Water Lore

This collection sits within environmental humanities and asks a question that bears on today's ecological concerns: how can we change the way we think about water, and what should it mean to us? Water now features heavily in scientific and public talk about climate change, where rising seas are weighed against advancing desertification, and where prolonged droughts are often followed by storms and flooding. Our continued pollution, diversion and desalination of water exposes how contradictory our bond with it has become.

Images of water are everywhere, from idyllic, untouched seascapes on vacation postcards to the wrecked coastlines shown in news coverage after tsunamis. Even as we harm the resources that sustain us most, shared vulnerability keeps growing.

The volume gathers contributions from the visual arts, history, earth systems science, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology, and music, crossing the usual boundaries between fields. It deliberately makes room for viewpoints that rarely receive attention, with many contributors writing from female, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ backgrounds. Established and emerging writers appear side by side, and the pieces combine practice-based research with critical scholarship.

Across its chapters, water is explored in its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical, and aesthetic dimensions. The contributors analyse how water is culturally constructed and represented, and offer original research and theory on how the conversation might be reframed to build healthier relationships with water sources in varied places and contexts. The book brings together new scholarship on water as persona and agency, and suits courses or reading lists in blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology, and environmental history.