Trace Your Waterscape on World Water Day
By Emily McKee, Ph.D., Associate Professor, NIU Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Environment, Sustainability and Energy.
For World Water Day on March 22, we’re sharing a series of blog posts diving more deeply into this vital resource.
March 22 is World Water Day, and this offers a great opportunity to think more deeply about something so common we might often take it for granted. Everyone interacts with water every day. But for many people, water access is far from secure. About two billion people—that’s more than one in six people on earth – don’t have access to reliably clean drinking water. We also need water for so many other reasons beyond drinking. We use it to clean things and protect our health; to grow food and make so many of the goods we use, from clothing to cars; to enjoy time together on lakes or in pools; and to perform spiritually meaningful rituals. So, what shapes my access to water, and how do my actions shape the access of other people?
This is one of the questions I investigate in my work as an environmental anthropologist. And the notion of a “waterscape” helps me think through all this complexity. Like the term “landscape,” a waterscape refers to the places in which we live and move. But it offers a perspective shift. Rather than privileging land, which might have water in it in the forms of lakes, rivers or puddles, taking a waterscape perspective focuses on the water, and notes the other things that channel, meld with and grow from it. And because we live together in these waterscapes with others, the ways that we use, play and otherwise interact with water shape the water that reaches other people, plants and animals.
On this Water Day, I invite you to learn more about your own waterscape. You can start by learning about who is upstream and downstream from you. In its most direct sense, this can mean who is up- or downstream from you on the Kishwaukee River or whatever other flowing body of water is closest to you. But it’s useful to think about this in a broader sense, too. Where does the water I interact with come from? And where does water go after I’ve used or influenced it? Because water takes so many forms and chemically bonds with so many other substances, this exercise can quickly grow complex – and that’s part of the point.
Water may reach you through pipes and a tap, but also as falling snow and rain, as run-off from your neighbor’s sprinkler, in the tea you drink at a friend’s house, and in the “virtual water” that’s embodied in the asparagus grown and shipped to you from Peru or the cotton in your new t-shirt from Turkey. And remember that when we use water, it doesn’t disappear. It simply changes – from the hose water sprayed on my car to the soapy mixture that flows through the storm drain and into the river, from tap water to urine-laced sewer water.
Work together as a family to see how long a list you can write, or create a giant diagram or collage and see how much detail you can add.
Tracing out these many flows highlights some of the logistical complexity of water management. And if we keep in mind that we don’t all have equal power to influence the uses that are upstream from us, we attend to the political and ethical complexities of water management. Race, class and other social factors give some people much more power than others.
Thinking about these relationships in our waterscapes can help us all make decisions about personal water use, shared governance and economic policies around water that center both rights and responsibilities. What can we do to protect our own access and safeguard the access of others, too?
