coe024_strang.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] So, Simone, how what gets you more in the mood to talk about water than having spent a day hiking around glaciers and seeing a whole lot of glacial meltwater? And Simone, how was hiking to that glacier in a skirt? And if you don't believe that there's photographic evidence now on Facebook, check it. Welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker2: [00:00:48] What makes me more prone to talk about water than being near a blackened soot sort of sooty covered glacier, which was spectacular and ominous?

Speaker1: [00:00:59] They're scary. They're really scary when you get up.

Speaker2: [00:01:01] I now understand why for centuries and for most of human history, our encounter with glaciers has been horror and dismay. Because they are, they are frightening entities, right?

Speaker1: [00:01:14] They melt, they flood. They encroach on your, your, your farm. They disturb your horses.

Speaker2: [00:01:21] They could knock their farmhouse off of it's off of its foundation, which might be part of the reason why Icelanders build these these barns and farmhouses into the into the hills themselves.

Speaker1: [00:01:33] So as you hear, dear listeners, we are back in Iceland again after a brief sojourn to the continent. And we are sharing with you today a lovely conversation with Veronica Strang, an anthropologist who also happens to be the executive director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University, a place that we have some memories of fond ones. The six weeks we spent there in 2014 working on our Wind Park books, and it turns out Veronica Strang is one of the first scholars in the humanities and social sciences to really spend a lot of time looking at water. I can't totally prove that claim, but I think intuitively it's correct because she's been working on water for 25 or 30 years a long, long time. I mean, water is obviously a hot topic right now, but right?

Speaker2: [00:02:26] And sometimes a cool topic, too, OK, very liquidy. But I think she does have to count as like original gangster and soldier O.G. in this category because she was doing this work long before this kind of elemental research was the hip and happening things.

Speaker1: [00:02:43] So props props out now. So we have a lovely conversation. We won't spoil it about all sorts of things, from the politics of water, the resource politics to the cultural meanings of water. We have a really interesting conversation about Earth beings, you know, water beings that so any of you who want to like? Tune in to this podcast to listen to, like Loch Ness Monster theories, you're going to hear some of those here explanations on this, on this one. But first of all, before we get to all of that, I believe you have a water story.

Speaker2: [00:03:15] No, I'm not. I'm not quite to the water story yet. I was going to pose a more philosophical question. Actually, it's quite possibly deep and profound. All right. All right. Which kind of made the same thing. But anyway, the question is what? What counts or what constitutes good water? And, you know, I'm sure that we've all heard of something called Sweetwater, right, and Sweetwater is is good clean water that's potable that you can drink that has a really crisp and lovely taste to it. I guess it usually comes out of a spring. It's not. It's not salinity. It's not salt water. It's not briny in any way. But then if we think about water and some of us, we talk a little about a little of this with Veronica too is, you know, is good water. That water, which is free for all humanity and other creatures to partake of, is good water. The sweet water versus salty water or seawater sweet water.

Speaker1: [00:04:17] It sounds to me like like a town in Kentucky, maybe Tennessee. That's with with a really good. Well, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker2: [00:04:24] I think I like Sweet Home Alabama.

Speaker1: [00:04:25] I don't. I don't think I've heard this term. Sweetwater ever. Really? Oh my gosh, it must be really good. But where I grew up, there wasn't such good water. The water wasn't really great, especially in

Speaker2: [00:04:35] The summer, right? So then you think about this urban water, right? So maybe the yeah, the summer water coming out of the pipes in Chicago is kind of nasty. Then we think about the really dangerous nasty water that was coming out of the pipes in Flint, Michigan. Yes.

Speaker1: [00:04:51] Yes, yes.

Speaker2: [00:04:52] So that's bad water. You know, I mean, there's kind of dangerous water, too. Indeed, there is. So you start to think about what is this good water? Is that water that's held in clouds? Is it water that circulates? Is it water that has infrastructure binding it into place and channeling it and distributing it to places?

Speaker1: [00:05:13] Well, one of the things Veronica talks a lot about in the interview is how water the liquid, transgressive, transformational medium that it is. Is this really good to think with when it comes to sorting through all of our moral issues? So, you know, water often becomes a medium that we used to talk about pollution and and contamination, as well as something that we use to talk about the sacred and and what what is what is special in our various cultures, right

Speaker2: [00:05:45] And powerful and plus water for everyone to doing in research on water. There's just a gazillion metaphors and anecdotes that you can pull from, right, because it's got so much good stuff about flow and

Speaker1: [00:05:59] On and on. So undoubtedly, I think Veronica would probably say whatever Sweetwater is, it's a whole lot of things that we value positively, but just get sort of swept

Speaker2: [00:06:08] Up into it. So the other thing we didn't I don't think we talked about this, but this is another interesting element of the element of water, and that is its mutability, right? And we commonly encounter it and it's mutable forms as ice, as liquid and as gas. And it quickly becomes, you know, through some trans modification. But it pretty quickly becomes one or the other of those forms in ways that other elements are less likely to do. Like if we think of fire and earth and air. Anyhow, I think water has some

Speaker1: [00:06:43] Interesting well, given that we were just warned about quicksand, I think that that, you know, on our glacier hikes that quicksand might suck us up. That makes me think that even Earth can be a little bit differential in terms of its material qualities, depending on, well, how much water it has in it, I guess. Right. So maybe that brings us back to square one. Tell your water

Speaker2: [00:07:00] Story. So there's a water. So I was thinking about what makes good water and then I and then I remembered what I think was the worst, the worst water I've ever drunk.

Speaker1: [00:07:11] All right, now we're getting somewhere.

Speaker2: [00:07:13] And it wasn't in Flint, Michigan. It was in a jungle and Guatemala and the tical region and the Patan got it. And I was, you know, 19, 20 years old doing a field study off in the jungle. We were like twenty two miles into the jungle and we had some water rations with us enough to get by for the week that we were going to be there. But we also needed to make use of any and all water sources that that we could. So we camped for the night and we camped next to this swamp pond, OK? And it was I mean, you could barely even tell that it was a pond. It was sort of like if you pushed your hand down, you could feel that it was sort of moist. But it was really a lot of Earth and a lot of plant bodies in there in the other bodies that were in there were mosquito larva. A lot of mosquito larva because this is where they, you know, calling out all Zika's like, this is where they hatch, right? That's how they that's how they come to life. So this entire little puddle, this sort of greasy puddle in the middle of the jungle was full of this lava. And we had to take our water bottles and sort of, you know, crush it down in. To the grass and the swampy belly. Go ahead and fill our water bottles with kind of yellowy golden water that was full of twitching mosquito larvae.

Speaker1: [00:08:47] Wow. And did you just chug it like that or was it like a mixer you put it in?

Speaker2: [00:08:51] No, because to make it good water, you have to knock it out with an iodine tablet or two, probably, too. So you have to put this other chemical combination into the water which killed off all the larva, actually. But it also makes it so that the water is drinkable for a human being. And it's not going to be toxic, I guess, or make you sick. And you know, it was probably the most disliked, sort of revolting, disgusting test testing your ethnocentric centricity water I've ever drunk. Yeah, but it did not. It didn't make me sick. So it's like, you know, it was this nasty water and a lot of ways full of these bug bodies. But at the same time, it was what you need. I mean, we need water in order to survive, and you don't want to drink water that's going to give you

Speaker3: [00:09:44] Parasites and other

Speaker1: [00:09:45] Other things. Right. And I think that ties in very nicely to Veronica's point that, like a lot of our sense of pollution, is when it comes to water. A lot of that is also has to do with the values and meanings that we transport to that water to. It could actually be chemically pure. Right? And still, knowing where it's come from, we have a colleague in civil and environmental engineering at at rice, who works on water, who, you know, laments to us from time to time that he's got these filters that can turn, you know, toilet water, gray water into into much, much purer water than you would ever get out of a tap and say, Houston. And yet, knowing that it comes from gray water, there are lots of people who refuse to drink it right on principle because it's a category violation. But anyway, folks, so what? In honor of that, what we'll suggest is that you pour yourself a big glass of crystalline water or whatever water you think is pure and good. It can be, you know, maybe it's the water from your local. Well, I mean, it could be that your local well water is just the bottom of all water. It could be,

Speaker2: [00:10:51] Yes, if there's fracking in your community, it can be really to say, Hey, you can let your water on fire.

Speaker1: [00:10:56] But anyway, pick your favorite water, pour yourself a glass and listen in to our conversation with Veronica Strang. Yeah. Go Veronica. Welcome, Veronica Strength to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we're so very pleased to have a chance to speak with you here in Durham in the north of England. You I'll just mention this that you are the executive director of the Institute for Advanced Study here and to thank you because through the auspices of the IRS, Simone and I were able to spend six weeks in Durham two years ago working on writing up our research on wind energy in Mexico. So thank you. That was it was terrifically productive time we had here in Durham. We're very

Speaker3: [00:11:42] Happy to be there and we ate more fish and chips than last

Speaker1: [00:11:45] Year. We had a lot of fish and chips. Yes, during our time here,

Speaker4: [00:11:50] But fish and chips in the country, of course.

Speaker1: [00:11:52] Yeah, absolutely. We thought we might start, as we all know in the humanities and social sciences today, water is a topic that really is for a variety of reasons, become exceedingly important and and much talked about. But interestingly, you've been working on the topic of water for twenty five or thirty years now, so you were well ahead of the curve, as it would say. In terms of this topic, I thought it might be interesting just to start off by asking you, how was it that you first became interested in doing research on water? Is there a story? There is it. Is it? Was it a lifelong ambition or an epiphany epiphany?

Speaker4: [00:12:32] Perhaps it would be nice to have to say so, but that wouldn't be entirely true. I misspent my early 20s in the Caribbean, and I practically lived underwater at that point as a scuba diver, so I've always been a bit of a water baby. And then I moved to Canada, where I did a great deal of work on environmental issues where, of course, the big issue at that time was acid rain and the dying Canadian lakes and horrible algal blooms called things like elephant snot and sort of green blooms and awful stuff. And so I did a great deal of work on trying to persuade people dwelling around lakes to help monitor water quality and so forth for the Ministry of the Environment. And that got me involved in the Brundtland Report, which was really interesting in terms of the effects of acid rain on forestry in Canada. And then I got a bit tired of the Canadian winters if I'm honest and moved to Australia, where I worked on the cattle stations up in North Queensland, with Aboriginal people and with the graziers, and that led to doctoral work on their very different relationships with the environment. And and these relationships was very much centred on the Mitchell River in Cape York. And so it became clear that, you know, water kind of ran through everything that they were doing. And so this evolved into an interest in how people engaged with their environments at a theoretical level and thinking about their different relations with land, their different cultural landscapes. And then, of course, a realisation that these were also water escapes and that this was actually the central element in their in their engagement in that environment. So that's kind of how it came about.

Speaker4: [00:14:13] And then I just discovered that water was one of the best possible topics to work on because you could really look at so many different things through it. You could look at the political relations and conflicts over resources and management and use. And of course, ownership, which is such a key issue which I'm sure we'll touch on. And then there were also these very interesting ways in which it revealed how people thought with the world, and I became very interested in that cognitive side, how people use the material of the world and its elements to think with so that we can't have a concept of flow without water anymore than you have a concept of stability without certain types of materials. And that, of course, led to some extent into understanding how people think about matter and its movement through time and space and religious beliefs about how water plays a role in spiritual being and notions of substance. So there's this wonderful diversity of things that water allows you to look at, but you're right. At that time, there weren't very many people doing this kind of thing, and it is now so much more fun because there are a lot of really good people writing about water and lots of different ways. And for more people to talk to you about it. So it's become much more sociable working on water than it was. But of course, it also means that one's work is very interdisciplinary because if you work on river catchments, you end up working with hydrologists and ecologists and other kind of ecologists. And I got very involved with the UN in the international hydrology program as well. So that involved a lot of interdisciplinary work. Sure, sure. Is there?

Speaker3: [00:15:52] Is there something? I mean, I love how you sort of describe the spaciousness of of water to kind of pull out all these different strands of human interactions with it? Is is there something special about water as a quote unquote resource, if we want to think about it that way? And of course, you can sort of deconstruct that if you'd like to. But is there something? Special about water, as opposed to other kinds of forms like Earth, land, soil, air, wind. Mean is there is there is there a kind of a particularity to to water that's important that you've seen?

Speaker4: [00:16:32] I think that you could do some similar things with air and wind and that you can do some of the same sorts of thinking about meaning with soil, which is clearly, you know, encoded with lots of different meanings about identity and substance. But water is is is the element that most obviously transgressors between us and the world. You know, it is. It's the element that connects us materially as well. We require a constant flow of water and the fact that we recognize it as so much as a substance of ourselves. So you might have a similar conversation about soil and what it grows up and how we incorporate those substances. And and in many cultures, that's exactly what you do. You have terms like Sons of the Soil where I work in North Queensland. People talk about how the things they eat, grow them up so that the environment materially grows them up. But water is something that cuts across cultures in that way. And even when people aren't particularly rooted to place, it remains a thing that that actually is a bridge between us and the environment, and it carries things between us. So in that sense, one of the most interesting things about water is how very specific cultural relationships with it are. Yet at the same time, how very powerfully cross-cultural some of its core meanings are. And this forced me to change my theoretical approach completely. Because, you know, anthropologists have been very strict about cultural relativity and the specificity of cultural engagement with place and so forth. But of course, when you work on water in different cultural and context, you realise very quickly that there are very strong recurrent themes that you can't avoid. And so you're forced into what was then in the early 2000s, late night, 1990s, a terribly unfashionable theoretical position of universality? Right? Yes. Which when I remember when I bought my book on the water came out of, you know, something that made some people very anxious. This notion of cross-cutting cross-cultural themes at the time. And yet now, of course, that's not

Speaker1: [00:18:30] Going to say, you know, we've come full circle back with the new materialism and things.

Speaker4: [00:18:34] Exactly. So interesting. But at the time, I was, you know, people wag their fingers at me a little bit for being so universal that I say, you have to have that because the evidence says that it's there. And in the end, you have to go with the evidence. And when you work in lots of different contexts and they keep telling you how important water and spirituality is and you know that everywhere you go, water is a source of generative power. You just you have to go with the flow. I mean,

Speaker3: [00:19:02] Literally, yeah, it can't be ignored. And you know, I think one of the interesting properties of water, too is precisely that flow, right? The movement and you said that it can sort of create connections and meanings between peoples to right. So water is is is able and apt to move and to flow in different directions. And so it has a kind of nationality that seems particular as opposed to Earth and land, which has kind of the markers of sovereignty, and it can be enclosed and captured in that way. Whereas water seems to have a a kind of freedom to it, in a way

Speaker4: [00:19:42] It's transgressive automatically. I mean, what is extremely hard to contain reliably? You know, it has its own way of doing things and it seeps. It permeates it, leaks away, it evaporates into what to hold. And one of the things we're working on ownership is makes it very interesting, is it? Yes, you can stick a fence around territory. And of course, we are seeing some very interesting efforts to enclose water, but it's not so easy. Mm hmm. And and I think there's two things about that. One is that, you know, the river connects communities. It can act as a boundary dividing them. But more often than not, when you work on river catchments, you find that they have relationships through water. They have to talk to each other about flow and access and management and so forth. And it physically connects people. And I think the interesting thing about water is that it forces you to think on a lot of different scales simultaneously because you have to think about how it mediates the individual body with its immediate material environment. But you also have to think about that in terms of larger scales, how it mediates relationships between communities in a river catchment, how it mediates relationships through where it's embodied in goods and a larger market and so forth.

Speaker4: [00:20:47] So water is carried around the world in so many of the things that communities produce. So in that sense, it links people at every scale from the individual body right through to international markets and flows of virtual water around the world. So, so it's good in that way, and I think it's also useful in terms of conceptual conceptualizing flows we use. I mean, the metaphor. Wars that we use water for to conceptualize notions of different kinds of flows is clearly key. So you see a lot of scheme transfers between literal conversations about water flows to things like the circulation of wealth, circulations of people, circulations of knowledge, and we use the same kinds of terminologies so we employ water to think with. And I love that notion that the world is so much inside our heads that we employ its different elements and their properties for our conceptual frames.

Speaker3: [00:21:41] I find that very interesting. Yeah. Can I ask where the limits of water are? I mean, if we think about ice, does that count as water? Or if we think about vapor or if we think about clouds? Well, they can. Yeah, they can. They be?

Speaker4: [00:21:56] I think actually that that's a really nice thing to think about because water more than anything is transformative and it changes its form in precisely those kinds of ways. And it also changes at scale. Water molecules are quite unique in their capacity to take different forms and and to carry other things as well. And if you think about a lot of the kind of cosmological concepts we have, water plays a very important role in understanding the movement of matter through time and space. And one of the things I bring to that, I mean, I work with Aboriginal communities who have a concept of the Rainbow Serpent as a sort of generative force from within the land, but which just fundamentally a hydro physiological cycle. And it mediates the movement of people and spirit and knowledge and productivity from within the land, through the hydro sphere and back into into the land in a cyclical manner, and is often used like that to sort of think about different scales. I mean, we, you know, we've just been having a lot of stuff in the news about water on other planets, and there's a great historical stuff on how people think it came to Earth, and there's some wonderful theories as well. So people always use water to conceptualize larger movements of things.

Speaker3: [00:23:13] Can you tell us more about the Rainbow Serpent? Yeah. How does he she? It kind of moved through the hydro cycle and moved people.

Speaker4: [00:23:20] This is a perfectly lovely cosmology because it's very beautiful. I mean, fundamentally, the water serpent being the major one is the water serpent. But as you'll know, in Aboriginal Australian landscapes, they're full of totemic beings, but they all fundamentally come from the water serpent being the rainbow serpent. So the Rainbow Serpent is like a kind of über generative force from which other beings are generated, and it's held in the land as a kind of generative power. And the best way to explain this, perhaps, is by thinking about human life cycles, because every human individual is believed to come from a sort of water source of some kind, usually a water place and their spirit jumps up to elevate the fetus in a woman's womb. And in where I work, that's called IRCAM punk, and that means a home place of your image. And so. So the water generates the live spark. If you like that is, then a sign given to the parents, you should be the father. And then the idea is that that person will traditionally will relive the lives of the ancestors, and as they mature, they will become closer and closer to the ancestors. And when they die, their spirit has to be sung back to that place. And if they die somewhere else, they have to. There has to be a series of songs and performances that take them back to their home story place. So you get this concept of the person as emerging from the non-material domain. So it's all about materiality and more materiality. They come out of the non-material domain, they become materially incarnate.

Speaker4: [00:25:01] And of course, that's a very cross-cultural concept that everyone has to deal with at some point. So they incarnate, they live their life and then they are dematerialize. And if you look at terms across Australia translating that concept, they translate into things like becoming material, becoming visible. And that's why the home place of your image is such an important translation, because what it tells you is that you've become in a kind of delusional sense. You become material and and then you live your your life and then you become immaterial again. And and there's all these wonderful notions of the dissolution of the person and the forgetting and a good person to talk to this about this to be Frances Morphy, who who's looked at terms longer in Arnhem Land, where they have a conversation about how when you you are norm material, there's a process of forgetting. And of course, this is a very recurrent idea. If you think about underworld and non-material domains, when the person returns them, there's there's that loss of self that comes with the loss of memory. So that's a human life cycle. But then you have to think of the radio service actually generating all the life cycles and all things that that do that kind of process of appearing and then disappearing. So that's what the Rainbow Serpent does. But in a sense, it's also matched to hydrological cycles on an annual basis. So it's a sort of annual scale where you get a big wet and dry season, so you're looking at seasonal cycles as well as life cycles. Mm-hmm.

Speaker1: [00:26:39] It's interesting that a lot of you know, a lot of the work on Australian Aboriginal cultures that I've read, and most of that's, you know, through my work on, say, you know, Warlpiri media and things like that, you know, around Yuendumu. I mean, there's a lot of that literature, the way people want to reframe the difference between, say, Aboriginal cosmology and ours is always that Aboriginal cosmology is are more centered on land and kin than we are. And so there's it's a way of reframing the world. And it's interesting that that as you're talking about the sort of the water cycle and the hydro, the importance of the hydrological dimensions of this, it makes me think, you know, maybe we have a little bit of trouble recognising the hydrological, sometimes because of our own terra logical. You know, our own ideas about what it means to be in a place and to be a social person and how you know. And I think in Western civilization that was really tied up with land for a long time right through agrarian ism. And, you know, so the land is sort of our basis. Do you ever feel that way that we sometimes may miss the significance of of the hydrology in non-Western peoples just because of our own, you know, kind of.

Speaker4: [00:27:49] I think it's less visible to us floods, of course. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:27:53] But now it's changes

Speaker4: [00:27:55] Become very visible. But I think it's less visible because we're no longer tied to agricultural cycles in the way we were. But you only have to go back a few hundred years and you find agricultural almanac that plot water movements extremely carefully and think about seasonal planting in terms of when the rains are going to come and so forth. And I mean, this is a very ancient skill that goes back to, you know, Mesopotamia is sort of calendars and almanacs that read hydrological cycles very carefully and think about time for planting. And you see some wonderful stuff in the classics about, you know, Iraqis and people talking about, you know, all the different signals and you get you get this wonderful material on this in Australia to all the different signals that tell you when it's going to rain at what time of year. And you know, so whether it's different resources coming for hunter-gatherers or the right time for planting, you can have a long, long history of plotting water cycles. It's actually lost touch with that fairly recently, and I think it's partly because we live on larger social and economic scales. This is much more pertinent at a local scale when you're planting things than it is when you're involved in a national or international economy.

Speaker4: [00:29:02] You have lost touch a bit, but we still have some really important notions about living water, and it translates in secular terms into notions of water and health and water well-being and what water does in hydrating us. When I was interviewing, I did a project on the River Stour in Dorset, which was the basis of the meaning of water. And when I talk to people, they had no trouble at all, transferring notions of their physical well-being as mediated by water into those of the environment. And the terms were quite interchangeable. You know, they say, Well, if I don't drink enough, I dry up like an old prune or, you know, I become like a desert. And that notion of being parched is quite transferable between the body and the wider, wider environment. And so I don't think we've lost it. I think we've sort of secularized it and ceased to sort of valorize it in particular ways. But you know, I did have edited volume recently with Franz Krauss on notions of living water around the world. It's still very much with us. And of course, you only need to go into a church in England for that still to be meaningful.

Speaker3: [00:30:03] But it's like our prophets of water now. Are meteorologists right? They are the ones who kind of at least in the northern world in many cases, right? They're the ones who sort of predict they're the kind of scientific or pseudo scientific dowsing rods of modernity in some ways, right? They're kind of predicting when the rains will come and when the floods will happen.

Speaker1: [00:30:24] And was that something? I mean, the other thing is, you know, with the with the sort of shift or urbanization right and people moving off farms, as you were saying and and coming to have these much more abstract relationships to where their food comes from, right? I think you're right that something has changed there and it probably is pretty recent. But now, you know, the world is reminding us again, you know, that the hydrological cycle is incredibly important and increasingly uncertain. And a lot of times now I think an urban dweller is experiencing the water cycle again as storm as drought. It's not a kind of attainable aesthetic object or something that's hidden away in pipes, right? It's now it's here, it's present and we come from a city, Houston, that has experienced, you know, three years of quote unquote historic flooding in a row. And I know this has happened in the north of England as well, too recently, so I imagine I'd be interested. Whether you feel that you know that those climatological shifts are actually part of maybe what's bringing water back into conversation and back to our attention again?

Speaker4: [00:31:30] That's an interesting question. I mean, I think that. I think flood analytically very interesting in in what they say about how we conceive of there being a proper balance of flows in our environment in lots of ways. And the language of flood, the language of being overwhelmed and subsumed is a very emotive language. And of course, anxieties about things like foul flooding, which is a big deal in the cities here because you get the sewers overflowing to people's houses. I hope you haven't had this in Houston. But of course, it taps straight into a very cross-cultural notion of pollution and of the substance of others invading our particularly boundaries. And it brings home very clearly to people that they have boundary spaces, which water can transgress. And the and that sort of dualism of water is kind of always with us, I think, in terms of being wonderfully beneficent, but also potentially punitive. And of course, we tend to have an everyday conversation that is entirely secular, but it sits alongside a sort of biblical imagery that we're most people are still reasonably familiar with in which water is seen, as, you know, the sort of the blessing of God and it comes from agricultural cultural history. But it can also be punitive floods, floods, drought kind of punishment and so forth. And this language still crops up. When you read newspaper accounts of flooding and so forth, and here we translated into this because we've been evil and wrecked the environment by creating climate change. And so there's a whole moral discourse about water as a punitive product of our mishandling of the environment,

Speaker1: [00:33:11] Kind of Christian eschatology. And there it

Speaker4: [00:33:14] Is. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:33:15] Well, I so think about this kind of the question of sort of toxicity or pollution. And again, going back to thinking about how water is is unique or some of the unique elements about it is that it is a very messy substance in ways, and we have these perceptions about what constitutes clean water. And having spent a lot of time in Latin America, where often you're not able to access, quote unquote clean water, that is water that you can imbibe without than ending up with parasites and other

Speaker2: [00:33:49] Ailments of the body, you

Speaker3: [00:33:51] Know, or we think about, you know, sort of the purity of lakes and rivers and our perception of them, right? So if they have a lot of material in them than they're they're not as as pure and as magnificent as they might be, right? So there's a way in which water contains many other sort of factors and elements that that we read into it. It's almost like a kind of a text in a way. I mean, this water on the table is is good clean water right from the top here. And yet there is this toxic water that circulates as well, and that creates a lot of fear and anxiety.

Speaker4: [00:34:30] I think it's very interesting the way people gauge the quality of water because interviewing people about this, you find that sometimes they don't mind having bits in if it's their bits. So, you know you've got forgotten why people drink it straight from springs that it might find little shrimps in the water because they actually take that as a sign of the good health of the water that it's got little live shrimps in it. Therefore, it must be OK. And then, of course, you have an entire critique and anxiety about things like the use of chlorine, especially fluoride. Massive controversies about the putting fluoride in water, which is seen as a sort of a pollutant, and even concerns about the fact that water has been treated with chemicals. But actually, there's also some very interesting stuff about springs and rivers and the extent to which water is seen as being compromised when it flows through a industrial landscape. And then you come down to the social relationships that people have because people no longer trust industries and farmers not to put things with side at the end of them into the water. And so there's a widespread perception that there's herbicides and other sides flowing into into the water,

Speaker2: [00:35:38] Which are defensible and

Speaker4: [00:35:40] They're invisible. And then there's all this stuff on pathogens and other people's substance estrogen in the water. I don't know if you have this problem in the states, but here in Britain, everyone knows that the water in the tap has been through seven people's kidneys and that it may carry a great deal of estrogen. And then there's always research about the effect of oestrogen on fish and on male fertility. And you're right. So there's a widening perception that we're living in a very compromised chemical environment. And this is why, of course, one of the reasons people spend a thousand times more than they do on tap water to buy bottled water from the source, from the spring, from the purity of one sort or another. And the imagery around springs and sources is so powerful. I mean, I love analyzing some of the adverts people put out for bottled water because it absolutely expresses those meanings of generative. You know, you get evolving with its volcanoes and you get Icelandic.

Speaker1: [00:36:33] Glacier water.

Speaker4: [00:36:34] Yes. Yeah, you get that French company. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. With his water babies. Sea water and fertility. And so you get these lovely pictures of babies swimming underwater because water is generous here. And so it taps straight into things that you could actually find five hundred years ago. And in terms of people's thinking about the, you know, working with holy wells to initiate fertility and so forth, which of course some people still do in this country have well dressings and fertility rituals here and there. But that's a very strong theme that runs right through those ideas. So, yes, the notion of water carrying the substance of others is,

Speaker3: [00:37:13] Yeah, it's part of it. That's part of it. I'm thinking too about, I mean, of course, this is part of your work as well, the politics of water and the kinds of politics that that water can generate. So I'm thinking of a fairly well known case of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where there was an attempt to privatize water, including this is the Bechtel Corporation came in and did a lot of sort of neoliberal restructuring of the water sources and designated that water would become much more expensive for some impoverished people. About half of their income was going to be spent on water. So drinking water, but also water to bathe, water to clean your clothes, et cetera. I mean, there's lots of uses that we have for water. And one of the elements of the contract that that they were trying to put into place in Cochabamba was that even water that if you use the catchment system, even rain that fell from the sky would be property of the Bechtel Corporation. So I mean, this is really haunting stuff for people, I think, and and again, especially people who are already living on the economic margins to not even be able to put out a sheet of plastic and grab water that you could, you know, give to your baby.

Speaker3: [00:38:30] It's horrifying. So there were there was a lot of protest against this, and they ended ended up upending the project. But one of the things that that this case showed us and I think was really the basis for some of the changes we saw at the level of the United Nations is that water itself. That is, potable water is a human right and it needs to be taken as a human right. Right. So the, you know, the ability to access water that's that we can ingest and that keeps us alive is part of a set, a set of discourses and policies and practices that have to do with what it means to be human, right? So I don't know, this is not really a question, it's more a kind of a, you know, just just thinking about these qualities of water as having. As being inalienable, right in some ways,

Speaker1: [00:39:25] But that's also what makes them so attractive is like a commodity because everyone has to have it right. So it's the one thing literally to be able to sell. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:39:32] Well, I think I mean, I think this is absolutely a core issue in working on water, and the Bolivian case is an important one. Yes, even the rain there was that lovely film time of year, wasn't it? And of course, it is a perfect example of that clash between scales as well. And one of the things that worries me most in my work is that I regularly deal with. Enclosures of water by large, I mean, and I think we're seeing a very important trend here towards transnationals and international trying to create international water markets and buying up. I mean, in Australia, for example, you have major consortia buying up large irrigation schemes, which are extremely profitable. And one of the results of that, of course, is that they then capture the water's flowing into major basin service like the Murray-Darling and grow wheat and cotton very thirsty crops. And so the downstream farmers get undermined and as do all the populations of other non-human species in the catchment area. So you see major degradation coming about through the privatisation of key water sources and places and also the emergence of water trading, which of course, nobody uses the word privatisation anymore. Because after after Bolivia, after the protest in this country, when Margaret Thatcher privatized water, they use other terms water trading, water markets and so forth. But that is de facto privatisation because what has happened is that farmers who had an allowance of for repairing abstraction then were given these as assets, which were then tradable on a water market. So in effect, it moved the ownership from a right to abstract water into the right to sell that abstraction of water.

Speaker4: [00:41:15] So there have been I mean, you see this all over the world. I mean, Bolivia was a very extreme case because it hit a very poor population and try to control even the rain. But you also see this pattern emerging in New Zealand. I've been very involved in Moree water rights because they've been trying to fend off, sadly not successfully, the privatisation of the major utility companies. And these companies own major rights to water extraction or hydropower companies. So that, I think, is a very key issue. And what you're seeing there, and I do think we should be looking at this very, very carefully is the implosion of water at a local level into transnational markets which have no local social or ecological responsibility. And that, of course, is a recipe for not caring too much about local communities and local ecologies. And all of these things are extremely difficult to regulate. I mean, I spent several years working with the regulator Ofwat here in the UK, and it's very difficult to regulate the water industry. They've got a lot more money, much better lawyers, more time and energy to put into, you know, forwarding their interests. And it's very difficult to resource regulatory bodies sufficiently. So the UN declaration was very important, I think, in terms of human rights. It set a kind of baseline, but it hasn't stopped the enclosure of water in very real ways because it's relatively easy to give people water to drink tiny amounts. What is happening to most of the water is for irrigation and so forth is really a key question because those are the things with really big impacts on catchment areas. Mm-hmm.

Speaker1: [00:42:57] That's what we're seeing this in in the United States and what's been happening in California, the southwest right, where all of the climate change models predict these are going to be intense drought areas. And we've seen, you know, many years of drought in California, where people have had to radically cut back home use. But then there's a great tension between that and the observation that big agriculture as well as water. I want to say Nestlé, but I'm not might be wrong about that. Who had been who continued to have the right to pump out of aquifers that are that are and out of reservoirs that are just going down and down and down?

Speaker3: [00:43:30] Yeah. And B and because of the lack of rain and the drought, don't have a lot of possibility of being reestablished. And in California, they've been growing very thirsty crops for a long time, like almonds. And you know, in the Central Valley you have rice cultivation, which is crazy. And you know, it's a very, very water intensive. It works in Southeast Asia. That's a good place to grow rice, but it's

Speaker4: [00:43:55] Very arid regions, exporting their water to temperate regions via rice and wheat and almonds and so forth. Of course, you've got the water wars over the Colorado been chugging along for centuries. But actually, I think one of the most interesting things about this is is its effect on democracy, because one of the things that I tend to think and is that what we're seeing here is a sort of. Weakening of government. And then what you're really getting is decision making by corporations who hold the key resources like water. And it's not just water, of course. There's a whole load of things going on in terms of things moving out of of national economies into global transnational control. And it seems to me that when governments privatized key things like water and energy, that they are fundamentally reducing their role in decision making because no longer lies with them, the control has moved up and out, and it's a kind of palani type. This embedding, if you like, from the material environments which are going to feel the effects into a much more abstract level of control. And so we don't have global governance, but we have governance via the market at a global level. And I do wonder what that's going to mean long term for democratic potential and our capacity to have national or local regional governance. And you find people abdicating responsibilities, I mean, something very interesting happened in Australia around this, and the federal government decided to set up river catchment groups, and they called it democratising the management of catchments. But in fact, what it did was to relocate decision making with the loudest voices, the mostly the graziers and farmers and industry and the mining industry particularly and allow the government to go. Well, now you're managing it. It's not our responsibility. So you're seeing some very interesting abdication of the responsibilities of government because they throw their hands up in their at all too difficult to solve the environmental problems we've created. But let's give it back to community. Of course, don't solve it, either.

Speaker3: [00:46:05] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Speaker1: [00:46:06] Right. Not, not very encouraging. Sorry. No, no. It's a

Speaker4: [00:46:11] Gloomy scenario. We live and we

Speaker1: [00:46:12] Live in a slightly gloomy times.

Speaker4: [00:46:13] In certain respects we do. Which is why with the counter movements that come from places like Latin America and the Green Movement and social justice movements are so important in critiquing these kinds of trends and saying, Well, actually, you know, there ought to be some way to maintain some kind of democratic hold of key resources. But these things swing back and forth. I mean, if you look at the history of water ownership in this country, it's gone from intensely, collectively owned and sort of pre-Christian eras to, you know, through to monasteries controlling water and and therefore the church having massive power and authority through to, you know, privatised sorts of arrangements through to nationalization reprioritisation. It's always a tug of war and it's tug of war because it's the stuff that creates wealth and as as you say, the most commodified of all things because everyone has to have it right.

Speaker3: [00:47:12] Right. Fundamental. In the next academic year, I'll be teaching a course called Speculative Futures. And in that course, we're reading speculative fiction up and against ethnography and social theory. And so I've been reading lots of what's been called Cliffy or climate fiction. And it's fascinating to see how important how integral water is to these really horrifying stories of apocalypse and the end of the world through drought and lack of access to water. So you have these refugees from Texas and, you know, in one story and then you have refugees from California and another and control of water through, like in Bacigalupi, Paulo Bacigalupi is book The Water Knife. The water knife is this powerful figure who takes who is able to sort of manipulate control of all water sources, which are absolutely required.

Speaker1: [00:48:09] And it said in the Colorado River Basin,

Speaker2: [00:48:11] You're just perfect. And in that

Speaker3: [00:48:13] Story, California ends up, you know, sort of Texas grabbing control destroyed.

Speaker4: [00:48:17] Well, I was living in Canada. Of course, there was a very lively discourse about what would happen when America ran out of water and the Canada owned all these big lakes and how that would change the relationship completely. Because, you know, owning the water is owning power to some extent. And there was a question of sort of whether this would give Canada a powerful position or the Americans would simply come and take their water. But you know

Speaker2: [00:48:40] What you guys are like? Right, right. That's our habit of concern. You thought that was your water, not ours.

Speaker4: [00:48:48] We've got boundary of the river. We just drained it. But of course, you're already seeing environmental refugees from desertification all over the world. So, you know, this is not entirely, not entirely fiction, but it is going to be one of the sort of crunch things, I'm sure. But it's also very revelatory of relationships between the disenfranchised who no longer own anything. And the small. I mean, what you're getting really is water being held by fewer and fewer people, pure, more powerful, more wealthy people. And that's that kind of elite ownership level and that divide. I mean, you look at some of the events in Britain just recently. Clearly, the inequality of that divide is becoming something that people are extremely concerned about. And you do kind of wonder what will happen with that as people realize that democracy lies to some extent in holding resources.

Speaker1: [00:49:41] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Can I I mean, because you have such a great depth of historical knowledge to maybe you can help give us some perspective on this. You know, have there been periods of reversal of the centralization of control over water historically that you find inspiring for thinking about perhaps the sorts of projects and movements that we should be trying to engage in today? As you point out, you know, people have been trying to contain and control water forever. This is not a new thing. With imperfect results, probably

Speaker4: [00:50:15] There's some very interesting stuff on a local scale. I mean, you could look at the post-war nationalization. Of things as a sort of a sort of re. Distribution of things that which came very much out of pressure for more sort of social equality after the war. But I do a lot of work with catchment groups, catchment management groups and there are lots of ways to own and reclaim water. They don't lie necessarily in legal forms of ownership, but they lie in knowledge about water. So if you start to think about everyday knowledge and expertise about water as a way of reclaiming, you get quite a lot of that. But you also get these catchment groups who try to address water issues in their neighborhoods. And they plant native plants and they clean crap out of the river and they protest when people do stupid things to it and so forth. So you do get these very interesting and they're everywhere. I mean, there's about 35 different catchment groups in Brisbane alone, and they're all doing the same sort of thing, which is trying to make their neighborhood and their water cleaner, better, better, filtered by native vegetation, more protected, more appreciated. Try to make places where they engage with water for all kinds of reasons. And it's very interesting work through them because they invested their identity in that kind of process of reclaiming the water. So you go interview people that are tree planting and they tell you how their kids come back to visit the trees that they plant, or they point out the ones they planted three years ago. And so this kind of local engagement with place has been a very important way of reclaiming water. It's getting it beyond the local level, which of course, it doesn't have fear, interfere with the sort of real management of water very hidden in political terms, very much is the tricky bit.

Speaker1: [00:52:03] I mean, do you see that? I mean, we see, for example, across the world now people who are really interested in creating, you know, local level or city level cooperatives to manage energy, for example, as a as a, you know, alternative to dealing with big utilities and grids and things like that. Is there something similar? Do you see that sense of

Speaker4: [00:52:25] This stuff bubbling around all over the place where you get this kind of, you know, these countermovement kind of collaborating with each other and creating those kind of outcomes? I do think that's a very interesting grassroots level, but there's this gap between the grassroots and the more formal kinds of powerful ownership. And it's very interesting how people have different relationships with different water companies or according to scale. One of the things I ran into in Dorset was. There was this village called raffish where there well had been declared unfit to drink. But they weren't bothered because it was their well, they'd never got sick, and they resented the kind of EU directive quality measure that was being imposed. They didn't, they didn't care about it, so they were quite happy to drink water that had been declared less than ideal because it was there well. Whereas when you interviewed people who were drinking water supplied by Wessex Water, which was then at that time owned by Enron.

Speaker2: [00:53:23] Houston Yeah. Right?

Speaker4: [00:53:25] Distrusted the quality of it. Sure. So what you get in the end is people's sense of water quality as a measure of their relationship with its suppliers and the people who are controlling the landscape in which they're drinking, whether they're drinking from which I thought was very interesting indeed. But I think these counter movements are important. And maybe though, you know, you get a sense of them sort of potentially growing into a sort of swelling voice about what ought to happen with water.

Speaker1: [00:53:55] And we've seen again in another part of the United States in Michigan and Flint, Michigan, particularly there. There's been, you know, a politics of water, a very visible and spectacular politics of water that that has really become an index for a conversation about the abandonment of, you know, certain kinds of post-industrial cityscapes about the the neglect of infrastructure. I mean, as you said before,

Speaker2: [00:54:24] Once you start human beings, human beings.

Speaker1: [00:54:28] So once you start talking about water, as you've said, you start talking about everything because of the nature of water. It's a very powerful metaphor in index in that sense. But I do feel like, you know, water is becoming a signature weather vane or simply a symbol for for talking about so many things about our contemporary condition such that you really do want to begin to inquire as you have for a long time now about the meanings of water in a broader

Speaker4: [00:54:53] Sense to think through that. But if you want an indicator of social and political relations, there is no better than water on every scale. I mean, you can tell about the relationships and family and its hierarchies by things like, you know, who believes, who's bath water after whom and who, those sort of things. And you can tell about the population's relationship with its government by how that how that is mediated through how they have access to water or not, whether they have any say in how it's managed or not, who owns it or not, whether there's a concept of water, the common good or whether it's been utterly commoditized. So all of these things are wonderful indicators, if you understand social relations,

Speaker1: [00:55:35] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker3: [00:55:37] So, Veronica, we have a very important final question to ask you, and that is if that's OK to move on to our oh yes. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And that is what is it like working at Hogwarts?

Speaker4: [00:55:53] Well, I'm very fortunate that I actually have an office that sits between the cathedral and also you really do. So I'm right in the center of Hogwarts, and it is quite magical.

Speaker3: [00:56:05] It's pretty beautiful. We were wondering if the cleaning staff used the Nimbus 2000 broom that is part of the Harry Potter series. This is when they play this game. Quidditch? Yeah, they they fly around on these rooms and Harry's brooms and Nimbus 2000, so we thought that would be the perfect implement for the cleaning staff here to use when they're going through your office and getting getting the dust over the corners. It would be wonderful if they did.

Speaker4: [00:56:31] They said it. A very good book. Yeah, but I, you know, I actually live across from where I work on the other side of the river, and I've often thought that a broomstick would be just the thing

Speaker3: [00:56:42] To get across

Speaker4: [00:56:43] And get across the road.

Speaker1: [00:56:45] But know was really like, I was just going to say also, the river is really, I mean, Durham is so much about the river, right? And it is and the whole organization of the city.

Speaker4: [00:56:54] This is a river with a wonderful water being.

Speaker1: [00:56:56] Is it? Let me tell you a little. Yeah, this is a good story.

Speaker4: [00:56:59] Ok? The river. Where is the home of the Lampton worm? And as you probably know, Worm is the Norse word for Dragon or Auden as what it comes from. And in the medieval period, of course, there were dragons all over the skies and dragons, of course, all water beings. And of course, you go to Asia and you have these wonderful hydro cycles of ascending and descending dragons that make it very clear and these wonderful cloud dragons in Japan. I could bore on about those four hours, but I'll tell you about the Lampton worm, because this is a very well known folk song here in Durham, which I'm not going to sing. You're safe, but it's called a lantern worm. And it tells the story about Sir John Lampton, who went fishing in the River Weir, and he caught this very queer looking thing on his hook, and he threw it in a well because it was too weird and he went off. But then he went off to Palestine, so this locates the story and the Crusader era. Mm-hmm. So if he goes to Palestine, where he gets involved in those wars, but once he's away, the worm grows and grows and grows and reaches an awful size and it comes out of the well at night and it starts milking the cows and then it starts on the lambs and the sheep, and then it starts on the children.

Speaker4: [00:58:11] So people write to the surgeon in Palestine. He comes galloping back and slays the worm. So this is a classic dragon slaying story right here in Durham. And it is contiguous with a whole set of dragons related stories in this area because of course, we have the Vikings invading during that period chasing St. Cuthbert and the monks all over till they settled in the cathedral there and. So you have this local mythological being. And the song, but what is absolutely lovely about this is that when the new Bishop of Durham is enthroned, even now, he has to come into the diocese at its southernmost point. He has to meet the local dignitaries over the river. Hmm. He is handed a medieval sword called a falcon, which you can go and see in the open treasures if you want at the cathedral. And he has to swear to slay the dragon. Isn't that gorgeous?

Speaker2: [00:59:06] And it's the worm, that very dragon, very dragon he has.

Speaker4: [00:59:10] So every bishop of this enthroned is what does this? And this ritual lapsed for a while, and then they revived it, and it's largely treated as a little bit of fun. But of course, what it also represents is the total repression of the pre-Christian religions in this region by the medieval Christians who were very military and very intense about it. And there were some very important water beings in this area. So if you go up to Hadrian's Wall, which is very close by. You have COVID 19 as well, and COVID 19 was a major water goddess adopted by the Romans as a myth from there are all sorts of things and a well, and that well was covered up in about the 12th century when the Pope's got really heavy handed about people worshipping non-Christian idols. And when they uncovered it, there were 16000 votive offerings and she had this huge cult across Spain and Portugal, and it was a really, you know, major water goddess. So although this is a very light hearted little story, what you have in that medieval period is a takeover in which water beings were ritually slain by all kinds of culture heroes right across Europe. And there is a whole repression of all those belief systems churches planted right on top of holy wells or right next to them.

Speaker4: [01:00:23] Hmm. And then you had this very interesting bubbling away alternative religion, which is still there. And so in a recent census in this country, the number of pagans, which only about three or four percent of population people who declare themselves to be pagans actually rose by 25 percent. At the same time that the number of people who declared to be Christians, about fifty nine percent fell by 13 percent. So it's still there, these kind of alternative religious belief systems, which of course, are critical of patriarchal religions. So there's some really interesting gender stuff there as well. So the fact that the Bishop of Durham, who is one of the most powerful bishops in the country, still has to swear to slay the dragon is actually really interesting, and I did a little discourse analysis of Justin Welby and his his his speeches at that time. He's now gone on to be Archbishop of Canterbury. And he said we must reconvert the region. You must topple the false idols. We must bring Christianity into every community so this stuff is not dead and gone.

Speaker1: [01:01:27] Oh, and I was I mean, this is maybe pushing it too far. But as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, we do have this class of mysterious water beings like the Loch Ness Monster and the lake. I mean, it seems like this is like there still is a certain fascination with this idea of these hidden beings, right? That although yes, it's it's kind of on the one hand, people don't take it very seriously. On the other hand, there is like an enduring fascination with them that you can't complete.

Speaker4: [01:01:51] Well, there's a reason for this. And I mean, I love this topic because water beings are wonderful and I've done a huge amount of work on the history of them. And what is absolutely fascinating about them is their ubiquity. You cannot go to a part of the world literally where they have, they have no water beings. Historically, it's just you just can't. I mean, everywhere you go, there is some kind of water being in history. And I think that this brings us to a very interesting area of anthropology, which is kind of where we started about using water to think with, you know, water water beings are fundamentally the personification of the power of water, its capacity to act in the world and to do things and to move and to be powerful. And so I now have the what I really need is two years off with a link up to write this book, but I have all this wonderful data about water beings from around the world, you know, horned serpent sitting in your part of the world. Sure, there's wonderful pueblo serpents you go down to Central America, all gets all Quetzalcoatl. All those things go down into the Amazon and you get these wonderful twin boa constrictors. You go up to Africa, you've got mummy water and all kinds of other serpent beings. Australia, Rainbow New Zealand, tiny fires, Japan, wonderful cloud dragons coming out of clouds and materializing and everywhere in Asia, ascending and descending dragon beings, dragons springs. You know you can't move to Canada. You've got this lovely stuff up north. You see wolves up in the northern parts of America. So they're everywhere. And the fact that they're everywhere. So something very important about how we. Create beings from from elements and their properties, because of course, there are lots of other kinds of beings, a tree being so, but water beings are the most ubiquitous and they're very fascinating and lovely. So there's another whole topic.

Speaker1: [01:03:40] Yeah, no.

Speaker3: [01:03:41] That's where wherever you find humans, you find water invariably, right? It's absolute necessity. So on that note,

Speaker2: [01:03:48] I think we should

Speaker1: [01:03:49] Toast a glass of water.

Speaker2: [01:03:50] No, I think we should. I think we should pour some water loudly.

Speaker1: [01:03:54] Water sounds there. There we go. Lovely.

Speaker4: [01:03:57] You can even gargle if you're not a nut.

Speaker3: [01:04:01] Let's hope that this is very well.

Speaker4: [01:04:04] Yeah. Use of

Speaker3: [01:04:06] Audio mediated. Ok, cheers.

Speaker1: [01:04:08] Cheers. Toast two is to water gulping. It was lovely to have a chance to chat with you about water and to have a glass of water with you.

Speaker4: [01:04:20] You're very welcome. It is a pleasure.