Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behaviour.
The Wonder of Water explores how human experience – including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases – impacts decisions around water. In many ways, the volume expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology. And yet this book is not simply for philosophers. On the contrary, a specific aim is to explore how more informed philosophical dialogue will lead to more insightful public policies and practices.
Case studies describe specific architectural and planning decisions, fisheries policies, urban ecological restorations, and more. The overarching phenomenological perspective, however, means that these discussions emerge within a sensibility that recognizes the foundational significance of human embodiment, culture, language, worldviews, and, ultimately, moral attunement to place.
Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behaviour.
The Wonder of Water explores how human experience – including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases – impacts decisions around water. In many ways, the volume expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology. And yet this book is not simply for philosophers. On the contrary, a specific aim is to explore how more informed philosophical dialogue will lead to more insightful public policies and practices.
Case studies describe specific architectural and planning decisions, fisheries policies, urban ecological restorations, and more. The overarching phenomenological perspective, however, means that these discussions emerge within a sensibility that recognizes the foundational significance of human embodiment, culture, language, worldviews, and, ultimately, moral attunement to place.
The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice
280
The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice
280eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behaviour.
The Wonder of Water explores how human experience – including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases – impacts decisions around water. In many ways, the volume expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology. And yet this book is not simply for philosophers. On the contrary, a specific aim is to explore how more informed philosophical dialogue will lead to more insightful public policies and practices.
Case studies describe specific architectural and planning decisions, fisheries policies, urban ecological restorations, and more. The overarching phenomenological perspective, however, means that these discussions emerge within a sensibility that recognizes the foundational significance of human embodiment, culture, language, worldviews, and, ultimately, moral attunement to place.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781487532987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Toronto Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Water Gaia: Towards a Scientific Phenomenology of Water
STEPHAN HARDING
Water is very old. Not, of course, the water you are breathing out now as you read this page. No – that's new water, a fresh reminting of two hydrogen beings with one of oxygen made by that oxygen-fuelled slow burn of food in your cells that we call metabolism. Old water has been around in the cosmos in vast quantities for a long time, long before our solar system existed. The oldest water was created at least 12 billion years ago, during the early life of our cosmos just after the explosion of the first supernovae – those huge stars in whose innards all the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen are created. Thanks to these massive exploding stars, we live in a water-spangled cosmos where about 10 per cent of all the matter in the vast reaches of space is water in the guise of water ice.
Since we can't see this old cosmic water with our naked eyes, perhaps the first step in our scientific phenomenology of water requires us to engage in the practice of what I call imaginative visualization.
Imagine, then, the cosmos shortly after the supposed big bang.
Visualize, if you will, in whatever way you can, vast clouds of hydrogen, the primordial element created in the big bang itself, smeared throughout space as a diaphanous tissue of shifting gaseous vapour, clumping here and there into denser pockets due to gravitational attraction. Now visualize some of these clumps aggregating down to such huge densities that the pressure inside them causes the hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms, emitting vast amounts of light in the process. Thus are stars born.
Visualize now how in some of these bigger stars, the inward pull of gravity among their helium and hydrogen atoms causes further fusion, giving rise to many of the heavier elements, including oxygen. Visualize these huge stars exploding as supernovae when their inward pressure becomes so immense that a kind of massive nuclear blast is created, spewing out the heavy elements into the surrounding space.
Out here, oxygen and hydrogen atoms can meet each other in more peaceful surroundings. See them now, finding fulfillment by sharing electrons with each other, creating a new emergent molecular being with the unique, unexpected qualities of that slippery, sometimes liquid H2O we call water. If, as some of our greatest philosophers have intuited, the cosmos is a great psyche, then water must be one of its most ancient ideas. Seen thus, each water molecule is a primordial concept made real due to the elemental attractions between hydrogen and oxygen.
We could keep on visualizing old water in the distant past out in space, but since we are aiming for a more current phenomenology of water, let's now shift our focus to water right here on our plane, on Earth, Gaia (Lovelock 1995). Where did our water come from? Here we encounter two possibilities, not necessarily mutually exclusive. The one with the most mythological appeal involves the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter. In essence, the idea is that early on in the life of our solar system, the orbits of these two huge planets shifted, sending some huge chunks of water ice from the asteroid belt hurtling towards Earth and the other inner rocky planets. It would have taken perhaps only a few of these icy comets to give us all the water now on Earth.
In my more poetic, less scientific moods, I like to imagine Father Jupiter peering in at the inner rocky planets of our solar system, and, feeling sorry for their desiccated state, using his gravitational power to send those comets in Earth's direction. Some must have missed, plunging into the sun with colossal puffs of steam. Others would have hit Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, giving them all their primordial water. The other, more prosaic, hypothesis is that the water was there in the very grains of cosmic dust that slowly accreted to form Earth and her rocky neighbours. There's more evidence for the latter hypothesis, which, sadly, shows that evidence doesn't always confer with poetic intuition.
Now that we've used imaginative visualization in our scientific phenomenology to discover how water in the cosmos was created and how some of that water might have ended up on Earth, it's time to explore how water behaves at the temperatures and pressures it experiences here at our planet's surface. It's time for an experiment, or as the phenomenologically correct French would say, an expérience. Put some tap water into an ice cube mould and place this in your freezer until you've made some ice cubes. Now you have ice – solidified water. Next, drop some of these ice cubes into a glass of water, and carefully observe the startling result. The ice floats! The exclamation mark is essential, because this really is a most astonishing phenomenon that has massive implications for life on Earth. Most substances become denser as they cool, which means that their solid phases (ices) sink into their corresponding liquids. Ice is less dense than water, so it floats.
Imagine that we could work some devious chemical magic so that the entirety of the world's ice suddenly became denser than water. The ice would sink, and many areas at the bottom of the oceans would soon be covered in thick layers of ice, making life impossible for bottom-dwelling creatures such as kelp forests, crabs, and many sediment bacteria. This same sediment would lose its contact with seawater, so ocean currents would not be able to carry nutrients such as phosphorus in the sediment to the ocean surface. This would starve the photosynthetic plankton of such nutrients, the foundation of the entire marine food web. So, no fish, no whales, and so on, and no carbon fixation from the atmosphere by the phytoplankton, so the global temperature would increase substantially. There would be further catastrophes. Imagine the polar regions no longer sporting their reflective sea ice – this, too, would make the planet warmer due to the loss of the ice's sun-reflecting surfaces. Without sea ice to keep them in place, ice sheets currently grounded on Greenland and on Antarctica would slide into the sea, raising both sea levels and global temperatures.
Ice floats on water because of a particularly special relationship between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water molecules – this is the key to many of its astonishing properties. Let's embark on another scientific phenomenological visualization. This time we shrink ourselves to 3 × 10-10 m, small enough to see individual water molecules as we plunge into a glass of water. We see trillions of them in movement, each one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen arranged in a wide V-shape at 104.5°C, with the oxygen at the sharp end. Look carefully and you'll see that most of the eight electrons shared by the oxygen and hydrogen atoms spend most of their time zooming around the electron-hungry oxygen atom, which therefore has a stronger negative charge than would be expected if the electrons had been evenly shared. Correspondingly, the two hydrogen atoms emanate a slight positive charge. This seemingly insignificant charge differential within each water molecule is the secret to water's unusual behavioural qualities. The endless mystery of attraction between opposites, between positive and negative electrical charges, that elusive Eros that underlies so much of nature throughout the entire cosmos, now makes itself felt here at the tiny, submicroscopic scale of a single water molecule. See now how the more positively charged hydrogen atoms on the molecule we are observing are attracted to the negatively charged oxygen atoms on neighbouring molecules of H2O. This is the famous hydrogen bond – an attraction nowhere near as strong as the covalent bonds that hold the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in every water molecule in that tight, more enduring embrace of atomic marital satisfaction, yet strong enough to give water its particular properties, which, as we will see, make life possible (see Figure 1.1).
Because they are so weak, hydrogen bonds form and break easily in liquid water in which water molecules, agitated by heat from their surroundings, gyrate and tumble over each other in an endlessly chaotic choreography that keeps them dancing wildly – as long as their temperature lies somewhere between water's very own freezing and boiling points. Now let's return to what happens to water's hydrogen bonds when water freezes to ice. With less heat to scramble them, the hydrogen bonds lock into permanence, creating interlinking hexagonal sheets of water molecules more widely spaced than those in liquid water. At last we see why ice floats on water – it is simply less dense than water because its hydrogen bonds are spaced more widely apart (see Figure 1.2).
However, at room temperature the hydrogen bonds, although weak, keep the water molecules bound together in the liquid state.
This liquid state – I see it clearly now as I sit on a little island at the edge of the River Dart, lost in contemplation. I connect with trillions upon trillions of tumbling water molecules, making and breaking their hydrogen bonds, becoming one emergent flowing whole: the river itself with its speech as it cascades over rocks – a synergistic duet of rock and water. I try to catch what it says – to parse that deeper voice I sense within it, but I never quite catch the message. The whiteness of the water as it roars past the rocks is another emergent property of those watery triplet beings making and breaking their myriad hydrogen bonds. So is the complex riffled surface I see as the river flows on downstream, carrying things I cannot sense but know are there, held in its watery embrace: fine sediment eroded from the naked fields, brown particles of earth. All sorts of ions – charged chemical beings – calcium, iron, magnesium, and many more, are dissolved in the river's water, each escorted by ragtag gaggles of water molecules attracted by the ions' electrical charges, giving them both freedom and protection.
In part, it is water's ability to hold ions in this way due to the polarity between the slightly positive hydrogen atoms and the more strongly negative oxygen atom that makes it essential for life. Water's polarity means that it is an excellent solvent, ably and easily dissolving a huge range of substances needed by living beings into a water-bound liquid nutrient that is easily transported across cell membranes into the depths of the cellular interiors of living beings, where they are desperately needed. Water also helps to moderate the overall balance between the myriad charged molecules within the cell and dissolves wastes that the cell can easily excrete across its membrane. Also, water is liquid at temperatures that allow it to be a flowing matrix supporting the complex biochemical activities of living beings. If the temperatures allowing this liquid state were any warmer, these biochemicals would fall apart – any colder and they'd freeze.
To get a felt sense of how important water is for life, consider this: living beings are mostly water. We humans are 60 per cent water. Some other living beings, such as water plants, contain as much as 95 per cent water. As Vladimir Vernadsky, the great Russian pre-Gaian scientist of the early twentieth century, once said, "Life is animated water." For scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin (1994), life on land is one huge interconnected cellular meshwork of flowing water which they call "Hypersea" – literally, a living, pulsing interactive sea within the tissues and cells of all land organisms whose ancient ancestors engulfed the ocean into their bodies when they first colonized the land. The inter- and intracellular waters of Hypersea move horizontally through soils within fungal tubes and into the plant roots with whom they connect symbiotically, sharing nutrients and information, promoting diversity in Gaia's terrestrial eco-systems. Every land organism carries its own personal piece of this flowing Hypersea within its cells and among its tissues, gifting its precious fluids to others when eaten, parasitized, or dying.
For Italo Calvino (1976) and Andreas Weber (2016), this ocean that we carry within us, this Hypersea, gives us the chance to feel more deeply into life – to experience the ocean, in poetic imagination, as a great inside where life originated and which we now carry as another inside here in our very own bodies. This notion of "inside" suggests that both ocean and Hypersea possess some kind of sentience, some kind of mind. The ocean isn't just water, it feels and knows, as do the sealike body fluids that saturate our every cell. When I swim in the ocean, says Weber, my inside meets and feels that far greater other, which is also an inside.
I sneak through sedges, docks, and pink campions in my wild garden, lie on my stomach and place my eyes close to the water surface of the little pond I dug in here twenty years ago. Tea-dark water, quite clear, shaded now from the bright spring sunshine by overhanging brambles and the old ivy-covered wall. The pond world slowly opens itself up to my gaze as a newt swims languidly to darker depths and tiny Daphnia beat the water with their antennae. Rotten leaves on the bottom, threaded here and there by rooted, undulating worms. Beneath my gaze, slowly moving flatworms hang upside down directly on the underside of the water surface. If I did the same, I would lie spread out on the ceiling of my sitting room, my back facing the floor. How can the flatworms do such a thing? Zoom down with me once again to the scale of a water molecule, right into the very surface of the pond water. See how the water molecules here have fewer partners to bind with, because there are none in the air above? This means that these particular water molecules cling more tightly to each other via their hydrogen bonds, creating a zone of tense water that can support the weight of an upside-down flatworm below or of a splay-legged water skater above. This same surface tension pulls water into limpid drops when it free falls from leaf tips or is splashed out from waterfalls. It seems increasingly likely that surface tension might be created, in part at least, by a fourth phase of water known as exclusion zone, or EZ, water, in which coherent liquid crystalline strands of water molecules form around water-loving surfaces and at the surfaces of water.
These hydrogen bonds – have I done well enough in giving you a felt sense of how important they are in making water what it is? If not, let me illustrate further. Let's engage in another chemi-magical experiment. With a wave of the hand we replace each and every oxygen atom in our glass of water with sulphur atoms, oxygen's immediate down-column neighbour in the periodic table. We've alchemically converted our water into H2S – hydrogen sulphide, which makes no hydrogen bonds because electrons don't find sulphur atoms particularly attractive. Without these bonds to bind them, the hydrogen sulphide molecules rapidly pick up ambient heat and, gyrating themselves into a frenzy as a gas, immediately vapourize from the glass, saturating the surrounding air with their signature highly toxic rotten egg aroma. Some numbers might help here for developing a phenomenological feel for the subtle strength of water's hydrogen bonds. Hydrogen sulphide is liquid only below an exceedingly cold –60°C. Any warmer and it boils into gas. Water boils at a scalding 100°C (at sea level, of course). This huge difference of 160°C is due entirely to the cohesive energy of water's hydrogen bonds. Can you feel their power?
Boiling is fast-track evaporation – a release of gaseous molecules from the surface of a liquid: in our case, of water. On my way to the river through the woods, I looked up beyond the trees and saw white sky water – clouds – mostly water evaporated by the sun from the nearby ocean. Clouds are one of water's life forms. How they hang in white puffs or extended sheets in the sky is a mystery to my animal body, but my rational mind is poised, ready to offer its story – several, in fact – to explain this mystery. Here is one. Plants suck up water from the soil with their roots, sending it up their stems with the help of surface tension through hollow tubes as far as their leaves, on the undersides of which are tiny pores through which the water escapes into the air along with specialized chemicals crafted by the plants to condense the water into clouds up in the atmosphere. Water thus condensed can fall as rain, returning the water to earth, soil, and vegetation.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wonder of Water"
by .
Copyright © 2020 University of Toronto Press.
Excerpted by permission of University of Toronto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
Part One: The Lived Experience of Water
Rain Queen
Kirby Manià, Simon Fraser University
1. Water Gaia: Toward a Scientific Phenomenology of Water
Stephan Harding, Schumacher College
2. Flow Motions and Kinethic Responsiveness
Stephen J. Smith, Simon Fraser University
3. Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
David Abram, Author and Cultural Ecologist
4. When Salmon Are Deemed Superfluous: Reflecting on a Struggle of Stories
Martin Lee Mueller, Rudolf Steiner University College, Oslo
Part Two: Water and Place
5. The Place of Water
Janet Donohoe, University of West Georgia
6. Engaging the Water Monster of Amsterdam: Meandering Toward a Fair Urban Riversphere
Irene Klaver, University of North Texas
7. Water and the City: Towards an Ethos of Fluid Urbanism
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Simon Fraser University
8. What We’re Talking about When We’re Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint, Michigan
Sarah King, Grand Rapids University
Part Three: Rethinking Water Policy, Practice, and Ethics
9. The Bonding Properties of Water: Community, Urban River Restoration, and Non-human Agency
Bryan Bannon, Merrimack College
10. Standing Rock: Water Protectors in a Time of Failed Policy
Trish Glazebrook, Washington State University and Jeff Gessas, University of North Texas
11. Phenomenology, Water Policy, and the Conception of the Polis
Henry Dicks, Université Jean Moulin, France
12. Towards a Complexity Ethics: Understanding and Action on Behalf of Life-World Well-Being
Robert Mugerauer, University of Washington
Part Four: Closing Reflections
Conclusion: Looking Forward: From Poetics to Praxis
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Simon Fraser University
The Lure of Water: Four Poems
Dilys Leman, Toronto
List of Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
"The Wonder of Water deploys an explicitly phenomenological approach to water, making links between environmental case studies, policy, and personal experience."
"The Wonder of Water deploys an explicitly phenomenological approach to water, making links between environmental case studies, policy, and personal experience."
"Using water as a lens for explicating the complexity of environmental experience, The Wonder of Water goes further than any other book in demonstrating how phenomenological methods might inform environmental management."
"Contributors demonstrate how a more comprehensive, engaged knowledge of and responsibility for water can guide water restoration and propel sustainable environmental and landscape design and policy."