Water the Climate Connector
The Understory: Issue Twenty-One
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In the spirit of Water’s collaborative potential, I invited a co-author for Issue Twenty-One. Musa Nxumalo has become a dear friend and business collaborator who hails from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he leads a practice of cross-pollination revealed in his book1. Instead of using the singular first person in this essay, we chose the pronoun suggested by Tyson Yunkaporta, “us-two” to reference our shared viewpoint. Us-two bring you perspectives on Water from both sides of the Atlantic and from lived experiences and cultural traditions that radically differ. And yet, we have arrived at the same place—centring our practices around the power of storytelling to create greater interconnectedness between people, nations, and the living planet.
Adam currently lives in Canada, one of the countries with the greatest amount of renewable internal freshwater per capita. His intimate encounters with Water are in the tidal forces of ocean waves, the acceleration of paddles, and the rapid slides along in frozen Water at high altitudes. Musa lives in South Africa, one of the countries with the least amount of fresh Water per capita (IndexMundi). His intimate encounters with Water are underground, having spent more than a decade in one of the most intensive Water industries in the world—mining. Us-two seek to be a microcosm of the global whole, representing lived experiences at the two extremes of our Water relationships.
Day Zero
In January 2018 city officials of Cape Town, South Africa, announced that within 90 days the municipal Water taps could be turned off for their four million residents. Dam supply levels had fallen to less than 30 percent of their total capacity. Mayor Patricia de Lille said, “We can no longer ask people to stop wasting Water. We now have to force them.” If the taps did indeed run dry, it would be a flagrant violation of the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa which guaranteed the right of access to sufficient Water to all South African citizens.
Brought on by three years of anemic rainfall, the government labelled April 12, 2018, as “Day Zero”—the largest drought-induced municipal Water failure in modern history2. Residents were asked to collect Water and to minimize consumption to just 50 litres per person per day—according to Time that was enough for one person daily to have “a 90-second shower, two-litres of drinking Water, a sinkful to hand-wash dishes or laundry, one cooked meal, two hand washings, two teeth brushings and one toilet flush.” In February, the height of the summer growing season, the national government throttled Water to agriculture in favour of urban consumption.
By March, the emergency efforts had provided enough of a buffer to stave off Day Zero. By June 2018 average rainfall swept the region for the first time in four years. A team of scientists looked closely at the role of human-induced climate change in the 2015-2017 drought and concluded that it had tripled the likelihood of occurrence3. The challenges of rapid urbanization and bulk Water demands from commercial and industrial use remain to this day. By 2030, it is estimated that demand for Water across South Africa could exceed supply by 17 percent.
The forecasted magnitude of Day Zero was avoided. However, the psychological trauma on city leadership and residents was shared by everyone, even if not evenly distributed. Water access disparities in Cape Town, as in many places in the world, fall along racial and economic lines and disproportionately affect the poor. According to Gina Ziervogel4, about a third of Cape Town’s population (1.5 million people) cannot afford Water and are eligible for free allocation each month. Those poor citizens typically access Water through a communal tap, and thus felt the effects even more acutely. The psychological effects of climate collapse are always heartbreaking to witness, and yet help us to see the true reality of our changing world. The Atlantic thoughtfully compiled the short film “Scenes from a Dry City” to document the months that were the lead up to Day Zero and the communal response.
It is often hard for us to imagine what the acute mental and physical stresses of climate change feel like. And while us-two are generally resistant to dwelling on apocalyptic visions of climate collapse, the Day Zero Water crisis shares themes with how other communities band together in times of disaster explored by Rebecca Solnit and shared in Issue Twelve. We saw the spirit of shared humanity (ubuntu) bringing people together to solve a common problem. Do we need acute emergencies to bring communities together? Can a growing consciousness of our mutual interdependence be the catalyst?
For most of us, our relationship with Water is only at the extremities. What if we celebrate Water as the life-supporting element upon which our planet is built and continues to be nourished? Issue Twenty-One seeks to probe the depths of Water. To embrace our paradoxical anxieties of living with too much Water or not enough of it, and to find gratitude for states of normalcy when we can turn on a flowing tap, nourish agricultural soils, and marvel at the lives of the myriad species flowing along with it. To consider what a future might look like where national boundaries dissolve to be better stewards of clean Water across all social classes, species, and ecosystems. Together we will look at Water from three lenses: Around Us, Inside Us, and Between Us.
Around Us
A Silent Land
Step back in time with us-two 4.5 billion years to the creation of Earth. It was not the “green planet” that we know today, but rather theorized to have been a barren land without surface Water. Earth was so hot that any moisture released from the heavy layers of enveloping clouds would immediately turn to steam. As Rachel Carson describes the western scientific view of Earth5, the contours of continents and empty ocean basins were sculpted in near-total darkness, as the layers of clouds were so thick that the sun’s rays could not penetrate them.
“Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering mantle of green had been drawn—a continent without soil, for there were no land plants to aid in its formation and bind it to the rocks with their roots. Imagine a land of stone, a silent land, except for the sound of the rains and winds that swept across it. For there was no living voice, and no living thing moved over the surface of the rocks.”
It was only once Earth cooled below 100 degrees Celsius that rains began to fall. Rain fell continuously “day and night, days passing into months, into years, into centuries.” This is the rain that filled the awaiting ocean basins, falling upon the continental masses to drain away to become sea. According to the NOAA, most scientists agree on this theory that the oceans accumulated gradually over millions of years.
It’s a beautiful story layered with complexities and possibilities. Is this how Earth, Water, and all living things came into being? Possibly. There are many worldviews with entirely different narratives around creation, many of which involve a parent figure as the protagonist. Stories equally filled with dreaming and metamorphosis.
On the African side of the Atlantic, down south along the east coast, we find the Zulu and Swati Nations who believe the first ancestor came out of a reed bed in a wetland marsh. Every year, in Spring (September), which according to most African traditions is the beginning of a new year, they celebrate creation through an elaborate event called Umkhosi womhlanga (The Reed Dance Celebrations). This colourful celebration is led by the king, who also happens to be the spiritual figurehead of the nation. In that celebration, young maidens go to the river early in the morning and pick a reed, carry it over to the royal palace, and present it to the king. These thousands of reeds are used to maintain the royal household. One of the main chants repeated during the ceremony for hours on end has the words, “aaahha uyinkosi yohlanga”, which means, “hail the king of the reed”. By implication, this means the nation’s identity is intertwined with the reed. The king (inkosi) is not just the king of the nation, but more broadly interconnected with the natural world. This annual ceremony is another way that a parent calls their children home: to celebrate who they are, where they come from, and new growth that needs to happen annually.
The Shape of Water
John O’Donohue6 describes Water as having an inherent property of freedom due to its ability to disperse itself evenly in any environment. “There are no entanglements or nets at the heart of Water.” It is this formless freedom that also gives Water its strength. Due to its hydrogen bonds, Water cannot be torn. For O’Donohue this translates into a kind of robust humility of Water— its elemental properties subservient to its environment.
“Water has great generosity and humility. It insists on no particular shape. It takes on the shape of whatever contains it: jug, stream, well, river, lake, ocean, tears, rain, mist or moisture. In this sense Water holds a wonderful imaginative invitation in it.”
Humans have taken this humble willingness of Water to shape-shift as their invitation for dominion. Over millennia, humans have exerted control over the supply and distribution of Water. This ability to harness Water has historically led to the rise and fall of civilizations. In South Africa, this control of Water has been used to fuel the economic and community expansion of the country through mining. Water is used to dislocate precious minerals from deep within the belly of Earth. You may be wondering “how much Water does it really take to mine minerals?” When it comes to gold specifically, Neville Bergin did the calculations and found it took over 10 megalitres of Water (that’s 10,000,000 litres) to produce one pound of gold. In semi-arid countries such as South Africa, the mining sector demands around five percent of the country’s available Water7.
The human control of nature has been eulogized by the likes of John McPhee, who, upon passing the engineering building at the University of Wyoming noticed the limestone etched motto, “Strive on—the control of nature is won, not given.” This motto inspired the title for The Control of Nature, which describes humanity at odds with Water in three stories. Of particular interest for McPhee is the mobilization of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who decreed that Nature was the “enemy of the state.” In an Army Corps film discussing the importance of controlling the Mississippi River, the narrator articulates the omnipotent voice of industry:
“This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first among trading nations … . We are fighting Mother Nature … . It’s a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.”8
It is from this war-time footing that emerged a perverse kind of circular logic earlier this month when the Army Corps of Engineers unveiled their new proposal to punch a hole in the Mississippi River Levee. First is the structural solution. The Army Corps proposes to structurally break something that was designed by them decades earlier to be impenetrable. Even more ironically, their solution is to return to the “floods and sediment that built the Mississippi Delta in the first place.”9
“By letting fresh Water and sediment flow from the river into the depleted wetlands of Barataria Basin, the diversion will mimic the spring floods that were common before people built levees to contain the river...Without those regular [sediment] deposits, the land has subsided. Further damage from activities like oil exploration cut channels into the delicate wetlands and let destructive salt Water intrude into the delicate marshes; all that and rising sea levels have combined to cause the loss of some 2,000 square miles of land in the last 100 years.”
Here’s the real kicker. The funding for the project is coming from penalties paid by BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. To recap, the $50 billion 2021 Army Corps project plan seeks to return the Mississippi River to its natural function of flooding and sedimentation before they began altering it. And the extraction of fossil fuels—which has further damaged the wetlands and been one of the primary contributors to human-created climate change not to mention the untold damage to the Watershed, species, and lives of Gulf residents by Deepwater Horizon—is the funding mechanism for adapting to its own effects. It would be laughable if the reality was not so horrifying. As Chip Kline, chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Board, says, “This is what climate adaptation looks like at scale.”10 The question now becomes what choice do we really have? As Bren Haase, executive director of the state coastal authority retorts to the emerging opposition to the proposal, “The alternative is unthinkable. It’s a coastal Louisiana that doesn’t exist.”11
Because Water is in a continual state of becoming, total control is an illusion. But in order to make the case for a $50 billion proposal to be funded with tax-payer money, an air of certainty is required to bring us back from the edge of disaster. The fluidity of Water around us runs counter to our desires for certainty—the seemingly insatiable appetite to tame natural force and bend them to our will. What becomes clear in reading histories of Water such as McPhee’s is the distinctions in tempo between human civilization building and nature’s cycles. In the time in which a modern nation materialized in the United States and South Africa, nature’s cycles were moving at a different pace and ambivalent to humanity’s ambitions. As McPhee writes about the Mississippi: “in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature.”
Whether our built environments can afford Water’s incursions or not, Water has purpose. It follows the shortest and steepest gradient to reach its destination—even if that results in a wake of destruction. By giving Water personhood, as the regional municipality of Minganie and the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit did with the Magpie River in Quebec this February 12, Water is legally recognized with its inherent rights: to flow and maintain its biodiversity. It also creates precedence around the ownership of Water. It can be used but not owned.
Inside Us
At the core of who we really are—from our identity, origins, and biology—we are Water. The human body is composed of approximately 90 percent Water determined with precision by age, gender, and hydration levels. Carson describes how the very fabric of our material selves emerged from origins in the sea:
“When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea Water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the Water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea.”13
Us-two are still in awe of the might of Carson’s words and conceptions. Not only that the salt in our blood is evidence of our oceanic emergence, but that the very minerals composing our skeletons share components of the sea. If ever there was doubt about our interconnectedness with other species, this shared compositional makeup provides the harmonious symmetry to put any conception of differentiation to rest.
There are occasions when our confrontation with Water recalls our very creation. In the mining industry, it is common safety practice to expose new workers to the heat they may encounter in the depths of underground work. In order to mimic the underground environment, mine workers are run through a simulation in a Heat Tolerance Test (HTT). The mine officials turn the temperate knob up and then pour ten litres of Water thinly across the floor area. Due to the heat, the Water turns to steam and becomes humid, mirroring the very conditions in reverse that led to the formation of our oceans. The HTT lasts a minimum of two days and can go on for as long as seven. It is done from 6 am until 8 am; afterwards, everyone goes home to rest, only to return the next day for the same. If the human body can survive this prolonged combination of heat & Water, the worker is approved to work underground.
We might think of the steam during the HTT as its own form of tears. The Water beads down the faces of aspiring miners as if they were shedding internal tears. Steam brings our aqueous interiors outside. John O’Donohue talks about tears being the most poignant presence of Water. Tears tend to appear at the extremities of human language in times where words alone would not suffice. The language of tears is where we, like Water, are pushed to our extremes. Tears emerge when we call forth the well of Water that resides inside each of us.
Between Us
“If the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, the wars of the next [21st] century will be fought over Water."
Ismail Serageldin, Vice President of the World Bank
Water has long challenged cooperation between civilizations, sometimes inciting “traditional wars” fought between nations and tribes with weapons. Vandana Shiva describes a second kind of war resulting from conflicts in how we perceive and experience Water differently between people, which she calls “paradigm wars.”14 Water wars pit market-based privatization and enclosure of the water commons against the universal ethic of Water as an ecological necessity. Shiva helps us to understand that it is the culture of commodification that is at war with diverse cultures of sharing that have roots even deeper than war. Water is still treated as a gift in the free water stands, Piyao, scattered throughout public areas around India which are now threatened by the enclosure of water commons through commercial bottling. Imagine the environmental impact, Shiva describes, of a billion Indians abandoning the practice of Water giving at Piyaos to quench their thirst from Water in plastic bottles. It is not just the waste, but also the inequity of access that is so frightening.
The United Nations calls Water the “climate connector” as it invites collaboration and coordination across all UN Sustainable Development Goals 15. It is by Water that humans and ecosystems will most radically experience the effects of climate change. “Food security, human health, urban and rural settlements, energy production, industrial development, economic growth, and thriving ecosystems are all Water-dependent and thus vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.” However, only 22 countries report having operational cooperation agreements between neighbours to share Water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers. Seven out of eight regions are currently off-track to achieve SDG Goal 6 of universal water and sanitation by 2030, with some areas dramatically trending in the wrong direction. In the past twenty years, the number of people lacking access to safely managed drinking water in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased by 40 percent.
Shiva writes that “the Water cycle connects us all and from Water we can learn the path of peace and the way of freedom.” What if cooperation could help us convert the vicious cycles that exist in many Water wars around the world into virtuous circles? What if designed conversations could play a significant role in bringing about coherence and connect the people of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia? What if the Nile River could be a unifier not an instrument that is now used to seed division between these great nations at the horn of Africa? What if Egypt redefined its relationship with the Nile, instead of “Egypt is the gift of the Nile” and reframe it as, “the Nile is a gift to all nations through which it meanders and tumbles”? What if Sudan, as a nation in between the two powerhouses saw itself as that cousin who opens the fridge after an intense sparring round and says, “beer anyone?” What if Ethiopia, as an up-river country, could use its economic growth ambitions by broadening the distribution network for the megawatts that will come from the hydroelectric power station and the huge gallons of Water from the dam they are building, to include Sudan and Egypt and other areas in the region?
Our existential dependence on Water demands that we consider our custodial relationship to it. By becoming better guardians of Water, our care can help to regenerate a healthier living planet.
Conclusion
It is easy to take for granted the life-supporting element that is Water. In times of harmony, Water is as invisible to us in our external world as it is within our biological makeup. It is only in the extremes of Water that we come to sense our interdependence on it, and its ambivalence to us. Too much Water can overwhelm everything that even the greatest ingenuity was designed to withstand. Too little of it parches the landscape and the myriad species who have come to depend upon its nourishment, including us.
Water is the way that humanity will most acutely experience the climate crisis. Whether it is in the force of cyclones, tsunamis, and floods, or in times of extreme drought when Water must be rationed, our communities face impending challenges that defy our greatest certainty to have “controlled Nature.” It is in finding our shared humanity—by transcending boundaries of markets and nations—that we will find the courage and possibilities to guarantee Water to everyone. O’Donohue bluntly describes Water as “the differentiation between life and death.” It is in the starkness of this reality that we realize life is the choice. Isn’t choosing life the most fundamental decision of all?
In her typical grace, Carson suggests: “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam & Musa
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In between issues, us-two will share reflections and those heard from readers. While the term community is often overused and thus abused, The Understory is a community of readers who value the comments of others. Please reply to this email or leave a comment on the website with any reflections you feel comfortable sharing 🙏.
Origins
Adam Lerner was raised in a region whose very existence was predicated on its relationship with Water. Situated along the fourth-longest river in the world, Memphis grew to become the largest city along the Mississippi River due to its economic reliance on one of the world’s most Water-intensive crops—cotton—a history interlaced with the slave trade. The Mississippi River provided the means for cotton agriculture, as well as the transport of cotton and slaves. The Mississippi River also carried European explorers and settlers to the ancestral lands of the Chickasaw. As cotton expanded in the region, the Chickasaw were forced to abandon their ancestral lands along the Mississippi to make away for new plantations in what became known as the Trail of Tears. While the colour of the Mississippi River is brown, we can recognize that its true colour is red for its role in the promulgation of slavery and Native American dislocation and death.
Musa Nxumalo was raised in Nongoma, Zululand, South Africa, surrounded by the Ngome Forest. In the Horn of Africa, the first part of his name “Mu” means pool. “Sah” means to draw from. It suggests that one is a pool of Water that people can draw from. The name Moses and Musah, are the same thing with the names used interchangeably in South Africa. His people originally come from where the River Nile begins. It is a place where Hapi, the god of the Nile, is said to dwell, at the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. In that area are mountains like Rwenzori on the Ugandan side, and Kilimanjaro if you approach it from Kenya or Tanzania. South Africa is considered to be the Cradle of Humankind. This is where it all began.
Christian Alexander, “Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ Water Crisis, One Year Later,” Bloomberg, April 12, 2019.
“Anthropogenic influence on the drivers of the Western Cape drought 2015–2017,” Friederike E L Otto et al 2018 Environ. Res. Lett.13 124010
“Unpacking the Cape Town drought: Lessons learned,” Gina Ziervogel, February 2019.
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951.
John O’Donohue, Four Elements: Reflections on Nature, 2011.
Department of Water and Sanitation, 2016: Benchmarks for Water Conservation and Water Demand Management.
John McPhee, The Control of Nature, 1987.
“Big Step Forward for $50 Billion Plan to Save Louisiana Coast,” John Schwartz, The New York Times, March 5, 2021.
Ibid, Schwartz.
Ibid, Schwartz.
“Quebec river granted legal rights as part of global 'personhood' movement,” Morgan Lowrie, CBC News, February 28, 2021.
Ibid, Carson.
Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, 2001.
“Water and Climate Change,” The United Nations World Water Development Report, 2020.
I note with no small thrill that The Understory, for all it's deeply rich powers of expression to date, has just turned Pro. What you have here would be comfortable in the pages of any of the most cogent magazines of the day. Even as I place this wreath at the feet of "you-two," I also recognize that the Understory itself is its *own* unique expression, and medium, and community which is growing over time to rub shoulders with and disrupt those establishment pillars of the press.
This is a stunning fact to sit with, given our entire tech economy's reliance on such metals, not to mention the human cost and exploitation to mine them: "When it comes to gold specifically, Neville Bergin did the calculations and found it took over 10 megalitres of Water (that’s 10,000,000 litres) to produce one pound of gold. "
Following suggestions from Manda Scott (Accidental Gods) I have adopted the practice these last few months of seeking to recognize, thank, and praise water (spirit of water - the miraculous fact of water) whenever I encounter it. Rain fall. What comes out of the tap. Washing dishes by hand. The absolute wonder of a warm shower. What I found is initially I would not remember until well after I had, for instance, washed my hands. Ten minutes later... "oh, I should have thanked water."
Over the weeks, the window of recollection became smaller and smaller until finally I remembered last Saturday while I was actually still standing under the shower, and I burst into tears at the depth of my awe, reverence and gratitude for the humble, most basic fact that we are water, require water, it is our first and primary nourishment along with the air itself. It is what bathes us in the womb, and what washes us our first day and our last day in this life. How can we not honor water every moment we touch it? To have lost touch with this conscious connection is just one more recoverable aspect of what was misplaced/displaced by our mechanistic dominant culture. It need not be so any longer.
I commend the practice to you all.
Dear us-two: thank you for stringing pearls of image-wisdom from every culture. This article sings with intuitive awe and scientific speculation. You portray the nature of our balancing act here in this world. We exist. The void of space surrounds our atmosphere, gifts us with breath and body. Always a good story to tell, seldom better told.