Water Flourishing in the Anthropocene

Abstract

What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.

Water Futures in Australia: Materialities, Temporalities, Imaginaries

“…Edited comparative collections such as ‘People at the Well’ (Hahn et al 2012), and reviews in the anthropology of water (Ballestero 2019a; Hastrup 2013; Orlove and Caton 2010; Strang 2005; Vogt and Walsh 2021; Walsh 2022) all emphasise ‘waterworlds’ – the bio‐social importance and culturally imbued experience of water, and its multiplicity and ubiquity. The focus on water includes cultural visions of good water futures in relation to living in the Anthropocene (see Cattelino et al 2019) and crucial questions regarding the diverse economics of such futures (Wutich and Beresford 2019).…”