. The illustrious Renaissance artist and scholar studied the elements closely and sought to understand their individual qualities by paying close, long-term attention to their manifestations. He began his study of water around 1506 and planned a major treatise on hydrology in general, as well as a geographical study of the entire water system of the Earth, to be followed by a discussion of military and civil hydraulic engineering, according to the editor of his notebooks. He never achieved it all, but he did make some very interesting observations of water in the process of realizing at least some parts of the grand project. He writes, for instance:

Of the four elements water is the second in weight and the second in respect of mobility. It is never at rest until it unites with the sea, where, when undisturbed by the winds, it establishes itself and remains with its surface equidistant from the centre of the world.

It readily raises itself by heat in thin vapour through the air. Cold causes it to freeze. Stagnation makes it foul. That is, heat sets it in motion, cold causes it to freeze, immobility corrupts it.

It is the expansion and humour of all vital bodies. Without it nothing retains its form. By its inflow it unites and augments bodies.¹

Leonardo da Vinci also addressed water’s different forms, such as steam, mist, rain, snow, and hail, in addition to the sea, as well as its movement and propensity for seeking out the lowest lying places when flowing unhindered, and its power to wear down mountains and river banks over time. In a word, he described water as one comprehensive element, even if it appears in many forms and qualities. In a sense, this is what we are doing also in this first part of the book, where the driving force of water is seen in confluence with human imagination and interest. To illustrate the more general implications of this perspective, this Introduction is organized in a way that allows different qualities of water to be foregrounded, each in their turn.

ELEMENTALS OF WATER

Let us first discuss some elemental qualities of water, that surfacing in various forms all over the world, sometimes to quickly evaporate or disappear into the ground, sometimes to flow peacefully across vast landscapes, shaping people’s experiences. In recent years, water has been seen as one of the great global challenges, and natural scientists have been called upon to find solutions to the expected future scarcity of freshwater resources. Many of these scientists take their point of departure in a particular vision of the hydrological cycle, that is a model of the connection between rain, freshwater, and oceans, a cycle that in recent years has been shown to be far less stable than previously imagined. Yet it remains a powerful model.

Introducing the hydrological cycle in the present context serves the purpose of distinguishing between water as a (largely scientific) abstraction, something which can be modelled and quantified, on the one hand, and water as an experience, something which must be socialized and qualified, on the other. Our focus is naturally on the second of these, yet the abstract notion of water often infiltrates even popular understanding and certainly is at work wherever water is being purposely engineered. The distinction took root in pre-modern times, as argued by Jamie Linton in his book, What Is Water? He describes the ideational transformation of water from being seen as a vital substance in pre-modern times to becoming a modern abstraction by way of hydrological enumeration.² At the same time, the idea of a hydrological cycle took root.

Of course, hydrology has had a long and uneven history with many sources, but it seems that in the first half of the twentieth century, the hydrological cycle became an established natural fact in science, through various treatises. It is still seen as one of nature’s grand plans, much in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci’s driver of nature. In the Handbook of Hydrology of 1993 it is described in the following way:

The hydrologic circle is the most fundamental principle of hydrology. Water evaporates from the oceans and the land surface, is carried over the earth in atmospheric circulation as water vapour, precipitates again as rain or snow, is intercepted by trees and vegetation, provides a runoff on the land surface, infiltrates into soils, recharges groundwater, discharges into streams, and ultimately flows out into the oceans from which it will eventually evaporate once again. This immense water engine, fuelled by solar energy, driven by gravity, proceeds endlessly in the presence or absence of human activity.³

Since then, it has been clearly established that the system is far from stable, and that human activity, social demands, and political priorities always infiltrate and affect the water-machine – just like climate change possibly does these days. This makes it expedient to develop a more nuanced understanding of the place of humans and societies within the hydrological system, that were far too easily expelled from the modern abstraction, as we saw in the quote from the handbook above. People are never simply placed in the environment; they actively interfere with it, and increasingly so as the global population keeps growing and technologies multiply, deliberately affecting water’s course and redirecting its power.

As a source of life, coming in many forms, water configures social communities.

Conversely, water is never just an abstraction when seen from the point of view of humans, who experience its many forms and forces: ice, snow, seas, waves, rain, rivers, floods, swamps, wellsprings, ground water, dew, steam – each of which engenders particular meanings and sensations, and makes certain social forms possible or prohibitive. Once established, excess or shortage of any kind of water potentially threatens society, as it had become known and taken for granted; there is thus a balance to maintain, for a particular idea of society to flourish. In some places, people deliberately seek to influence the hydrological cycle as they perceive it, for their community to thrive. Thus, they demonstrate the human face of hydrology; we shall see how in one of the cases below, deriving from the Andes.

Although people in the richer parts of the global water catchment rarely have to go without fresh water, in less privileged regions it is still a recurrent question of life or death – for children, livestock, and potentially everybody. For all humans, water is a generative, and regenerative force. The existential meanings of water also include the sensory experiences of the shifting qualities of water, and their contribution to the deeper meaning of lives and places, all of them dependent upon access to water, whether firmly regulated or not, and linking people to the material environment and to each other. This is clearly an elemental quality of water, which transpires from the presentations from widely differing regions below.

This takes us to an implicit point about water, namely its agentive powers; water does something in society. Water irrigates, inundates, floods, dries up, and creates social tensions as well as transport systems. Water may create or obliterate value, for instance, when either inundating dry land or destroying the crops by flooding fragile fields. It also has a strong bearing on moral values, when it comes to sharing and distributing water resources within a community. Finally, water has deep imaginative implications; it carries people’s thoughts towards other shores, further horizons, deeper meanings, and existential questions. In the presentations below, we get a sense of how this happens in actual practice.

FLOWS OF WATER

The agentive powers of water are closely related to the ways in which water moves and organizes people on its way. We may think of rivers flowing in their own pace and carving out riverbeds, testifying to the power of water in both the short and the long term, and transforming natural resources and social communities as they bend and twist. We may also think of artificially established canals, emulating natural flows, but having their own long-term social and political implications of maintenance and regulation.

An almost paradigmatic example is Veronica Strang’s analysis of the transformations of nature and ‘natural’ resources along the Brisbane River in Australia, where people use the water for a multiplicity of purposes, transforming it into different kinds of value, and where the river is therefore never the same:

Social communities deeply affect water’s flow, mass, and usage.

The Brisbane River starts high in the Jimna Ranges in a network of small streams that are often no more than a thread of green in the dusty hills. By the time it reaches the Port of Brisbane, it has been captured, used and turned into many things: beef and vegetables, fruit and wine – things that can be bundled into containers and shipped to the trading partners on which Australia relies.⁴

This analysis demonstrates how water, as the most basic ingredient in the transformation of natural resources into commodities, can become almost anything, but may also give rise to tensions between different groups of people. Thus, the closer the Brisbane River gets to the city, the more tension there is between industrial and recreational needs, for instance.

Rivers may sometimes overflow the banks and flood the surrounding landscapes, whether deserts or fields. In some cases this may be beneficial to the surroundings, in others it proves disas...