Water Chronicles
By Tricia Toso
“ … even the humblest forms of matter and energy have the potential for self-organization beyond the relatively simple type involved in the creation of crystals … inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined. And this insight into matter’s inherent creativity needs to be fully incorporated into our new materialist philosophies”
~Manuel De Landa 1997, 16
At Water’s Edge
The course of water, as it cuts through geographies and disciplinary boundaries, leaves furrows, gullies, and marks of its flow; it surfaces the processes, practices and meanings that we bring and attribute to water. Tracing the flow of water, as it intersects, branches, disrupts and converges over urban and rural geographies, one is confronted with the political, economic, cultural, social and ideological forces that shape our waterways.
As a critical metabolic component of all life, water has vital and symbolic significance that constitutes and delimits the public realm. It can be life-sustaining and life-threatening, an element and a flow, a means of transport and an obstruction, a nuisance and a resource, something to be regulated and circulated, something to be controlled, something to be feared or enjoyed. It can be destructive, polluted, dangerous and endangered.
Our everyday water practices are fraught with tensions; the relationing and disentanglements, the understandings and distancing that allow us to engage in neoliberal capitalist regimes that shape the ways we live, interact, and enact. Thinking about the ways we consume and take pleasure in, flush away and contaminate, market and buy, manage and govern water is to consider the everyday, the necessary disentanglements, the putting aside, the turning a blind eye.
The water flows that we most often encounter are shaped by topography, the built infrastructure, whether canals or hydraulic dams, institutional and legal agreements, finance and market forces, power dynamics and ideologies, social networks and property relations. Flows of water are almost always subject to techno-social systems, yet the materialities of water often elude control. Water resists our quest for control. Flooding, landslides, storms, tsunamis, waterborne disease outbreaks demonstrate the limitations of our technomodern attempts to control water. It resistance shows us the ways in which infrastructure has been implicated in the production of uneven landscapes of risk and access.
The ripple effect of the reduction of water as economic resource through its capture and exploitation is one that I am only beginning to recognize and understand. I sense that a study of water offers the potential to discern the ways in which infrastructure networks sharpen and reinforce social and resource inequalities: the unequal provision; the exploitation of water resources by large corporate entities; the dumping of toxins in someone else’s water table. A site of contestation and negotiation, water flows reveal the dispersed and polyvalent sources of power that represent a range of economic, political, and social interests, technical expertise, and knowledges. Yet, how do we begin to understand the ways in which proximal and distant waters are connected, often through subterranean systems that are increasingly being endangered? How do we understand something we cannot see, touch, sense?
How do we understand tailing ponds, the toxic stew of urban canal water, the bottled water that seeps BPAs into drinking water within existing theoretical frameworks, and how can we stretch the limitations of our understanding of hydrospatial orders?
Cool, Sweet and Confusing Waters
The bottled water industry is alive and well and I am disquieted by its presence here, in this Concordia classroom. Is it cynical or naive, or perhaps ironic (?) to discuss the impending apocalypse of climate change, while hydrating from bottled water? We are all well-educated, aware of the issues at stake in an industry that capitalizes on poor industry regulations and control, unresolved Indigenous land claims, political apathy and public gullibility, so how to explain the presence of bottled water? How to understand the disparity between ethical and theoretical stances and everyday practice?
Heidegger suggested that humans are defined by our self-understandings; our experiences and actions arise from self-interpretation, and as such the meanings we ascribe to life forms are not fixed, but rather shaped by our practices and interpretations of the world (1962). In healthcare professions, practitioners and carers are asked to take the perspective of patients, to empathize with their suffering, their struggles, and this is what allows for the gap between clinical knowledge and clinical understanding to be bridged. It is what allows empathy to emerge and be incorporated into practice. Is it that we lack a language for the concerns, experiences and losses of water?
Spinoza ascribes to bodies particular vitality: “Each thing [res], as far as it can by its own power, strives [conatur] to persevere in its own being” (Ethics pt. 3 proposition 6). Looking at the spring water tapped from a esker north of Val d’Or and sitting here in a Montreal classroom, I think of perseverance. What is perseveres here?
Try as I might, I cannot find the words or the grammar to speak for the water trapped in a polyethylene terephthalate bottle as BPAs slowly leeching into its chemistry, commodified, sold and bought. It has become an (unwilling?) actant in a global water market dominated by corporate giants, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi. Does it yearn for the winding ridge of the St-Mathiew-Lac-Berry Esker; does it miss flowing through the stratified water-laid sands and gravelly loam, the ice-walled tunnels and clay crevasses? Is it absurd to ask such a thing? To wonder of the life of water? How to think about water as having its own vitality and power without anthropomorphizing? How does one cultivate compassion for water; to mitigate the trauma when we have no common language, no common expression?
A Day at The Lake
We stop for lunch and a swim at Lac des Sources. Later, when I look up the name I find that there are eight lakes in Québec with the same name. Most are either in the Laurentides or Abitibi-Témiscamingue regions. I note that the satellite images show no rivers or streams entering or leaving the lake. This is curious. Closed lakes or endorheic lakes are rare in Canada, one generally finds them in arid or desert areas and confined by natural geologic land formations. The most plausible explanation is that the rivers and streams that feed and maintain lake levels are contained in underground culverts and piping systems. Surely there must be waterways between it and neighbouring lakes, Lac Adair and Saint-Hippolyte. Where are the connecting streams and creeks between the lakes? And how is it that Lac des Sources is situated between a lake named in honour of a third century theologian most well known for his opposition to the absolution of Christians who committed adultery and a lake bearing an old Scottish name?
Nomenclature aside, Lac des Sources with its missing rivers, swimming regulations and lakeside chalets represents a complex human-nature entanglement. As a geomorphological and biophysical system it is also sociocultural. It is not only determined by the drainage systems, but the plant and animal life that inhabit the lake and its shores, as well as the human demands placed upon it. Human economic, social and cultural needs are bound up with this lake entity. As recreational space it is regulated by municipal ordinances and laws that determine activities and uses, and just as it inhabits a municipal space, it is framed by political, scientific, religious and ideological components.
Uncharted Waters
Dr. Mostafa Benzaazoua explains that when exposed to water and air, sulphide minerals oxidize and produce acid. Thus mining has the potential to pollute source water through the exposure of heavy metals, as well as the chemicals used to mine ore. Between 2006-2009 approximately 2 million tonnes of pollutants, in including toxins such as lead, sulphuric acid and arsenic, nickel and chromium were released by mines in Canada into tailings and waste-rock dumps (Ecojustice). The joint research program at UQAT studies the management of mine waste and rock, treatment and quality of water and mine reclamation. Their objective is to minimize the trauma the earth and water experience in some of North America’s largest open pit mines while charting the depletion of the earth’s reserves. The complexities and paradoxes’ of the research department’s work is puzzling . How does one discuss sustainability when mining uses something like 9 trillion litres of water globally? How does one contemplate waste management when the mining industry dumps in the range of 180 million tonnes of hazardous waste into rivers, lakes, groundwater and oceans every year? How do we reconcile ourselves to the idea that best practice tailing ponds management involves either wet or dry covers, neither of which address the toxicity of the water, but rather simply bury it and leave it for future generations to deal with?
We are on the Archean Abitibi greenstone belt of Superior Craton, Quebec, Canada, a geological boundary zone. The histories of volcanic and sedimentary sequences, magmatic flows and substrate water systems are here, beneath our feet. What do we know of the the ancient scores of water flows and planar fractures that predate life on earth? Such stories lay almost beyond imagination, yet one can help but feel compelled to follow the yellow veins of crystallized minerals, the breccia veins and diatremes, lateral mantos’ that in hopes of finding a narrative. A way to understand what has come to pass.
The silent stories of rock are visible here, if still indecipherable. They have been exposed to view through the endeavours of a gold mining operation. Apparently these boundary zones, rich with histories, alkali syenite and rhyolites, are also sites of gold deposits. Standing on the edge of open sky pit we watch 135 ton mining trucks move up and down the steep, spiralling roads carved into the wall of rock, carefully orchestrated and timed to avoid unnecessary maneuvering. The walls themselves are characterized by the marking of dynamite shafts and the slow work of excavation, layers upon layers of rock broken and moved to create the inverse shape of a pyramid. The bottom of the pit is still four years from its final point, but workers below are busy boring holes for samples of mineral deposits, planting dynamite for the afternoon blasting, and pumping out endless amounts of water. Geoscientists believe the water found in a mine just west from here in Timmons, Ontario, is two billion years old. The oldest water to be ever be found on earth, water that defies our understanding.
What kind of event is the loss of species we don’t know, a species that is not sensible to us? (Yusoff 2011, 580). Yusoff suggests that the indeterminacy of the violence we inflict upon the death offers a way to think with “the insensible worlds of biodiversity to overcome some of the humanistic binds of relationality” (580). The violences of open pit mining, culverting streams and rivers, and commodifying water predicated upon human desires and proclivities; they do not take into account for the precarity of life we are insensible to and water itself.
Tom Gleeson, hydrologist with University of Victoria led a study that was released in 2015, reporting that groundwater is non-renewable resource everywhere in the world, and that just 6% of global groundwater can be replenished and renewed in span of 50 years. The fossil water that is trapped deep underground in aquifers, is not rechargeable. Canada’s chief hydrologist, Dr. Alfonso Rivera estimates Canada has about 70,000 cubic km of water sitting with 150 metres of the surface and that this groundwater is at risk from landfills, the mining industry, leaking gasoline storage tanks and septic tanks, chemical runoff, livestock waste, petroleum products, industrial waste disposal sites and dense industrial organic liquids. With this in mind, how develop an “ethical taxonomy” that reconfigures the “distribution of the sensible” in biodiversity loss in time? (Yusoff 2011, 582). I struggle with the idea that it is already too late. That the call to relearn and reconstitute our relationship with water is belated. And like Anishinaabeg hunting lands and the cariboo, the water we have assumed to be renewable will diminish until it is nothing but a trace.
On The Shore of Unknown Waters
“To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself”
–Butler 2004, 30.
An undeniable characteristic of the Anthropocene era is the “pandemic array” of human interventions and transformations of the global water cycle (Alcamo et al. 2008). This includes physical, biogeochemical and biological processes that life on earth depends upon, with over 126,000 species living in freshwater ecosystems (about 12% of all known species on earth) water flows are essential to life (Garcia-Morena et al 2014). As numerous scientists have suggested, fresh water are in a state of global crisis and one of the most imperilled ecosystems on earth. Water has intention, and as a deep presence it attracts and sustains life.
If we, or any species on earth, are to survive the Anthropocene, we must engage in a practice that is grounded in a belief of ontological equality. Our relationing in the world must consider the “throbs of pulsation of molecules, stones, water, the lives of plants” (Whitehead, 111). We must bear witness to the vital materialities and flows of water, of “the turbulent immanent field of various and variable materialities [as they] collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate” (Serres 2000). In awakening what Henri Bergson described as ““a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature” (1998, 45) we “lavish attention on specific ‘things,’ noting the distinctive capacities or efficacious powers of particular material configurations” (Bennett 2010, ix) that will allow us to develop more just relations with water.
An Ocean Without Shores
Fairy stones are the result of exposure of Late Cambrian age sandstone that reveals the sediments and organisms that existed at the interface of sea and land in the earliest Paleozoic age. These fossils tell stories of supratidal, intertidal and shallow-marine lithofacies. Some have suggested that they were among the first organisms to journey to land. I think of the Zuni people whose origin stories tell of a world that began as clouds and water until the marriage of earth and sun brought forth green algae and from that all life forms arose.
The discovery of the oldest water on Earth near Timmins, Ontario, and the potential for life well beneath the surface brings the stygofauna of New South Wales to mind. These tiny species brought a $1 billion drilling project to a halt. Living in closed systems without sunlight, stygofauna are vital to the health of the groundwater, and suggest the potential for life on other planets. What might these inconspicuous life forms reveal to us if we are to cultivate more attentiveness, to learn to sense and understand their presence?What relations lay there? What histories?
How to speak to stygofauna?
Bennet suggests that the performative contradiction inherent in speaking for water or stygofauna will dissipate when we revise the ways we operate and relate to matter, but I beg to differ, nor do I think it a desirable objective. We live in contradiction, speak in contradiction, and rather than work to dispel that, we should seek to live in it. To understand our self-organization, self-identification as part of world-historical processes, “not only as producers, but products of changes in the web of life” (Moore 2016, 3-5) That we are something more-than-human and less-than-social, our organization, whether human bodies or political bodies, are porous and are in continual and ceaseless relationings with non-human entities, matters, processes. Thus our interaction, descriptions and engagements with vibrant matter are located in a performative contradiction, and that this offers potential rather than restrictions. There is no one way to be in performative contradiction; it is a creative act.
The Tide is Out
Can the flow of water unsettle our existing conceptions of space, technology and landscape? The modern city, in all its cultural and material complexity, presents a distillation of these tensions, encompassing both the ambiguities and the limits of “nature” as conventionally understood” (Gandy 1).
As a 306-km long system of manmade locks, canals and channels, the St. Lawrence Seaway is recognized as one of the most challenging engineering feats in history. The Seaway changed watercourses and hardened shorelines. It required dredging and blasting, 50 years of negotiations with the U.S. government, flooding of numerous villages, and further land dispossession of the Mohawk people. With newfound prosperity came unforeseen consequences: more effluent dumping from industrial agriculture; more blue-green algae; more sewage from urban centres; more pollution from factories; more destruction of wetlands, forests and healthy shorelines; large scale bird die-offs; and the invasive species that would come to plague the Great Lakes Basin. Blinded by economic promises and the myths of development and progress, we are only now coming to terms with the impact of industrial development on our waterways. Only now are we acknowledging the impact of colonial capitalism on the circuits of water that flow through our geographies. The system of colonial authority was based on the notion of mastery over nature while creating and reinforcing social and economic inequalities. Our waterways are testimony to the ways in which infrastructure was an actant in the processes of segregation and exclusion. The question remains, how do we decolonize our water systems?
As industrial, agricultural, and transportation practices destroy and contaminate ancient aquifers and re-choreograph vital waterways through the construction of canals, hydro-dams, and culverts we must address the practices, institutions, and infrastructures that have transformed bodies of water in cumulative and inexorable ways.
We all have water in common; we are all situated in relation to water, whether a river or ocean, a lake or stream. Thinking and narrating through and for water has the potential to bring together issues and concerns that are too often addressed in isolation. Addressing the transformations of waterways allows us to think through species extinction and ecological degradation in tandem with anti-colonial struggles, social justice issues, petropolitics and mining, the flows of multinational capital and globalization of resources. Revisiting our watery relations will allow us to return to water, that is to engage in a re-relationing and begin a practice of decolonization. To disrupt the ethos of enclosure that has worked to construct colonial discourses around property and water. As an element that can gestate life, create and destroy, our re-relationing with water offers the potential for transformation.
Works Cited
Alcamo, JM, Vörösmarty CJ., Naiman RJ et al (2008). Charting our water future. Economic frameworks to inform decision-making. 2030 Water Resources Group.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchel. New York: dover.
De Landa, M. (1997). Thousand years of nonlinear history. New York: Zone.
Ecojustice, https://www.ecojustice.ca/
Gandy, M. (2014), The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Garcia-Morena, J, et al (2014). Sustaining Freshwater Biodiversity in the Anthropocene. In: Bhaduri A, bogardi J., Leentvaar J. Marx S. (Eds). The Global Water System in the Anthropocene. Springer Water: Springer. 247-270.
Heidegger, (1962) Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarried & E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row (Original work published in 1927).
Moore, J.W. (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.
Serres, M. (2000). The Birth of Physics. Trans, Jack Hawkes. Ed. David Webb. Manchester: Clinamen.
Spinoza, B. (1992) Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley.
Ed. Seymour Feldman. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press, 1929.
Yusoff, K. (2011). Aesthetics of loss: biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 37, 578-592.