Reclaiming our Relationship with Water: Comments on the April 2023 Oceanside Chat
Author and water researcher, Giulio Boccaletti, was the presenter for April’s Oceanside Chat and he spoke about the history of humankind as it relates to water. This is also the theme of his book entitled Water: A Biography. He maintains that water has been instrumental in the formation and evolution of human institutions and infrastructure throughout history. Water is always on the move, often unpredictability in both time and space, which has always been a dominant consideration for humans. Only during the last 150 years has water been more available when and where humans required it — although not always of adequate quality. As a result, water’s practical value today largely depends upon institutions ensuring its safe usage on demand, and its economic value is linked to accessing the infrastructure that secures, treats and supplies it. This is a far cry from water’s value as sacred substance that many ancient cultures considered to be the key element of life itself and a link to the unseen world.
Giulio was asked about the philosophical difference between a Confucian-based focus on building structures that could control rivers in order to manage them and a Taoist view of adaptating to the natural cycles of rivers by accommodating their variable flow patterns. A similar philosophical dichotomy exists today that questions whether we will ultimately have to adapt to water’s changing regimes or whether we can continue to successfully engineer water even during a period of rapid climate change. Whereas adaptive-type solutions have been implemented in a few interesting (albeit small-scale) settings, some people believe there has been too much investment in and reliance on our engineering of water to feasibly make large-scale shifts. He asked whether individuals would assume responsibility for treating, disposing and recycling their water (even if supplied with the technological means to do so) and whether it would be cost-effective.
Giulio noted in his book that the vast majority of water management efforts have consisted of various landscape modifications, which have been employed and improved upon for centuries, thus creating the “illusion” that engineered landscapes could successfully insulate society from the impacts of water uncertainties and climate variations. This illusion essentially delegates environmental agency to bureaucracies and institutions. Consequently, humans have gradually relinquished their personal relationship with and responsibility for water either to the state or to corporations that act on their behalf but also free them to pursue other goals in life. He asks whether our sedentary lifestyles have historically necessitated this tradeoff, perhaps best exemplified by the ability of fewer than 1 in 4 Americans to identify the source of their water.
In addition to socio-political institutions, water has also had an influence on the history of legal doctrines specifying how and by whom it could be owned, claimed or used. Giulio noted that the integration of laws originating from the Roman Empire and the Church ultimately led to the common law under which water was viewed as a shared resource that could be utilized by anyone occupying land adjacent to a surface water body. Eventually, the right to use water could be appropriated and, although the water itself could not be owned, a right to use it could be acquired and essentially owned. Nowadays it is possible to purchase water futures on the commodity market, and the United Nations recently declared that water is a basic human right. Although humans presently have assorted “rights” pertaining to water, the perception of a right to be demanded from man-made institutions is demonstrably different than the perception of a gift from nature or earth for which to be thankful.
