The act of reading this page is enabled by a confluence of literacy, focused intent, and opportunity – but underlying this privileged and human practice is a necessary balance of waters. If a sense of well-being accompanies this act, it rests on a frequently assumed, but always precarious, equilibrium. As the reader draws in breath, the relative humidity of the air is neither too wet nor scorchingly dry. And while these words (this page or this screen) are dry enough to be legible, the reader is neither distracted by thirst or dehydration, nor by an urgent need to pee. In all...

Staseson makes strange water’s un-still surface. Water Drawing is a video and sound installation that explores water’s materiality. Through long and intense close-ups, and seamlessly looped studies, we experience the vulnerability and mutability of this substance. Reflected light continually morphs and transforms on water’s enigmatic surface. This light becomes unrecognizable, abstract, appearing to be drawn by hand. Multi-layered sound design combines manipulated water phrases with ambient source sound collected near Lake Katepwa, Saskatchewan. The familiar mixes with the unfamiliar, to encourage reflection, introspection, and imagination. We are invited to be mesmerized by the play between water’s surface and camera lens,...

The work references the processes of two waste water treatment systems: the Eco-Machines pioneered by Dr John Todd, located at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial on Interstate 89 in Vermont and the industrial scale facility in Montreal, the Station d’épuration des eaux usées. Eco-Machines comprised distinct basins and their lodgers (fish, algae, plants) that treat grey and black waters through interconnectivity and photosynthesis. Other sources include the desert and Ælab’s documentary about the Todds, These organisms have the ability to self-organize (2009, 12 min).

We are inspired by the desert (the etymological root of wastum, or waste), which is incredibly creative...

This is a chapter about two very large metaphoric seas. The first of these encompasses the movements of capital. It is the invisible current we refer to when we say the word “currency” – literally, “the condition of flowing.”¹ It circles the globe in an instant, pours through stock exchanges and tattered wallets alike. It pauses when assets are frozen and accelerates when investors achieve greater liquidity. Some say that it trickles down to the poor like inconstant rain. Its rising tide is supposed to lift all boats. We survey an economic landscape dotted with pools of resources, poling our little...

Water, the condition of all possibility, has become the unheeded recipient of the material wastes and toxins of late-capitalist production and consumption. Even as its continual movement between bodies and across borders defies the economic mechanics of quantification and instrumentalization, water is commodified, turned into measurable units, and sold for profit. As it changes forms and cycles through various manifestations of bodies, societies, and polities, diffusing, spreading, and bringing back to us the very matter we cast away, water shows us that at every level we are of water. But to harm water is not simply to harm ourselves; it...

In 2010 the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shocked and enraged the world. Suddenly, the high stakes of water contamination, usually ignored, were brought into full view. However, despite the environmental devastation it signalled and the widespread media coverage it received, this was hardly the first time an environmental disaster of devastating proportions had occurred. As American president Barack Obama made speeches about corporate accountability, victims of corporate crime elsewhere wondered why the water in their territories continued to be contaminated by American companies with impunity. Shortly after the BP oil spill, survivors of the...

On 3 February 2011, Royal Dutch Shell abruptly cancelled its summer plans to drill for oil off the Alaska coast, citing uncertainty over its ability to obtain requisite permits in time for the short ice-free season.² The move was one more twist in a long-running dispute.³ As Emma Kineeveauk, the environmental program manager for the tribal government of the village of Point Hope, had explained in 2008 , “Oil operations will not just hurt our community ‘Tikigaq’ Point Hope, but will hurt all of the hunting communities. If oil is found, there are going to be lots of ships going...

Suspended in the air an image is formed in light – water holds it in place, frozen. On one side photographs are projected onto and through the ice tablet. On the other side is text from Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson. Images capture something in time. Projecting photographs onto ice gives them a transience that photography generally denies. The melting ice is a metaphor for memory. The images are viewed through the ice and are distorted in the material. Time affects the image as the ice thins and transforms back into a liquid state.

Cross-pollination occurs when sensory impressions of...

A freshwater mermaid offers a taste of her treasured collection of rivers and lakes from various regions of Quebec. Some water samples are out of stock, some taste like blueberry roots and rocks – a rare experience as the commodification of water accelerates and sources of clean water become harder to find. These performances address water at first from an emotional and gustatory place, and then allow the audience to form their own response to the broader social and political issues found within....

Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures² float beyond human comprehension in a zone where science and aesthetics flow together in baffling ways. As Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute notes, the end of the nineteenth century experienced a “golden age” of research on jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton. Illustrations by Ernst Haeckel and others were “inspired as much by the beauty of the organisms as by functional scientific interpretation.”³ Haddock predicts that the start of the twenty-first century will also become a golden age of research on what he terms, simply, “gelata.” Scientific advances in molecular tools as...

At the workshop where initial drafts of many of the essays in this book were presented, participants began by introducing themselves, situating their home in relation to local bodies of water; in my case, it was the Annapolis Valley, between the Cornwallis and Gaspereau rivers, near the shores of the Bay of Fundy. The participants had not been instructed to self-identify in this way, but for an event called “Thinking with Water” it seemed a logical, almost natural, thing to do. Like many other workshop participants, though, I had travelled many hundreds of kilometres, to a different watershed, to attend...

One of the most striking effects of modernity has been the emergence in Western thought of an extraordinary hubris: a conceptual bifurcation between culture and nature, and the idea that “civilization” has separated humankind from inclusion in and interdependence with ecological processes. This conceptual relation is often gendered, positioning culture with (active) masculinity and nature with (passive) femininity. At times it has also been heavily racialized, aligning notions of culture with primarily Western, more cosmopolitan ways of life, and conflating notions of (unspoiled/unformed) nature and (innocent/primitive) indigeneity.¹

The sources of this dualism are multiple, entangled in a distant past when...

I typed these words on a windy day in Hamilton, Ontario, an industrial city, once powered only by Niagara Falls, today by a grid that harnesses power from hundreds of rivers across the Province of Ontario, connected to dams at James Bay, Quebec (protested by the Cree and the Inuit),² at Churchill Falls in Labrador (under claim from the Innu of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish),³ at Wuskwatim, Manitoba (where the Nisichawayasihk Cree blocked construction),⁴ at The Oldman River in Alberta (protested by the Peigan Lonefighters),⁵ and at the Gardner Dam near Saskatoon on the South Saskatchewan River (where I was taken...

To begin, I need to acknowledge and give thanks to the spirits and the people of these lands: (Montreal, where the Thinking withWater workshop occurred in June 2010), the Gan-ya-ge-haga of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – the People of the Flint who you may know as the Mohawks, and who I know as the Keepers of the Eastern door. All too often in our stressful, busy lives we forget to exercise the fundamental protocols of our co-existence. In my culture, it is “good manners” to acknowledge whose land you are on. And part of that is to introduce yourself, so people can...

The Lachine Canal is a vestigial corridor that draws a shallow line through the south-western portion of the island of Montreal, linking the Old Port with the town of Lachine, on the shores of Lac St Louis.² Constructed in the early nineteenth century, an era of great enthusiasm for canals in North America, the canal’s purpose – part commercial, part military, and part hydraulic – was to bypass the otherwise unnavigable rapids on the St Lawrence River, the principal impediment to the smooth flow of (European) trade between Upper and Lower Canada. Between 1825 and its closure in 1970 the Lachine Canal...

I live near the rapids called Iohná:wate’ in the archipelago of Tiohtià:ke. Put another way, the Lachine Rapids in the Montreal archipelago influence and shape the place where I live.¹ The rapids are both watery event and place. Never still, these waters are a turbulent stretch of river that resists easy navigation and mapping. The river, Kaniatarowá:nen, or the St Lawrence, flows between the rocky Precambrian Shield to the north and the Appalachian Plateau to the south and finds an intense diversity of life at Tiohtià:ke, where the Ottawa River offers its sediment-rich waters to the archipelago. Distinct from other...