Review Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Conversational Drift and Artistic Inquiry: Thinking With The Harrisons

Transdisciplinary artist Sarah Strachan offers a practice-based researcher’s perspective on Thinking with the Harrisons. The book explores how this renowned eco-artist duo’s responsive, ‘conversational drift’ approach suggests how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity and uncertainty.

1,820 words: estimated reading time = approximately 7.5 minutes

Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis Art offers an exploration into the pioneering and prophetic work of eco-artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) in conversation with the writings of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead’s concepts of process philosophy. The authors, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, position the Harrisons not as historical figures to be interpreted from a distance but as collaborators whose approaches continue to shape contemporary ecological art. This shift — from thinking about to thinking with — is central to the book’s structure and argument. It reframes the Harrisons’ practice as an ongoing, relational inquiry rather than a closed body of work, and it invites readers to inhabit the methodological openness that characterised their ecological engagements.

“Rethinking the arts in the environmental crisis involves questioning the conventions of art and their appropriateness for a rapidly changing world just as Whitehead’s search for a different philosophy of nature involved him questioning the foundations of science and Stengers, the questioning of the cultural values of technoscience.”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 105)

Showing the cover of the book 'Thinking with the Harrisons' by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, 2024

The book is described by educator, artist and researcher, Iain Biggs as “an unusual and highly important text” that focuses on “how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions”.¹ However, for me, its most significant contribution lies in its articulation of thinking with and conversational drift as methodological frameworks. For practice-based researchers like me, these concepts are not merely descriptive of the Harrisons’ approach; they constitute an epistemic orientation and methodological process for engaging with ecological complexity, multispecies entanglement, and climate-related transformation.

Thinking with: a relational epistemology

The concept of thinking with emerges throughout the book as an epistemic orientation grounded in relationality, responsiveness, and co-production. To think with the Harrisons is to enter the same mode of inquiry that animated their practice: a willingness to be transformed by the ecological, social, cultural, and political contexts one encounters.

For practice-based researchers, thinking with is significant because it challenges the assumption that research begins with a stable problem or a fixed set of methods. Instead, it suggests that ecological research must be co-constituted with the systems it engages. Thinking with becomes a form of methodological humility — an acknowledgement that ecological knowledge is distributed across species, landscapes, and processes, and that the researcher’s role is to participate in these distributed networks of sense making. Douglas and Fremantle emphasise that thinking with is not a metaphorical gesture but a practical orientation. It shapes how the Harrisons approached sites, collaborators, and ecological crises. It also shapes how the book itself is organised: as a polyphonic assemblage of voices, perspectives, and disciplinary positions that collectively enact the relational ethos of the Harrisons’ work.

Conversational drift: methodology as movement

If thinking with provides the epistemic orientation, conversational drift provides the methodological process. Conversational drift describes the Harrisons’ characteristic way of working: beginning with a question, entering dialogue with collaborators (human and more-than-human), and allowing the conversation to move in unexpected directions. Crucially, drift is not a lack of focus; it is a method of ecological attunement. It can mean both “the motion and the result of that motion”.² It mirrors the dynamics of ecological systems, which are non-linear, iterative, adaptive, and relational. Drift allows the work to follow ecological cues rather than impose a predetermined structure. It is a methodology that privileges openness and emergence. For practice-based researchers, conversational drift offers a model for how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity without becoming overwhelmed. It becomes a way of navigating uncertainty — of allowing the research to unfold in relation to the shifting conditions of the ecological systems it engages.

The book highlights that the Harrisons’ conversations were never limited to human interlocutors. Their work is filled with dialogues with watersheds, species, coastlines, and climatic forces. These conversations are not symbolic; they are methodological. They reflect the Harrisons’ commitment to treating ecological entities as collaborators with agency.

“Conversation in this work is not limited to people but to the interaction between elements in the landscape shaped by human self-interest in the form of farming, paper mills, channels, levees and inevitably toxic pollution. The idea of joining the ‘odd kind of dialogue’ in which ‘the business of the universe/is conducted’ (Seventh Lagoon/91) here becomes the discourse of that place.”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p.102)

Conversational drift, in this context, becomes a way of listening to ecological processes. It requires the researcher to attend to signals that may not be verbal or human-centred: the movement of water, the behaviour of species, the shifting of coastlines. It becomes a method for recognising that ecological knowledge is co-produced across species and systems. This more-than-human conversational method anticipates contemporary multispecies and post-humanist scholarship, yet the Harrisons’ approach remains grounded in material processes. Their conversations with landscapes are informed by ecological data, fieldwork, and site-specific observation. Here, conversational drift is both conceptual and operational.

Showing 'Book of the Lagoons' by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, from the book 'Thinking with the Harrison', 2024

Mapping, scale, and systems thinking

Both thinking with and conversational drift are deeply entangled with the Harrisons’ commitment to systems thinking. The authors emphasise the Harrisons’ ability to drift across different scales — from lagoon to watershed to planet. This movement is not arbitrary; it reflects the ecological reality that local phenomena are embedded within larger systemic dynamics. For practice-based researchers, this raises important methodological questions. How can artistic practice operate at scales that exceed the human sensorium? How can research remain grounded in local specificity while attending to planetary processes?

The book suggests that thinking with and conversational drift offer a way through this tension. They allow the work to move fluidly between scales, guided by the ecological relations that emerge through conversation. Scale becomes a drifting relation rather than a fixed parameter.

The Harrisons’ conversational texts — hybrid forms of poetry, dialogue, and ecological proposition — are central to their practice, and the book treats them as methodological artefacts. These texts embody conversational drift in their structure: they move between voices, temporalities, and epistemic registers, refusing closure in favour of ongoing inquiry. For practice-based researchers, these texts demonstrate how writing can function as a site of ecological experimentation. The drift of language becomes a method for exploring ecological futures that are not yet materially realised. Thinking with becomes a textual practice as much as an ecological one.

Critical reflections: the limits of drift and relationality

The book presents thinking with and conversational drift not as perfected research methodologies but as ongoing, situated practices that must continually negotiate their own limitations. Drift can be difficult to reconcile with institutional structures that demand clarity, deliverables, and measurable outcomes. Thinking with requires time, trust, and relational labour that institutions often undervalue. Whilst these attributes of the method offer potential for art practice-based research, as artists and researchers we need to work within the constraints of these institutional structures.

There is also a risk that drift, if unexamined, can obscure issues of power and representation. Who participates in the conversation? Who is authorised to drift? As Grant Kester acknowledges, “voices that run contrary to official wisdom often take longer to locate and are more difficult to hear”.³ Whilst the authors foreground these tensions by recognising that “systems continue to reveal and confirm biases and structural inequalities”⁴ and “the arts and the environment and conservation movements are still characterised by a lack of cultural diversity”,⁵ there is a reliance on artists from within the Eurocentric hegemony in the chapter titled thinking with one another. This references artists immanent in the Harrisons’ work, who have furthered it through experimentation or of the same generation with similar concerns but using different approaches; although, as outlined in an earlier article on the Harrisons, their enquiry has focused primarily on artistic practices that openly acknowledge the Harrisons’ influence.⁶

Showing 'Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece' by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, from the book 'Thinking with the Harrisons', 2024.

A methodological invitation

The authors position thinking with and conversational drift as evolving and generative methodologies for ecological art in the era of climate crisis. They offer a way of engaging with ecological complexity that is adaptive, relational, and open to transformation. They challenge artists and practice-based researchers to cultivate methods that are responsive to ecological systems that embrace uncertainty and that recognise conversation — human and more-than-human — as a form of ecological agency.

“Could the Harrison’s key contribution lie in how they share their learning in such a way that those who follow grasp their experience with clarity? Unlike the world of art and its proprietorial character, the Harrisons are not afraid of other people making use of their work”

— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 214)

In this sense, the book is not simply a retrospective on the Harrisons’ work but a methodological invitation. It claims that the Harrisons’ legacy is not a set of works but a way of working that remains urgently relevant. It asks us to continue thinking with the Harrisons by allowing our own practices to drift — toward new collaborators, new scales, and new ecological futures.

Sarah’s references

[1] Biggs, I., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environmental Crisis: A review

[2] Strachan, S., 2023. A drift in conversation: Across hierarchies and beyond boundaries. Journal of Arts Writing by Students. (Bristol, UK; Intellect Publishing. p. 92.)

[3] Kester, G., 2004. Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art (University of California Press, Berkeley. p.172.)

[4] Brain, T., 2018. The environment is not a system. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 7(1), pp.152-165.

[5] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons. Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

[6] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2023. Thinking with the Harrisons: what does now demand? Field: a journal of socially-engaged art criticism, 23.

Find more

Thinking with the Harrisons: Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis, by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, is published by Leuven University Press (2024).

Anne Douglas (Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland) has written about the book at the Leuven University Press blog (September 2024).

You can explore the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at The Harrison Studio.

Craig Adcock was the first to use the term ‘Conversational drift’ as the process undertaken by the Harrisons. It was the title of an article which documented a conversation between the three of them. He writes: “The title ‘conversational drift’, which they suggested, is meant to reflect both the process of interchange that occurred between us and also to suggest how their ecologically orientated art function in general: their work sets up situations both in art galleries and in the halls of government that encourage the conversation to open up, to change, and to drift toward innovative and creative solutions to real world problems.” (Conversational Drift: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Adcock, Craig: Art Journal, Volume 51, Issue 2 (1992) p. 45)

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Sarah – “In my practice, I enter into deep conversations with people, place, the land and its materials. More recently this has also specifically involved conversations with generative AI, which is helping me to explore the concept of more-than-human conversation further. Therefore, the development of this review has been informed by conversations with all these entities.”

Sarah Strachan

A transdisciplinary artist exploring through printmaking, painting and ceramics how perceptions of being in, knowing and belonging to the world affect our ecological awareness and thinking.

River / Run – Waterbodies from Dorset to Findhorn Bay

Poet and campaigner Fiona Moore finds joy and celebration alongside loss in fellow ecopoet Helen Moore’s river / run, a collection of long-form poems exploring a living ecology, history and language shared with waterbodies and our fellow animals.

1,930 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

NB: If reading on a phone, you might want to allow it to rotate the page and read as landscape rather than portrait, to maintain the format for the excerpts from the poems.

If a river is long-form water, then a long poem can run like a river. Ecopoet Helen Moore has written a trilogy of long-form river poems, set in Dorset and north-east Scotland. They explore ecology, history and language, and the plight of Atlantic Salmon. (I’ll follow Moore’s practice of capitalising all living beings.)

But is river ever singular, or is that a superficial, simplistic human concept, foreshadowing exploitation? Here’s what the river networks say in the poem ‘Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / weal’:

Don’t call us ‘river’
            as if we were singular - 
                 a blue, serpentine line on a map,
                                    an ‘s’ from source to estuary;
                                                                  an abstraction                       
                                                  to be navigated, straightened. 
                                                                  fished, dredged.

Opening a book of ecopoetry, even the most ecologically minded reader may think: will I feel preached at? Moore deftly avoids this in the passage above by allowing the water to speak and question our assumptions. The reader may also ask: will dread overcome me, or will there be some joy? river / run contains joy in the energy and diversity of water, its inhabitants and landscapes, alongside the dread and the pain of loss.

Showing the cover of 'river / run' (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork by Animate Earth Collective — ‘river / run’ (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork: Animate Earth Collective

Findhorn – northern flow and flight

Joy also comes from the liveliness of the text – the varied, energising forms it takes, and the way description engages all the senses. Moore crafts her poems to embody riverine flow and eddy. The writing has a kinesthetic effect, if that’s the right way to say you feel it’s moving you along (often fast) and around. I found this most effective in the opening poem, ‘Findhorn Bay: Waves of Flow & Flight’. Even on a map this bay, east of Inverness, is an astonishing landscape. The poem begins “Tide pouring into the Bay as if through the neck/ of a wineskin -” and shows the impact:

Incoming waves flowing past boatsheds, The Captain’s Table, 
houses hunched against north-east winds -

           down past the Kirk, rippling over sand- & mudflats,
           brine filling the rough-stitched ‘Gut’ of salt-marsh,
           swelling it with the wine of Life.

It’s a largely benign flow, but hugely powerful; the poem doesn’t need to remind us explicitly how destructive water can be, as part of the forces we’re letting loose while we fail to address climate emergency.

Showing 'River Findhorn', photo by David Buckland 2024 — River Findhorn. Photo: David Buckland © 2024

The wineskin metaphor’s a rarity, all three poems being mostly deep in the ‘real’ world. As well as the movement of tide, rivers and burns, ‘Findhorn Bay’ describes two long journeys and a short one, first the ancient migration of Wild Salmon “sacred to Picts & Celts”, with “Miocene eyes”. Their route is extremely challenging, “from furthest Atlantic… through kelp forests, storms, gyres,” until the “leaps of faith” as they struggle upriver in Scotland. But

For every hundred Salmon that leave our rivers now,
less than five return.

river / run includes photos by David Buckland, one depicting Wild Salmon infested by Sea Lice, spread by fish-farm escapees. It’s painful to look at.

Pink-foot Geese take the second journey, and the poem shifts from the speaker’s viewpoint on ground

& the sky suddenly wrinkled, filled with tremulous lines
as if the weathermen had pencilled in the air-waves,
these marvellous patterns converging on the Bay.

Hairs on my skin rise spontaneously to meet them,
& in my chest, heart is a full crimson sail.

to imagining their summer in the far north and migration route back to Scotland, “following star-maps in their brains”. Apart from the “dragon flare of gas at Sullom Voe” these passages are exhilarating (heart as a sail, another rare, wonderful metaphor) until, arrived at Findhorn,

A dozen Pinkfeet stir, 
    beating hearts, 
  lifting, honking....

                                                  Pop! Pop! Pop!
                                                  Explosions of shots
                                                  ring out, shattering the calm -

a slaughter begins. The unexpectedness delivers a jolt. Loosely indented text is shocked into two columns, straight-justified: geese dying on the left, shooters opposite. The anger comes through, and we’ve been flying with the geese and share it.

  Most shooters travel
  long-distance for ‘action’
  they film & boast
  on YouTube channels - 

  600 miles to Findhorn Bay
  GREAT SPOT
  FOR SPORT - - - - - - -

The narrative turns to the human inhabitants’ perspective, from strongly against to appreciating the income the shooters bring, and the rights (or not) of Nature.

Showing Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024. — Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024.

All this is done in three pages with a lot of white space for the reader’s own thoughts. The whole poem is only 12 pages long: rich in descriptive language and packed full of references, yet concise. Its last, short journey is a farm-to-farm route that Findhorn fishwives used to take, trading herring from their creels for cheese, eggs etc. It’s written in short prose paragraphs – a walk, at human speed. “Who are the descendants of these tough women? What tenacity of character, what knowing in their blood?” This idea of instinctive, inherited knowing likens the women to Salmon or Geese. The speaker’s rucksack becomes a creel:

... will a future culture come to honour Nature’s teachers, incise Goose & Salmon in their hearts? In my creel I’m placing all the man-made rubbish. There is no place for it in this cauldron of Life.

Nature and culture – an ecopoetic palimpsest

‘Findhorn Bay’ was written for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival. The other two poems were commissions from Cape Farewell, centring on Dorset river systems, as part of the RiverRun project “that connects Cape Farewell’s scientific partners with local farmers and artists… [on] the poor state of freshwater”. All three poems are divided into sections with titles, to help the reader follow the structure.

Showing The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray. — The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray

In her introduction, as well as helpful context for each poem, Moore explains her method: an interdisciplinary, collaborative, intuitive approach, with “roots in animistic European traditions”, alongside “gleanings” while out in Nature, engagement with scientists and others, and research into the many aspects of a landscape from geology to social history. She describes how from all this “the writing ferments and emerges as a poetic palimpsest”. When you read the poems, this makes perfect sense – and so it does that, she says, they take a long time to write. Other writers can imagine what the work might involve: choosing which material to use and how, ordering it, editing down and down, touching on themes often just in a short phrase, trusting the reader to do the work and make connections.

‘Dorset Waterbodies’, the middle poem, takes varyingly indented forms, all across the page, to score the rhythm. I particularly liked the sections where other voices speak: the water (see opening quote) and its creatures. In ‘Nightmare slurry spill’, Fish and industrially farmed Cows speak in a loose pantoum, whose semi-repeated lines convey a powerful sense of claustrophobia: the Fish can’t breathe, and “Overcrowded Cows… feet in piss & shit” are unnaturally confined. As a whole, I wasn’t quite as swept along by this poem as by ‘Findhorn Bay’, but that’s by a very high standard. The introductory section, describing a visit to Durdle Door, captures a sense of post-lockdown relief, though empty cruise ships are “squatting the horizon… ticking over” (the filthy bunker fuel, the emissions, the waste!). It celebrates the new tourists’ diversity:

                & crowds of colour           break
                                                                the monotony
                                   of white, rural         m o n o c u l t u r e s.

Moore uses spaced-out letters to emphasise a few key words in this poem. I stumbled over these; maybe that’s the intention, but I’m not sure they add to what the form and language already do.

The poem ends with the river (“if you must make us ‘river’”) making the case for human respect and restoration, “the right to self-determine”. The descriptions of river life are beautiful, from Dippers and Dragonflies to Waterweeds to

                                       our single-celled beings
                                                 constellate    like s t a r s ...

The conclusion might have more impact in performance, perhaps less so on the page, however fervently we agree:

                                          let’s be communities of diverse voices
                                with a common future.

                                          A communion of subjects & one 
                                                             Commonweal

This kind of writing is so, so hard to do, even in a riverine voice – which, here, seems to shift a little from river towards human.

Dorset – southern spells and celebration

‘Edge of Wild River’, the third and shortest poem, begins with a dream of a Salmon. Moore explains in the introduction she dreamt it while living in difficult circumstances in Sydney, with the terrible 2019/20 bushfires raging. The Salmon collides with her, “like being struck by a waterlogged pillow”. “What has she to say?”

Apart from the dream, in prose sentences with breaks, this poem is all written in short-lined verses, left-justified. The tone is song-like, spell-like, as if to will a different future into being. In ‘Water Blessing’ voices ask for forgiveness for pollution:

We this grey wreckage 
dumped on the bend in spate;
we the old bones of trees,
the breeze, swimmer, floating leaf ...

Human healers are celebrated: the scientists, litter pickers and amateur water testers. Ecologists studying water samples and counting River Shrimps

                                            listen 
to sounds from underwater hydrophones - 
eerie bubbles, clicks, and echoes
bouncing off the sterile walls -

Showing 'Dart, 2018' - still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie — Showing ‘Dart, 2018’ – still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie.

In a 2022 interview Helen Moore gave to Kathryn Alderman, on the Ink Sweat & Tears website, she was asked if there’s a difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry:

“Ecopoetry for me is all about consciousness. Consciousness of our deep interconnection with our planetary home and of our humanimal nature. Awareness too of the paradigm that has created our disconnection in Western cultures, and the power structures that have a vested interest in maintaining our disempowered state.”

river / run puts these principles into action, but subtly, using the power of description, form and language. ‘Edge of Wild River’ ends with a couplet that sums up the book’s passionate message [poet’s ellipses]:

as we help wild river heal,
so we help and heal ourselves ...

Find more

Helen Moore’s river / run (2024) is published by Cape Farewell Books. Cape Farewell produces opportunities for artists, scientists and communities to work together: “by creating art founded in scientific fact, our projects highlight humanity’s destructive impact on the earth and inspire people to act towards a sustainable cultural shift.” As Fiona explains, two of the book’s poems form part of Cape Farewell’s RiverRun project, which interrogates the environmental impact of the way the Dorset land is farmed, and the impact on the rivers and waters that feed Poole Bay.

You can explore more of Helen’s work at her website — where you can also listen to her reading Findhorn Bay, Waves of Flow & Flight, the poem created for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival 2018, with a soundtrack by VisionSonic.

Helen Moore is also a member of ClimateCultures and has written posts for us, including The Start of Something Going Wrong, her review of fellow member Joanna Guthrie‘s collection, Her Whereabouts. In The Ghosts of Fleas, her post for the Finding Blake website, she shares and discusses her poem inspired by William Blake’s 1819 painting, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’.

Fiona mentions Helen’s Ink Sweat & Tears interview. You can read that here.

Fiona Moore’s collection, Okapi (2024) is available from Blue Diode Press, and you can find her on Instagram at fionamoore555.

All images from the book, river / run. The final image is a still from a film by ClimateCultures members, Hanien Conradie and Margaret LeJeune. You can read Writing on Water, Hanien’s post discussing the film of her performance in the River Dart and reading Afrikaner poet Eugene Marais’s Diep Rivier.

Fiona Moore

A poet, editor and environmental campaigner, whose second book, 'Okapi', is a book-length eco-poem. She has edited issues of Magma Poetry on climate change and islands.

Nettle-eater: On the Call of the Wild

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe finds in Tom Hirons’s Nettle-eater concise, expansive, poetic prose on peril, discovery, and instability in the wild experience of a soul going mad to become truly sane, breaking and remaking our understanding of existence.

1,070 words: estimated reading time = 4 minutes

Poet Tom Hirons’s short prose book, Nettle-eater, is an urgent voyage into our inner wilds. They lie buried but still in reach through those outer wilds that have likewise been banished, seemingly, to the margins and to memories of a none-otherness that underpins all. There is, of course, nothing truly, completely other in this world, although our civilisation has made it its business to manufacture and commodify separation. Even our language of ecology and mutuality is reduced to ‘systems’ and ‘services’ and ‘sustainability’.

This is a book of peril and discovery, of facing head-on an instability. Not as a teetering, precarious balancing act between fates of madness and sanity as we maybe feel our nettle-eating narrator is presenting to us — the story here is not of such a tipping point so much as a wilful lunge into wildness — but an instability within those words and the experiences they try to contain. The experience he relates is of a soul first breaking and then remaking its understanding of existence, of what sanity can possibly mean in an insane world. “Some sadnesses are too great to be borne in a life built upon sanity.”

“You know the call,” he begins. “All your books speak of it. If I differ from you, it is only in this: When the call came, I heeded it.”

Nettle-eater

Accepting the call, our narrator heads to the moor as commanded, to live wild on nettles. He weaves for us a short account to counter the long processes of our taming, of ourselves and all about us. That history has made a madness out of rationality, displacing us from where the unnamed beast still hides and calls, “beyond the edge and in the deep centre of things”. To find it, the nettle-eater unmoors himself on the moor, thankful for the spectral visions it affords him.

“There are folk both fair and foul abroad on the moor who are older than all my dreams, old as the jagged stones and those curious people who raised them; from them I learned a little humility, at times, although the lessons were mostly quickly forgotten.”

‘Rewilding’ is not a word you will find in this book, or in Sometimes a Wild God, Hirons’s poem that feels like a good walking companion to this feral story. (Both are very elegant small books, perfect for a pocket and a walk out into woods, waterways, hills or moors). This is not nature-archaeology as cure, taking us back to how things used to be. I suspect rewilding is not a word he uses much in conversation or interviews. For all the ancient, half-buried links to a feral world waiting to be discovered, attended to and lived anew, there is something much more forward-moving in these concise, expansive revelations in prose and poetry: for-wilding rather than re-wilding? Or, simply, wilding.

Wilding himself, self-willed, into the more-than-human — “waking in the night wearing fire-gloves” from the nettles, “hands … stung to red rags, pierced with pins”; bruising his naked body as he leaps, salmon-like, at the high waterfalls of the moor or forced “into impossible slivers of space between rocks”; being laughed at by wild horses “unimpressed by whatever wisdom or folly I was engaged in” — the nettle-eater seeks to turn humanity’s pale mimicry of nature with him, willing our planted world also to defect. Without much success: “I like to think, though, that a few straight larches twisted their trunks and kinked themselves towards the wild side beneath the silvery moon on nights of particular eloquence on my part.”

As the year moves on its cycles, and he moves through forgotten initiations, “enticed … from the skins of secret roots and the peculiar angles of the stars”, the nettle-eater’s spirit frees itself from his earth-bound body — but not in separation — soaring “as swift and strong as a buzzard. The land below me was as perfect as a wren, crisp as lichen or ice.”

“Do not sit there, wondering,” he ends. I have told you the truth.”

Sometimes a Wild God

Yes, Nettle-eater has heeded the call and urges to us too. “You were never more lost than you are now, if you cannot reach out, touch the wild earth and weep.” Yes, sometimes a wild god calls on you at home, perhaps disturbing your safe, quiet reading:

He will not ring the doorbell;
Instead he scrapes with his fingers
Leaving blood on the paintwork,
Though primroses grow
In circles round his feet.

…

The Fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.

Dare we listen to that call? With the nettle-eater’s story and the wild god at our door, perhaps we take the first, faltering steps before we’ve even realised…

Nettle-eater (2018) and Sometimes a Wild God (2015) by Tom Hirons are published by Feral Angels Press (“poetry for a world on fire”), with artwork and illustrations by Rima Staines. Both are also available as audiobooks, read by Tom; Sometimes a Wild God is also available as an A3 poster. Tom and Rima are co-founders of Hedgespoken, an offgrid travelling storytelling theatre.

The suggestion of a new verb for-wild, in place of re-wild, was included in neologisms proposed by philosopher and writer Ginny Battson in her February 2020 Seasonalight blog post, Re to For: “Times are changing and, with Earth in crisis, we are needing to imagine our futures ~ preferably, good ones. With so many things re-quiring a very new approach (at least in living memory), I am beginning to dislike the prefix RE. re-wire, re-cover, re-weave, re-wild, re-store – ‘re’ as in to go back. … We need to look forward into newness that’s just. And that needs to be reflected in our language.”

On the dangers of forcefully excluding the wild, of making it monstrous by paying it too much ransom for the assumed security of civilisation, perhaps contrast a story like Nettle-eater with John Gardner’s short 1971 novel, Grendel, which I reviewed in Bringing Our Monsters Back Home. Better to take a home visit from the Wild God than from Beowulf’s monster, I think…

Stories We Tell About Food & Regenerative Farming

Animist farmer & writer Paul Feather reviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives.

2,900 words: approx reading time = 11.5 minutes

“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” – Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster

The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we were told perhaps by teachers or parents when we were young, those that we tell not simply in words—though words are very much a part of it, and I return to words in a moment—but that we enact with our choices and continue telling as they were told to us: these stories are the meat and potatoes of culture.

As I write this, my impatient daughter leans over to me and whispers that she is hungry. She speaks softly so as not to interrupt her mother’s conversation with two neighbors about these stories we tell and how we might gather over food one day soon to retell them together. Out of respect for this conversation, or simply because she judges me more likely to stop what I am doing—to stop typing these words—my daughter interrupts me instead of these others to tell me that she is hungry.

Eat another cantaloupe, I tell her. There are leftover potatoes in the skillet on the stove. You made bread at school today, and there is some left. Go eat it.

And we each will have our stories about this. I think to myself that she is bored more than hungry, but I don’t know what her stories are. Maybe that I am boring, or that someone should have made dinner, or that eggs are easy to make but she is tired of eggs.

Every meal has a story.

The stories we all tell about food are bound up with other stories: sometimes with stories about how we gather in community to cook it or eat it or grow it, or about the meaning of the soil and the Earth. They’re existential. They influence how we all act.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image of soil from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024)

Our food is globalized, so now our stories about food are further bound up with other stories about geopolitics and climate and war and just about everything else. It’s gotten rather complicated.

Social movements, scholars, and corporate or government bodies have been trying to unravel this complication and to converge on a viable global story about food, and the collective story has grown to encompass billions of words worth of books, academic papers and all the rest; but anyone with a lick of sense can tell that we haven’t really got it figured out just yet.

So writing about food is a tricky business.

Six Inches of Soil

Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing Six Inches of Soil, a book accompanied by a documentary of the same name (which I did not watch) that describes the English movement for regenerative agriculture (RA).

The book starts off by introducing itself as a continuation of the documentary project and then the first three chapters establish the background for a conversation about regenerative farming.

Regenerative farming: Showing the cover of the book, 'Six Inches of Soil' (2024) — Six Inches of Soil

The first chapter summarizes the Green Revolution with a more-or-less mainstream analysis presenting it as “a miracle that created a disaster.” Some readers might object to this analysis and argue that the Green Revolution wasn’t as miraculous as it’s sometimes made out to be, since small family farms have always been more productive than industrial corporate operations. In her 2016 book Who Really Feeds the World, Vandana Shiva points out that small family farms—most less than 2 ha in size—produce 70% of the world’s food while being relegated to less than 25% of the farmland [1]. But Six Inches of Soil sticks to the mainstream narrative here about the miraculous productivity of industrial agriculture, and so that’s uncontroversial in a sense. In any case, every legitimate analysis agrees that whatever the initial value of industrial agriculture, it has made a very big mess.

The second and third chapters attempt to define regenerative agriculture and lay out the soil science behind it. Defining RA is a bit tricky: the billions of words of story about food is sometimes vague on distinctions between regenerative and other frameworks like organic, permaculture, agroecological, conventional, etc. Six Inches of Soil presents RA as a methodology that conforms to certain principles and practices intended primarily to increase soil health—which mostly means incorporating organic material, sequestering carbon, and increasing biodiversity—all good things.

It is a problem that Six Inches of Soil presents ecological farming as an outgrowth of the Green Revolution. The book’s claim that regenerative farming paradigms are a response to the destruction caused by chemical industrial agriculture is completely false. [2] & [3]

Regenerative farming has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous people all over the world, and while the book mentions that European scientists began to think about organic farming after studying Indigenous growing methods, its failure to meaningfully and consistently acknowledge the origin of regenerative agriculture in Indigenous thought and practice as well as Indigenous people’s continued contributions to the movement will have implications for later chapters.

Case studies in regenerative farming

The middle portion of the book describes three different regenerative farms. The first is an 800-acre commodity grain operation that has brought sheep into their fields to build fertility and transitioned away from plowing in favor of less impactful cultivation methods. The second is a small start-up market garden that also integrates sheep for fertility and tills only minimally with hand tools. The final case study is a rotationally grazed cattle operation that experiments with silvopasture.

The case studies give the book a more grounded center and—along with the dialogical style arising from the book’s origin as a documentary film—make this a relatively easy read in spite of the complex topic.

Showing 'Principles of Regenerative Agriculture', from Six Inches of Soil (2024) — The principles of regenerative agriculture presented here in ‘Six Inches of Soil’ are strictly material and omit socio-cultural aspects of RA such as reciprocity, the sacred, or human rights.

All of the case studies present regenerative farming as bit of a struggle—though a rewarding one—and none of the operations are exceptionally profitable. Indeed, none of the featured farms pay their operators a living wage. These growers seem to be motivated mainly by a passion for their work and a sense that they are contributing to a positive social and environmental movement.

What does regenerative farming regenerate?

The final two chapters of the book present first a more spiritual dimension of regenerative agriculture and then a view of the future. These chapters taken together—along with several interludes sprinkled between the chapters—illustrate a fundamental tension within the RA movement. I perceive this as a tension between a mainstream, progressive, modern paradigm and a smaller more radical current that finds in agroecology far deeper implications about cosmology, epistemology, or spirituality. (In full transparency I am firmly committed to the more radical interpretation.) Somewhere in between, we might discern a dialogue that promotes relatively radical restructuring of our economic and social value systems, but does not find modernity to be completely bankrupt and would attempt to evade an epistemological crisis.

The book as a whole maintains a very progressive—and I would argue mainstream—synthesis of regenerative agriculture as a strategy to mitigate climate change. The book promotes a theory of change in which consumer choices and movement-building put pressure on governments and corporations to enact better policy. Most of the interludes and much of the final chapter offer policy suggestions or regulatory strategies that would support a healthier food economy. Progressive readers will be very much at home with all of this, while readers less enamored with progressive politics may be underwhelmed by these portions of the book.

I judge that the mainstream progressivity of the book as a whole arises from viewing RA as a response to the Green Revolution and from failure to acknowledge that Indigenous people have been doing regenerative agriculture for thousands of years and continue to do it in many places.

A 2023 article exploring anti-colonial definitions for regenerative agriculture finds that neglecting the paradigm’s Indigenous origins results in over-emphasis of its biophysical dimensions and tends to omit socio-cultural aspects that are critical to the movement’s success in mitigating global catastrophe. The authors suggest an anti-colonial definition for RA that foregrounds these socio-cultural aspects by making them a container for the biophysical farming practices:

A way of farming comprised of entangled values and practices, and founded in Indigenous principles of loving-caring for the Earth. This approach to farming values 1) reciprocity, 2) respect, 3) collective (human and non-human) wellbeing, 4) knowledge co-creation, 5) (re)localization, and it is often practiced through some combination of 1) minimizing soil disturbance, 2) maintaining vegetative soil cover, 3) maximizing diversity, 4) integrating livestock, and 5) minimizing synthetic agrichemicals. [3]

When we abstract regenerative agriculture away from its origins and away from this broader cultural container of reciprocity and respect, when we pay attention only to its biophysical dimensions, what we end up with will not address the roots of the global environmental crisis. Choices enacted from this narrower interpretation of RA will likely perpetuate environmental crisis.

On spirit

Chapter seven is about the more spiritual side of agroecology.

Chapter seven brings a deeper ecological perspective to the book by gesturing toward the unfathomable microbiological complexity in the soil popularized by scientists like Anne Biklé or Martin Sheldrake; more radical perspectives such as Vandana Shiva’s statement that our sense of self could or should arise from having our hands in the soil; and by including several poignant observations from contributors like Satish Kumar, who observes,

In our modern mechanistic world view we only recognise things which can be measured. What cannot be measured does not exist. I think this worldview needs to change.

Satish Kumar. From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

This chapter seems intended to address the deeper cultural implications of agroecology—and it more or less does—but there is a difference between including a chapter about something and making that something a container for the entire book.

The book has 22 contributors, and for some of them it seems that the movement is mostly about moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil so that it better delivers ecosystem services and mitigates global warming. This is entirely consistent with a modern mechanical worldview, does not require a deep cultural shift toward values of reciprocity and respect, and according to this interpretation a farm growing sugar for Coca-Cola on land stolen from Cambodian peasant communities could be regenerative if percent carbon in the soil is going up. [4]

Some contributors like Satish Kumar and Dee Woods do consistently foreground deeper epistemological and cultural issues, but the book as a whole does not.

Something missing

Sitting here now and returning to wrap up this review after letting it simmer overnight, I am again writing between interruptions from my daughter about the food we will eat. She is neither bored nor hungry today. She is chatting with me while cutting up pears and apples and roasting them as an after-dinner treat for company visiting this evening—a service she proposed as an exchange if I would boil potatoes for dinner, and to which I readily agreed.

And so today as every day we enact our stories about our food, and inside of this story where my daughter is cutting up pears I will try to cut to the center of my thoughts with these awkward words and to have time left over to boil the potatoes before the guests come.

Regenerative farming: Showing an image from 'Six Inches of Soil' — From Six Inches of Soil (2024).

There is a sense that however many billions of words we have written, there remains something missing from our stories about regenerative agriculture. A 2022 literature review comparing agroecology and RA frameworks explores whether politics are the thing that is missing:

One aspect of agroecology that does not always fit comfortably in the realm of regenerative agriculture is political activism, or the place and emphasis that the “social” dimension takes in the definition of the social-ecological system. This is perhaps one of the reasons why agroecology is more closely associated with peasant movements, for whom claims on rights and access to natural resources are urgent, while regenerative agriculture is an approach increasingly—but not exclusively—also adopted by commercial, often large-scale farmers or external investors less concerned with natural resource access or food sovereignty issues. [5]

The mainstream trend in the RA movement does actually promote political activism, but I think it somehow remains apolitical in the sense that it’s progressive rather than radical.

To the extent that an ecological worldview finds our disconnection from the land rooted in deep cultural dysfunctions, and to the extent that progressive politics fail to address those dysfunctions, I wonder if the mainstream current within RA might be agroecology without the ecology?

Whatever framework we use, if it isn’t held within a cultural container of reciprocity and respect, it is without a soul.

Six Inches of Soil could more naturally address these deeper dysfunctions if it better acknowledged agroecology’s roots in Indigenous farming practices and the cooption of those practices by Western academics and scientists who adopted “regenerative” methods without acknowledging the central values of the cultures who invented them and who, in coopting these methods, failed to perceive that regenerative values are integral to the methods themselves.

But these are fraught and thorny issues, and perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect this book to adequately address the deep dysfunctions of our culture. If portions of Six Inches of Soil fall short here, it does also clearly advocate that consumers get their hands in the dirt and visit a farm—that we all build better relationships with growers and make some connection to the soil, and that we make opportunities for children to do the same. If the book is effective in that advocacy—if people read it and then tear up their front yards to plant a garden with their children, or even if they grow a bit of kale in a pot on the patio—then I think it is a successful project and I am grateful for it.

References

[1] For data to support this claim, see Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland (2014), published by GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

[2] Six Inches of Soil p25: “There have been a series of ecologically or biologically based farming systems that have responded to the roll out of industrial farming. The first response was biodynamic farming, and then came organic farming in the late 1930s. Permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology arrived during the 1970s, and then finally, we have regenerative agriculture.” See also the chart on p26.

[3] Origins of regenerative paradigms in Indigenous agriculture are well documented, e.g. Sands, B., Machado, M.R., White, A. et al. Moving towards an anti-colonial definition for regenerative agriculture. Agric Hum Values (2023).

[4] This is just one example where this sort of claim gets made, e.g. ‘Nature-based solutions’: Land grabs in nature’s name (2022), published by PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), one of five regional centres of Pesticide Action Network, a global network dedicated to the elimination of harm upon humans and the environment by pesticide use, and to the promotion of biodiversity-based ecological agriculture. Six Inches of Soil does not make explicit claims that projects associated with clear human rights violations are regenerative, but neither does it consistently and unambiguously clarify that they are not.

[5] Tittonell, P et al. Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics? (2022). For another review on the contestation of these terms, see Giraldo, F and Rosset P, Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements (2017).

Find more

Six Inches of Soil: How to heal our soils, ourselves and our communities through regenerative farming ed. Molly Foster, Priya Kalia & Jeremy Toynbee (2024) is published by 5m books. Contributors: Mike Berners-Lee, Matt Chatfield, Henry Dimbleby, Adrienne Gordon, Vicki Hird, Anna Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Hannah Jones, Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Claire Mackenzie, Nicole Masters, Josiah Meldrum, Lucy Michaels, Emma Mills, James Murray-White, Marina O’Connell , John Pawsey, Tom Pearson, Colin Ramsay, Nic Renison, Lizzie Sagoo, Ben Thomas, Ian Wilkinson & Dee Woods. The book consists of seven chapters and six ‘interludes’:

Chapter 1: It’s a miracle, but that miracle has created a disaster
Chapter 2: Regenerative farming, what is it?
Interlude I: Are we using our farmed land wisely?
Chapter 3: The science of soil
Interlude II: Regulation, greenwashing and co-option
Chapter 4: Regenerative mixed farm: Pig Pink Farm, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire
Interlude III: Subsidies, Brexit and trade
Chapter 5: Organic market garden: Sweetpea, Caxton, Cambridgeshire
Interlude IV: Food security and UK self-sufficiency
Chapter 6: Pasture-fed beef: Treveddoe, Bodmin, Cornwall
Interlude V: Applying agroforestry in mixed regenerative farming
Chapter 7: Soil as soul
Interlude VI: Enterprise stacking
Chapter CHAPTER 8: How do we build a sustainable future for food and farming?
Epilogue – Act now

In parallel to the book, the documentary film Six Inches of Soil, directed by Colin Ramsay, tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food. The film website includes additional reading and resources, including an impact campaign.

In his previous ClimateCultures post, Dystopian Farming: an Inquiry, Paul introduces ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation. And in Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate, he seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.

Paul Feather

An animist farmer and author whose artistic interests include the courtship of landscapes for food and seed and translating animist thought into the language of physics.

On Being Water Beings — “A Return to Water, Rather Than Dust”

Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White, in conversation with Veronica Strang about her new book, Water Beings, finds connections with his own work at a time when water is under threat and we need to rebalance our elemental relationship.

2,850 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes

“Water serpent beings’ abilities to be monstrous also traverse scales. They can lurk within the individual psyche and represent the seething inner sea of instincts and emotions, or they can reflect tensions and fluid capacities for disorder at a societal level, such as the chaos represented by war or revolution… At a cosmic level, they can represent apocalyptic events – the Flood, the volcanic eruption, the earthquake, the tsunami.”

— Veronica Strang, Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.

Showing the cover of 'Water Beings, by Veronica Strang (published 2023) — ‘Water Beings’ by Veronica Strang (2023)

Water in crisis

Recently I’ve been sensing a disconnect between me and water. I live close to an iconic river, in which I learnt to swim and as a teenager had lucrative summer jobs punting tourists along it. However, the River Cam, like most if not all UK water systems, is heavily polluted, and I know of many local cases of humans and dogs who have been seriously unwell after a dip.

The data for the newly designated bathing status at Sheep’s Green in the Newnham area of Cambridge recenly showed high levels of e-coli and other nasties that have leached down from a sewage pumping station some miles away. In addition, the heavy winter, spring and now summer, rains we are getting in this normally drier part of the land often wash off concrete and create epic floods, with run-off washing into the rivers and through the soil.

I’ve just made a short film about one of East Anglia’s chalk streams, the Newmarket Brook, and I have been learning from geologists and hydrologists about chalk streams’ unique qualities and fragility. This one is in varying states of health. I also helped a friend, Tony Eva, make Pure Clean Water, a film about Hobson’s Conduit, which flows from the springs at Nine Wells, by the hospital, through various colleges and into Cambridge. It is in a perilous condition, continually abstracted and contaminated.

Away from just this one city, the human world is at war, and water gets scarce and used as a threat for those being persecuted and bombarded. We’re in a water crisis and if we are to survive as a species and remain equitable with our ecosystem, our relationship with all the elements must rebalance. Recognising this disconnect is the start, and framing our connection to the sacred and to older knowledges feels like an important way forward. A crucial way forward.

It’s timely then to discover Veronica Strang’s body of work, and engage with the growing movement towards river/nature rights. The vast body of human creativity around water and water beings comes to the fore in her book, which really resonates and brings joy to this jaded mind. If many of us unite around care for water and becoming water guardians, from a variety of faith beliefs, political and ecological opinions and none, our human power can make a real difference.

I’ve recently been a participant in two University of Cambridge conferences on water-human relationships where Veronica delivered keynote lectures. Her research straddles anthropology, archaeology, theology, philosophy and more — ranging across human history, our experience with and belief in beings that inhabit watery realms, and our cultural imaginations and psychological systems.

Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis is a very deep dive into watery worlds inhabited by a vast array of extraordinary more-than-human beings, and into our imaginative nature as an ancient species. Every society has developed complex and intricate beliefs and knowledges around water beings and their values, roles and responsibilities, including our projections on them as either benign or monstrous. Living alongside them, dreaming of them or even being devoured by them, has given humans a sense of fear, worship, adoration, and veneration. Perhaps now is the time to fully merge our substantive presence on the earth with water creatures?

Water Beings - showing 'Muisca tunjos', votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold. — Muisca tunjos, votive offerings to ancestral serpents believed to inhabit Lake Guatavita, Colombia, 10th–16th century CE, gold.

A confluence of knowledge and imagination

While grounded in academic scholarship, Water Beings reads like a flowing chronology of connectivity, an important congregation of how the planet’s climate and delicate ecosystems and the human creative impetus to respond all come together. Ultimately, this work is about narrative, fact and fiction: stories and images of water beings are part of our human construct, and now is a time to acknowledge and honour them. What might they mean? What might they anticipate?

The book’s ten chapters categorise types of water entities — irrigating beings, supreme beings, demonised beings, reformed and transformational beings and more — and frame our ways into their study. A key final chapter then sharply focuses on the now, why we are in this condition of crisis and dis-connection, and ways we might return to a closer, healthier framing. I’ll return to that important chapter.

Water Beings - Showing Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928: Unknown artist, watercolour on paper. — Unknown artist, Nyai Blorong, Goddess of the South Sea, Java, before 1928, watercolour on paper.

I was particularly delighted to discover in chapter 8, ‘Supreme Beings’ — as Strang moves forward with her story, societies become urbanised and with that comes monotheistic faith structures and practices — an image from William Blake, ‘Moses erecting the brazen serpent’.

This chimes with an ongoing absorption into Blake’s prophetic work I have through the Finding Blake project, a fascination with his fourfold vision. Here, in an underwater realm, serpents are coiling around humans, literally squeezing the life out of corrupt sinners, while Moses stands watching upwards to the head of the main water serpent. Here is an image of the entwining of watery beings which has become the symbol of medicine and healing: caduceus.

Showing William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper. — William Blake, Moses Erecting the Brazen Serpent (Nehushtan), c. 1800–1803, pen and watercolour on paper.

Water is rare in Blake’s paintings, and where it does appear it often represents the subconscious, a metaphor for yearnings, regrets. Here it is a vessel, dominated by these beings of great power, human victims in their coils — and yet the interplay between them and Moses is highly significant: dominion and dominance. I’m not aware of Blake referencing the Thames in his work, despite living very close to it for most of his life, yet surely it played a role within his unconscious knowledge of the world. I wonder if he saw serpents and watery beings on his daily walks alongside it? I’m led to believe he and his wife Catherine could see the river from their last flat, where he died, which is now under a major London landmark hotel.

Chapter 10, ‘Reformed beings’, flows up to contemporary times, and the use of images of water beings in literature, films and more. This makes me think of the local town of Ely, once a town of eels, fished for and captured in plentiful supply and shipped off to London as a commodity. Now the eels are gone, with the last remaining eel catcher, into mythology of both creature and trade. Eels live on in artworks, sculptures by the river, and paintings aplenty in local galleries and markets — a symbol of this fenland town. Many tales of the fens are marked by the beings that once inhabited waterways since cut as agricultural drains: part of the industrialisation of land reclaimed from watery bog.

‘Turning The Tide’, the final chapter, forms a confluence, bringing together knowledges from countermovements — indigenous activists, campaigners for social and ecological justice, nature-worshipping religious groups, legal activists, and scholars — to include learnings and imaginings from all kinds of creative practitioners, strongly making the case for recognition of the rights of the more-than-human, and water itself: ultimately, the vessel and element that holds us all.

Here, the full power and resonance of the author’s research comes to the present day, and she offers the full weight of her learning and sharing:

“Today, in a world urgently in need of a change in direction, the stories that water serpent beings tell, and their capacities to represent alternate visions of human-non-human relations, may be the most crucial role that they have ever had.

“As our water serpent beings have shown, societies that have achieved long-term sustainability have done so by maintaining steady-state or circular economies, rather than embarking upon spirals of growth and expansion.”

Returning to my home city of Cambridge, plagued by the constant over-hanging clouds of development and the ‘growth agenda’, this message needs to ring loud — and just maybe the water beings may rise again from the Cam, or emerge in eel-like form to teach humans this lesson of steady state fluid dynamics. Human and watery other.

Showing 28 Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm. — Double-headed water being in the form of a ship, Viking Age plate brooch from a grave in Lillevang, Bornholm.

Water Beings: a Q&A with Veronica Strang

JMW This is such an extraordinary work of rich, deep scholarship. I appreciate greatly the visual, literary and historical journey you take the audience on, and feel enriched by this book.

VS Thanks for this kind comment — this research has been a wonderful experience for me. Although water beings appear regularly in folklore, ethnography, history and theology, no one has previously researched aquatic deities systematically and comparatively, and venturing into this new research area has been an extraordinary adventure. Water beings have so much to tell us.

JMW Can you share how this study started, and tell us some of your journey following the waters and the watery beings?

VS My research as an anthropologist has always focused on human-environmental relationships, people’s beliefs and values, and particularly their engagements with water. I have explored a range of issues relating to water: ownership, governance and management; conflicts over water; religious beliefs about water; and rights to water, for humans and for non-human species and ecosystems. Much of this work has been in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and more briefly in Malawi. But the issues around water that interest me recur all around the world.

Water beings swam into my research very early on. In the early 1990s I worked with indigenous Australian communities in Queensland and learned about the Rainbow Serpent that is so central to their lives. A decade in New Zealand, during which I conducted research with Maori iwis on water ownership, rights and management, brought me into contact with their beliefs about rivers as living ancestors, and their taniwha and other water beings. Realising the vital importance of these aquatic deities caused me to pay attention to them elsewhere.

It soon became clear that — since all early human societies worshipped the non-human domain, which we call Nature — water beings (as well as other elemental and non-human ancestral figures) were ubiquitous in human history. And in all of these early societies water beings performed similarly vital connective roles: personifying the creative and potentially destructive powers of water; forming the world and populating with human and non-human beings; providing humans with consciousness and enlightenment; exerting religious authority and, above all, generating water and life in annual cycles of production and reproduction. So for several decades I collected images and narratives about water beings all over the world: feathered and water lily serpents in Central America; African python deities, Arctic undersea beings; Indian nāgas; Japanese cloud dragons and Chinese imperial dragons; North-American Pueblo horned serpents or, on the north-west coast, wolf or bear headed beings; Amazonian giant anacondas and celestial boas; Celtic deities in rivers and springs; Norse sea serpents, and Eastern European rain dragons.

What happened to these water beings over time in different cultural and historical contexts gives us an illuminating narrative about different societal trajectories and transformations in people’s relationships with water and the non-human domain. And so the project grew into the major comparative study that forms the basis of my book. The study shows how growing instrumental control over the environment altered the relations of power between human societies and their environments, and led changes in beliefs and practices in relation to water deities. As humans gained more technological power over water, and felt more ‘god-like’, a fascinating pattern of deity humanisation emerged. This led to the semi-humanisation of water beings, or their displacement by deities in human form, and culminated in the major monotheisms assigning authority to human, male gods and demonising the non-human beings of earlier religions.

JMW Would you explain a little about how you chose to structure the book, and make these categories of beings? And which of the world wide canon of water beings you have researched most captures you?

VS Water Beings follows the changing patterns in societies’ relationships with water through a comparative study of their water deities. Although these changes happened at different times in different places, the book is loosely chronological, starting with the water beings of the earliest human societies and those that remain central today in place-based indigenous communities. Such societies understood the co-creative role of the non-human domain, manifested in water beings, and sought to have reciprocal and respectful relationships with them. They also maintained relatively egalitarian relationships in their political arrangements, being led by both male and female elders.

The text then moves to examining the effects of greater human control over water, for example in ancient irrigation societies, and considers how their religious and political arrangements changed alongside their new infrastructures. With new hierarchies and centralised governments, power shifted from water deities into the hands of (usually male) priests and deified rulers who became the figures responsible for bringing the rain and maintaining social order.

The following chapters explore how, as societies became more technologically powerful, water beings were made subservient or subsumed by new deities in human form until, with the rise of monotheisms that separated Culture from Nature, and sought dominion over the latter, they were demonised and slain. It also shows how emerging scientific visions disenchanted the world and consigned many nature deities to ‘folklore’. In the final part of the book, however, we see how this alienation from the non-human domain, and the exploitation of other species and environments that it encouraged, has led to the current environmental crisis. There is now an increasing understanding that there is an urgent need for humankind to regain more convivial, and therefore more sustainable, relationships with water, ecosystems, and other living kinds.

The book therefore also examines new visions of water beings in recent and contemporary art, literature and film, in which they are recognised and respected as key manifestations of the co-creative powers of the non-human domain. These emerging images and narratives express people’s growing desire to reconnect more positively with other living kinds and ecosystems.

As for which water beings have captured me the most? I can never choose. My first love was the Australian Rainbow Serpent, but they are all extraordinary and wonderful, beautiful and terrible, and endlessly fascinating.

JMW Anthropological research gives us an opportunity to look back at historical evidence and to engage with local/cultural knowledges. In this case there is such a desperate need to apply all this knowledge to how we respond to water now, which you explore in some depth in the final chapter. How might we look back in 100 years, with your assessment of the current trajectory of human/water relations?

VS My research helps, I hope, by showing how, for many millennia, human societies maintained respectful relationships with water and the non-human domain, in which people sought to protect their needs and interests as well as those of human beings. It shows how and why many societies moved away from such egalitarian visions to seek power and dominion over ‘Nature’ and how this increasing inequality led to exploitative and unsustainable practices. Most large societies are still on this trajectory, led by ideologies of growth and expansion, and the belief that yet more technological control will solve the problem. Meanwhile, species and biodiverse habitats continue to disappear, human populations and their use of resources continue to increase, and it seems that humankind is dragging the world towards a painful and potentially critical collapse.

But in almost all societies there are also passionate counter-movements: social and ecological activists and indigenous communities striving to promote alternate ways forward. They share a transformational vision of human and non-human equality, circular economies, more sustainable lifeways, and beliefs and values that recognise the vital co-creative role of the non-human world. These movements are growing: more and more people are pushing their local and national governments and international bodies to make better choices. What the world looks like 100 years from now will depend on whether they can succeed in turning the tide. And in this battle — and it is indeed a battle for human and non-human survival — water beings, as compelling personifications of non-human power and creativity, are a vital narrative device for communicating ideas about how we might engage with water differently.

JMW Do you feel positive about us working with the more-than-human to assert the rights of nature and the rights of water within human law/psychology?

VS How could one feel other than positive about working to uphold the rights of all living kinds in what is fundamentally a shared interconnected world, in which human and non-human wellbeing cannot be separated? This is surely the only rational and ethical position from which it is possible to see a future in which all of us can flourish. So yes, I feel immensely positive, and indeed privileged, to be able to work with these amazing water beings and their wonderful capacities to communicate a more hopeful vision of the future.

Find more

Water Beings – from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis by Veronica Strang is published by Reaktion Books (2023). Veronica is a Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. You can explore her work — and watch a summary video of a planned TV series based on Water Beings — at her website.

James has made or collaborated on water-related films and projects, including The Waterlight Project, Pure Clean Water (2023), River Of Light (details to be published at The Newmarket Chalk Stream Trust). He took part in the recent Being With Water Otherwise conference, where Veronica was keynote speaker. You can read Un-tending the World – A Geopoetics of the Wild, his recent review of Two Lights by James Roberts. James is also creator of the Finding Blake film and project; Mark Goldthorpe, ClimateCultures editor, is editor of that website and the Waterlight site. In a recent Waterlight blog post, Religion and Climate Futures – Waterlight Screening & Cambridge Unseen ‘Chalk Walk’, James discusses a recent screening of the Waterlight film at a Cambridge University and LSE joint summer school and the interest in chalk streams and further film making that Waterlight has helped stimulate.

James will be in conversation with Veronica at the Into The Wild gathering in Sussex on 25th August. The festival itself runs 22nd-26th August.

Chalk-streams is a blog by Charles Rangeley-Wilson, a writer and conservationist with a lifelong passion for rivers.

James Murray-White

A writer and filmmaker linking art forms to dialogue around climate issues, whose practice stretches back to theatre-making.