We are resuming this section which was on hiatus during the summer. Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Esse number 109, Water file, fall 2023.
We have entered a global water crisis. Everywhere, warnings are being hammered out about the accelerated desertification of the Earth, the industrial pollution of its water resources, the overexploitation of its aquifers. By 2025, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will face water shortages, we read in a 2021 UN report. Yet in Canada, water still flows freely through taps and garden hoses without us fully realizing its rarity. We do not know thirst.
“Thirst unites us with the world and others,” writes Jean-Philippe Pierron in The poetics of water. For a new ecology (2018). Ironically, in a figurative sense, thirst is also the lust that has led humans towards extractivist excesses. At a time when the Quebec government is encouraging businesses to adopt a sustainable development policy, greenwashing by multinationals is omnipresent and makes it difficult to distinguish between mercantile actions and those that really care about well-being. collective. For example, the World Water Council, which organizes the World Water Forum, claims to focus “on the political dimensions of water security, adaptation and sustainability”, guided by the superb slogan “Together, let’s make water a global priority”.
However, what the activist Maude Barlow teaches us in the work Who owns the water? (2021), published by Écosociété, is that the World Water Council was formed to promote the interests of private companies offering water management services. The 2030 Water Resources Group, Barlow tells us, created by the World Bank with the mission of implementing the UN sustainable development agenda, is made up, among others, of large water bottlers such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Knowing also that water made its debut on the Chicago Stock Exchange in December 2020, there is reason to be perplexed (and worried) about the real intentions behind the notion of sustainable management of water resources.
Already, considering water as a resource subjects it to an economic logic and an essentially anthropocentric vision. Researchers engaged in ecological thinking are developing new ways of thinking about water outside of utilitarianism, by first recognizing it for its vital role in the ecosystem. In the book Common water. From natural resource to cosmopolitan thing (2012), Sylvie Paquerot, Frédéric Julien and Gabriel Blouin Genest propose a renewal of our conception of the “water” object which would take into account its plural nature.
Without denying the existence of water as a resource, they believe that it is important to put it back in its rightful place in our modes of governance, that is, after recognition of the vital nature of water and its civic use. In their typology, water as a source of life responds to a necessity (preserving the right to life and the survival of ecosystems), citizen water meets needs (reasonable access to water) and water -resource satisfies desires (economic uses).
The water crisis is not limited to the question of drinking water. The ocean ecosystem, whose waters contribute to the absorption of around 30% of CO2 resulting from human activity, is also endangered by global warming and the melting of glaciers. The sea has also become the receptacle for our residual materials, our decomposing plastics and our oil spills. It is the memory of our throwaway culture, says ecofeminist Astrida Neimanis in Hydrofeminism. Become a body of water (2021). To this already too heavy memory is added that, violent, of colonial history, intimately linked to maritime traffic. Even today, the seas and oceans are the scene of terrible migratory tragedies.
Faced with such a dark portrait and the fact that ecological and humanitarian challenges are dependent on intertwined economic and political issues, themselves framed by complex laws, the weight of art is relatively modest. What artists can, however, in parallel with the citizen actions that we must actively carry out, is to restore to water its symbolic and sacred value, a value that is retained by many indigenous peoples around the world, for whom water is not only a vital resource, but also a spiritual figure.
The artists and theorists in this issue of the journal Esse thus navigate in a poetic approach to water, sometimes between aesthetic forms and militant actions, sometimes in analytical thinking imbued with metaphor. Adopting an undeniably critical view, this file highlights works that attempt to raise awareness of water pollution and climate challenges, to consider restorative justice and to open up horizons of hope. […]
Therefore, to renew our ethical relationship with the environment and restore water to its primordial role within a non-anthropocentric world, considering transforming our bodies of water into fluid resistance movements is a promising idea.
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