The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice

Description

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. Cover Half Title Page Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: The Lived Experience of Water Rain Queen 1. Water Gaia: Towards a Scientific Phenomenology of Water 2. Flow Motions and Kinethic Responsiveness Flow Motions Gestures of Life A Thirst for Life Water Ethics Conclusion 3. Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet A Flock of Selves Fluttering Conundrums and Finned Imperatives Ocean-Going Avatars of Place The Hidden Alliance The Outer Bound of Oblivion 4. When Salmon Are Deemed Superfluous: Reflecting on a Struggle of Stories Norway, 2010 The Pacific Northwest, 1910 Norway, Today The Elwha River, Today A Generational Struggle Questioning the Legitimacy of the Anthropocentric Story Forging Different Kinds of Alliances Bearing Witness as More-Than-Human Voices Emerge into Our Midst Life Wants to Live PART TWO: Water and Place 5. The Place of Water Dwelling Water, Home, and Journeying Water and Destruction of Place Conclusion 6. Engaging the Water Monster of Amsterdam: Meandering Towards a Fair Urban Riversphere Bullebak Monster The With: Riversphere, Meandering, Being in Common Amsterdam: Dam in a Watery Place Hybrid Waters from Aa to IJ Amsterdam Meandering Back to the IJ Living with the Bullebak 7. Water and the City: Towards an Ethos of Fluid Urbanism I: The Natural City: Thinking with Water II: Designing with Water in Mind III: Moments in Design: Flowing to Still IV: Looking Ahead – Towardsan Ethos of Fluid Urbanism 8. What We’re Talking about When We’re Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint, Michigan Race Aphasia, Re-membering, and the Difficulty of Addressing (Post)Colonial Reality Ruin and Ruination An Environmentalism of the Built Environment PART THREE: Rethinking Water Policy, Practice, and Ethics 9. The Bonding Properties of Water: Community, Urban River Restoration, and Non-human Agency Riparian Restoration and Modernist Thinking Meaning, Value, and Agency Friendship and Rivers Conclusion 10. Standing Rock: Water Protectors in a Time of Failed Policy US Water Policy Big Oil and the Logic of Capital The Lakota Way of Life and DAPL Conclusion 11. Phenomenology, Water Policy, and the Conception of the Polis From Phenomenology to Water Policy Phenomenology and Ontology: From the Things Themselves to Being Itself The Opening of Being: A Two-Stage Process Two Conceptions of the Polis: The Polis as Human Organism and Forest Ecosystem Conclusion 12. Towards a Complexity Ethics: Understanding and Action on Behalf of Life-World Well-Being Introduction The Case: Lower Duwamish Waterway Towards a Fuller View and More Adequate Response Implications PART FOUR: Closing Reflections Conclusion – Looking Forward: From Poetics to Praxis The Lure of Water: Four Poems Skinny Dipping on the Don River, circa 1909 On River Fishing: Advice to Women The Lure of Water Baptisms for the Twenty-First Century List of Contributors Index