Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care.
1,340 words: estimated reading time = approximately 5.5 minutes
It’s midsummer, and England has just experienced its hottest June since records began.1 Temperatures have been topping 40oC across Europe, while in the eastern Pacific Ocean a ‘monster’ El Nino is developing,2 with its effects already being felt in places like Papua New Guinea.3 London recently paid host to ‘London Climate Week’, at which the UN Secretary-General highlighted that London was not just ‘Calling’, but ‘Cooking’, perhaps starting to bear out at least some of the apocalyptic vision of The Clash’s post-/punk classic.4 But several Climate Week events couldn’t go ahead; most notably perhaps, a panel discussion at the London School of Economics on improving the management of extreme heat was called off due to — you guessed it — the extreme heat.5
Anthropocene ironies
‘The Anthropocene’ seems to be an age of irony. The term describes a period in Earth’s history when (some) humans have seemingly become a dominant, controlling, world-making force, and yet our knowledge of the future implications of that agency are shrouded in uncertainty. This is an age of melting polar ice giving access to more fossil fuels; of urgent defences against rising seas being wrapped around fossil fuel infrastructure;6 of the clear need for more global cooperation just at the moment that geopolitical worlds seem to be pulling apart.7 And meanwhile, experts on dealing with the heat can’t talk to each other because it’s too hot.
As the philosopher-poet Eugene Thacker put it in a 2021 interview:8
There is a tragic irony in the Anthropocene idea. We do matter after all. The evidence? We have created the conditions for our own extinction. I suppose that is an achievement, of sorts. So convinced are we as human beings that we matter that we are willing to sacrifice the planet for our own species-specific self-importance.
This year’s submissions to our evolving online Museum of the Anthropocene capture this sense of Anthropocene ironies. Like last year, some deal with collapsing boundaries,9 with things which are neither one thing nor the other, or which seem to be something but which are in reality something else.10 As we move through them, we move in many respects from identifying the problems and violences of the Anthropocene towards the moves we might make to undo them. But that spectrum of knowledge and action is implied in all of them, in different ways.
Katya Boinvoisin points us towards the ironies and contradictions of the clean energy transition, showing how the rare earth mining frontier — producing materials which are vital for ‘clean’ energy tech — is pushing into northern Scandinavia and repeating many of the political and environmental violences we tend to associate with fossil colonialism11 and fossil capitalism.12
This year’s collection features a range of shape-shifters; objects whose meanings and attachments seem to shift radically when viewed through the lens of the Anthropocene. Izzy Laws’ account of the rubber duck shows how a cute children’s toy can also contribute to marine plastic pollution; but in a further twist, how an accidental spillage of thousands of the things helped scientists piece together new knowledge of ocean circulation — crucial to helping us better understand future changes in the ocean-atmosphere system.
Maisie Royal offers us a cup of matcha, and places the latest coffee shop trend in a deeper historical and geographical context. Once used to aid meditative contemplation of the beauty of human-nature coexistence, now it is a fully-fledged global commodity and challenging coffee as the chemical enhancer of choice for exhausted minds labouring under late capitalism. Nonetheless, Maisie suggests that matcha still embodies a deep desire for (re)connection with nature, even as its cultivation in Japan is increasingly challenged by changing weather patterns.
Bethany Waite similarly explores the juxtapositions of beauty and industry through the lens of crochet. She traces the mechanisation of this craft skill and its increasing entanglement with ‘fast fashion’ and synthetic fibres, but points too to emerging craftivism movements by which crochet, as a form of “slow, handmade work” is interjected “into fast, industrialised spaces, disrupting the speed and disposability that define modern fashion systems”. In so doing, crochet promotes a new ethos of care, community and sustainability.
Lastly, Joanna Edwards also examines the tension between materiality and meaning. Their object is a handmade Pride flag, stitched together from fragments of industrially-produced cloth to produce something fundamentally different: a defence and a celebration of queerness. Drawing on notions of ‘queer ecology’, Joanna diagnoses the Anthropocene as an age defined by the rejection of the inherent queerness of both natural and human worlds, and by the enforcing of boundaries and hierarchies. By gathering around Joanna’s flag, we can see how fighting against the Anthropocene requires solidarities that cut across the categories industrial modernity has bequeathed to many of us.
Queer ecology — looking beyond categories
Oversimplifications abound in corporate and state environmentalism, from deeply performative nature-culture dualisms to the rendering of wild spaces in one corner of the world fungible and exchangeable with wildness elsewhere, through mechanisms of offsetting and substitution. Queer ecology reminds us of the inherent strangeness, intimacy and interdependencies of the world, which cut across the Western philosophical ‘operating systems’ that, since the 16th century or so, have dominated how the nonhuman world is comprehended and apprehended.
In this age of irony, it is plain to see how these categories contain their own contradictions within them; spotting and talking about those ironies, then, might be the key to undoing their violences.
Papua New Guinea at risk of food shortages as El Niño brings frost and drought, Rebecca Bush (The Guardian, 25/6/26)
London’s Calling, by The Clash: “…the sun’s zoomin’ in // meltdown expected // the wheat is growing thin” (Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, 1979). Some travellers on the Central Line this week might nonetheless welcome the idea that the “the ice age is coming”.
You can find all five new entries in Inside the Museum, along with Martin’s selections for 2022 to 2024 – a growing collection of objects and entities that shine new lights on the Anthropocene and ask important questions of us. And we bring together all of Martin’s introductory essays in the main Museum of the Anthropocene page. Do also check out our earlier project, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, where CimateCultures members discuss the objects — real or imagined — that illustrate the emerging planetary age for them.
To mark the first four years of our online Museum of then Anthropocene, we recently hosted a conversation between the Museum’s co-ordinator, UEA’s Dr Martin Mahony, and fellow ClimateCultures member, GroundWork Gallery’s director and curator, Valerie Sekules. Do read Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years for an exploration of how collections such as this enhance- our understanding of our planetary age.
This short piece by Ingrid Bååth for studio ClimateCulture (not related to ClimateCultures) discusses how Queer Ecology offers “a framework for seeing — and living — differently. It reminds us that the binaries we inherit are not inevitable. That nature is not static.”
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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.
For his recent post with Veronica Sekules, Martin said: “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Eco-artist and designer Ife Abhulimen‘s sculpture, Dark in Nature, explores persistence by holding an object in place long enough to be noticed. Emerging from the space between appearance and disappearance, it questions our notions of ‘waste’ and ‘away’.
960 words: estimated reading time = approximately 4 minutes
Often times, the moment something becomes ‘waste,’ it also becomes easy to forget.
And then, once it leaves our hands, we move on. We carry on with our day as usual and rarely stop to wonder where it ends up.
Every year, we discard hundreds of millions of tons of plastic. Most of it slips quietly out of view into landfills, oceans, into places we don’t have to look at. And once it’s gone from sight, it becomes easier to believe it’s gone altogether.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But some things don’t often follow that saying.
What we choose not to see
Most of what we throw away is designed to leave us quickly. A bottle is used for minutes. Packaging is torn open and discarded without a second thought. These objects pass through our hands so briefly; it almost feels like they were never really there to begin with.
And yet, they remain, just not where we can see them. That absence creates a kind of comfort. If it’s no longer in front of us, it no longer belongs to us. It becomes someone else’s problem. Somewhere else’s reality.
But that distance is thin. Almost imaginary.
It didn’t start as art
Dark in Nature, one of the pieces from my recent solo exhibition, Delicate Resilience, began in that space between presence and disappearance. It is made from reclaimed plastic bottles, wire, textile scraps. Materials that were once held, used, and then set aside. Things that had already reached what we might call their end but in my mind still had potential to become a conversation piece. At the centre, a darkened organic-looking structure holds fragments within it, bits of colour and texture held in another bottle that feel like remnants of something that hasn’t fully let go. Around it, the forms extend outward. Bottles bend and stretch, no longer functioning as they once did, but not erased either.
There’s a sense of movement in this piece of work. The wire reaches outward, almost searching, almost restless. The forms resist stillness. They push past the boundaries that try to contain them.
And then, unexpectedly, there are the yellow elements. They resemble flowers; small, delicate, almost hopeful. For a moment, they suggest something familiar. Something natural. Something alive.
But they are not what they seem.
They are constructed, like everything else in this piece. Placed there, not grown there. These ‘flowers’ hint at nature’s persistence, its quiet way of pushing against human interference, always trying to find a way to thrive.
The illusion of growth
That’s where the tension sits. Dark in Nature holds that contradiction quietly. It looks like growth, but it isn’t the kind we understand. These materials do not return to the earth. They do not follow the cycles we associate with life.
They stay, they break, they shift, they scatter but they remain part of the world, whether we see them or not.
So what we are looking at isn’t growth in the traditional sense. It’s persistence taking on the shape of something we recognise.
When we throw something away, we rarely imagine its future. We don’t picture where it settles. How long it stays. What it becomes over time. But that doesn’t mean it disappears. It simply moves beyond the edges of our attention. This piece brings it back from that distance. It gathers what was scattered. It places it in front of us again, not as it was, but as something we can’t ignore quite as easily.
Not gone, just repositioned
Nothing here is new.
Every part of it has existed before, used differently, for an original purpose. All that has changed is the context. The way it is seen after some artistic manipulation. The fact that it is being looked at again. And maybe that’s enough to unsettle something. Because if these materials were never truly gone, just relocated, reshaped, reassembled, then the idea of ‘away’ starts to feel uncertain.
Dark in Nature – a small shift
This work doesn’t offer answers.
It doesn’t tell you what to do or how to respond.
It simply holds something in place long enough for it to be noticed.
And sometimes, that’s where change begins, not in immediate action, but first in awareness.
Because once you begin to notice what doesn’t disappear, it becomes harder to believe in the idea of ‘away’. And maybe ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was never the full story.
Elsewhere on our blog, in Starting to See Waste as Art and Heritage, curator Veronica Sekules introduces her special essay for our Longer feature, using an exhibition at GroundWork Gallery to explore artists’ roles in helping change how we value what we discard.
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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.
Ife – “I use AI to create mockups and nice backgrounds for my art pieces, which has been very helpful especially when I want to showcase work in a different setting. In addition, I use AI to do research as it helps me filter all the fluff, in contrast to Google search, and it gives relevant information. I also use it to search for opportunities in the sustainable art space. I try not to use it a lot because I think it’s robbing us of our capacity to think as intelligent humans. For this post, I have used AI to help with grammar corrections.”
A self-taught eco-artist and designer who explores themes of consumption, sustainability, and environmental responsibility, inviting audiences to discover beauty and value in what is often overlooked.
Artist and writer James Roberts shares Rise and Fall, his short, award-winning film-poem, which gives us all space, an invitation to find calm, to experience our local rivers, to find a practice of connection and show some reverence.
1,300 words: estimated reading time = 5 minutes + 5 minutes video
Rise and Fall developed from a short visit to the Cambrian Mountains above the Elan Valley dams one spring afternoon. I was trying to film red kites with my drone, but the kites had other ideas, disappearing over the peaks at speed. So instead I decided to do a shot of the little River Elan, starting almost at its surface, then sending the drone as high as it would go.
When I viewed the footage later, a poem began to write itself about the experience — about the high drift and growing distance, which seemed like a metaphor for where we are now in relation to the natural world. The further we rise, the more distant it gets. Rivers, it seems, show us where we are.
After that I began visiting other rivers whenever I was out and about, filming them handheld and up close, or floating the drone above them to record their contours: the Wye, the Lugg, the Cleddau, the Dart, and a few of their tributaries. I hadn’t set out to make a film, but that poem wanted to do more than just sit on a page. It wanted to be a film-poem.
Luckily I was told about the upcoming Rivers of Film Festival and encouraged to send in a film treatment. Even more luckily the film was accepted and then went on to win the inaugural Clare Crossman Prize. The process of making a film was a real adventure for me, for which I’m very grateful.
There’s so much in the news these days about the state of our rivers. They’re polluted, choked with sewage, nitrates, harmful bacteria. It’s the water companies’ fault, or privatisation, or chicken farms. But these are symptoms, not causes — indicators of a wider disconnection with the natural world which continues to widen. Rivers show us what we’re doing to the earth, our attitude towards it, our now-distant relationship with it. Everything flows into them: our poisons, but ultimately our ideas and ideologies.
It seems like there’s headway being made in the fight to save our rivers. Good souls are measuring nitrates, monitoring streams, building networks, litigating. They’re raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for this fight. Meanwhile, the great rollout of AI is being backed by every government and major investment company, estimated to cost tens of trillions in the next decade. As part of this, our children are being encouraged to develop relationships with companions that don’t exist. They’re being connected deeper and deeper into the wiring of machines. Machines that consume billions of litres of water. Will the rivers be spared?
What is the most important thing?
This is what I want to see: a farmer walking down to a nearby stream first thing in the morning, before they start their long workday. When they reach it, they spend a few minutes watching and listening. Then they bow. Or a group of children on their way to school going to the riverbank to drop flowers from their gardens into it, watched smiling by their investment banker parents. This is not part of some new-age religion — it’s simply a practice of connection. Start the day with something important. Show some reverence.
I remember reading about a man who visited a reservation in the US hoping for some instruction on how to live better. Two elders led him out into the desert early one morning. They told him to bring nothing, just to sit until they told him he could return to the village with them. They left him there for two hours. When they returned they asked him one question: What is the most important thing in life?
He thought about what they might want to hear and said: family. They shook their heads and walked away.
Two hours later, with the sun now reaching its zenith, they returned and asked the same question.
“Friends,” he answered.
They walked away again.
After another two hours they asked the same question. Again, the wrong answer. And again.
By late afternoon it was 100 degrees in the shade, and the man wasn’t in the shade. Again he gave them the wrong answer.
The next time he could barely speak. His head was spinning, there were sparks in his eyes, and his throat was like a sand chute.
“What is the most important thing in life?” they asked again.
“Water,” he croaked. “Water!”
They smiled, picked him up, embraced him, and let him drink before returning to the village.
My little film-poem ends with the line: “If you want to, you can find your way back” (sorry for the spoiler). I’m not trying to preach, only to offer a viewpoint in the most simple way I can. For me, we have to find practices that reconnect us to the real, to move away from the virtual. Find our way back to what we are — animals, dependent on other animals, the soil, the rivers. That reality will return to us whether we like it or not.
The film is deliberately slow; you might find the pace frustrating. It’s shot in black and white, as simple as I could make it. This is to give us all a little space. Nick Sergent composed a beautiful cello soundtrack, which helps slow the piece down further. It’s an invitation to calm, and hopefully a way for you to reconnect with your local river.
James Roberts is an artist and writer based in the Welsh Borders. For more of his writing, subscribe to intothedeepwoods.substack.com, where he writes about establishing practices of connection to the wild. His website is: seariverwood.com.
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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.
James – “I do use AI. It’s an efficient spellchecker, it’s good at helping me fix my old car, and it’s excellent at interpreting Tarot decks. I don’t use it for creative work: AI ideas are pretty useless to me. I do think, however, that it will replace most professional creatives in the near future. This is already happening in the design industry where I used to work. See above for how it impacts the environment. Therefore, like meat and plastic, it should be consumed sparingly. I’m already weaning myself off it despite only experimenting with it for a few months.”
You can read about the Clare Crossman Prize, which James was awarded at the Rivers of Film Festival in Cambridge, here at Clare Crossman’s website. A ClimateCultures member, Clare (1954-2021) was a poet with a deep connection with the natural world and with place, which this prize celebrates. Along with filmmaker James Murray-White and other local champions of the River Mel in Cambridgeshire, Clare created the Waterlight Project, a website and film inspired by the chalk stream.
You can read more about the Rivers of Film Festival that James Murray-White devised and curated in Cambridge (September to October 2025) in his recent piece for our Creative Showcase, our growing portfolio of new and recent works from ClimateCultures members. The festival was commissioned by Cambridge Past, Present & Future as part of the RiverCamCAN Project (Climate Action Through Nature), and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. Further screenings of the 10 films commissioned for the festival are planned around the UK — including at the Living Water exhibition in Cambridge (20th March – 5th December 2026) — the screenings on 28th May (University Library) and 25th June (Pembroke College) — and at the River Summit in Henley, September 2026 (date TBC).
A writer and artist who teaches practices of connection to the wild, author of 'Two Lights', and with artwork exhibited in several galleries in the UK.
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.
‘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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
VSWater 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.
Writer and filmmaker James Murray-White finds in James Roberts’s ‘Two Lights’ a profound, close observation of the living world: a wise blending between writer and subject that encapsulates the essence of geopoetics as the sensitive expression of reality.
1,780 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes
“There is a skill in un-tending to our spaces, in patiently leaving them to their own remaking. It’s a skill that is vital now, when the damage we’ve done to earth has become so urgently in need of reversal. Some of the best examples we have are found in old churchyards. We can enter and quietly watch the slow unfurling of the space. Perhaps we can rediscover our sense of the sacred.”
James Roberts’s work has been on my radar since I received and reviewed a copy of his astounding Winged four years ago, as the UK and much of the world remained in lockdown during the Covid pandemic. My gut feeling then was that this book marked the emergence of an artist whose observation and awareness of the creatures of this earth are precise, startling, and vital. And needed, urgently. I wrote then that he is ultimately a realist interlocutor, and now I’m convinced.
“In this twilight space that echoes with the sound of the falls there is an elsewhere that is almost touchable. Children, every one a little animist, are born with a sense of mystery in nature, though we educate it out of them. It returns at times, in places like this. “
Here, in his new work, it is James’s words and narrative that lead, with a carefully curated collection of images that stand alongside — supporting, not dominating. And his words track difficult and often unimaginable terrain: his wife’s illness, his depression, and the various ecological crises we are foisting upon our world that are accumulating into a bigger disaster of ecosystem collapses that we cannot understand.
Swift from the book ‘Two Lights’ by James Roberts
Geopoetics — seeking a renewed sense of world
All of this has sent James out to walk, wander, explore and observe: bigger journeys in earlier days, across Africa and the Algerian desert, and then more recently closer to home, along rivers and streams meandering through Wales and the Welsh/Herefordshire Marches, woods, fields and edgeland strips and crevices.
“I’m doing my best to imagine a species of bird on a planet like ours, but utterly different, thousands of light years away. I imagine this planet spins on a more oblique axis to its sun so that twilight in its northerly and southerly regions lasts for days. Here evolution has favoured creatures which can create their own light. Its oceans glow, lit by clouds of algae. In its strange forests trees have evolved needles which shine like Christmas decorations. And in its skies are great birds blocking out the pointillist patterns of the surrounding galaxies. The birds have long necks and wide wings. They are covered with phosphorescent feathers, standing out against the sky, like luminous swans or comets.”
This is from the opening chapter, ‘Chasing the Dawn’, tracking the start and spread of each dawn across the world, and demonstrates a deftness, an acuteness, and a sense of an observer-participant in this universe, that really fizzles. It sets this book up beautifully.
He leads us across different terrains and habitats, describing how different species of birds interact with and are moved or motivated by the sun’s rising, and then brings us back to ‘home’ with him, with a placing and drawing of his own terrain, and then an overview of how he came to be there.
The chapter delves into a description of his connection to bird life, birding, or bird knowledges — this is such a wise blending between writer and subject. It is as though we are being gently told or forewarned that from here on in, the writer becomes bird, and will be shamanicly moving between these worlds throughout the book.
The words flow as black marks making narratives on the page, and then as we turn some pages we find a resonant wash of a bird flying across the whiteness. A swan champions upwards, neck and wings extended (I searched for the right descriptive word there, and championing feels like the very best at my disposal right now), within or against a black/grey gloom or miasma, passing across and over.
I’m influenced by the Scottish poet/philosopher Kenneth White, who advocated an approach to life known as geopoetics, defined by The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics as “seeking a renewed sense of world, a sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics, expressing reality in different ways, through de-conditioning and using all our senses”. This work — I’m unable to call it simply ‘a book’ — encapsulates all of that, glued together with feathers held and dropped by all the avian community flying past James’s close-observing eye.
Swans abound minutes from my house close to a bend in the River Cam, and I too stop and watch and wonder as they glide and move, inhabiting and dominating watery space. There’s a bird interplay, along this hallowed river space, between swans, ducks, and a heron (I assume it’s a single solitary heron, with a defined hunting ground, though there is a ‘heron tree’ a mile or so further down, which is known to house a dozen or so at various times). And of course there’s at times a very active human layer, University and town teams rowing along at speed, their coaches on cycles bellowing from the towpath. Then there’s the below-the-water-line interplay, although with three sewage inputs within a couple of hundred metres any aquatic life is seriously threatened. And yet, the swans live here! They arch, and breed, and feed. Life.
“It’s our fate on this ocean-facing island, if our direction of travel as a culture continues, to face the rising waters, the ever-more-frequently-boiling rivers. We may continue to poison them, to carve, block, and silt them up for a time yet, believing as we do that they are simply our resources to be harnessed. But they will outlast us and their waters will run clean, eventually. There will come a time when this stretch of river will flow wilder than it does now.”
Creation in the ruins
In another striking sequence, within the chapter titled ‘The Church and the Island’, James writes about visits to ancient churches, creates pictures, discusses religious practices, especially asceticism — fascinating histories of hermits Evagrius and Cynog — and even hearing an ethereal voice testing the acoustics in one building. He then returns us to the ruins, to the wild, and the becoming that transcends facilitated worship towards an other-worldly deity.
Other snapshots he brings us include tragic moments of hatred invested upon the natural world by some of us. Shooting at swans, tearing apart foxes, throwing an owl’s already dead body onto a road to be crushed by vehicles, and the ugly reality of compulsive photography — of everything! — rather than seeing, observing, sensing, listening, and being with.
Two Lights is writings and images in the ruins. The desolation of despoliation, and not knowing the catastrophe that humans are catapulting ourselves towards. And yet, through close witness, and perhaps the collapse of our ego clutching to all we think we know, the avian world is just there — here, right alongside us. Whether or not they might save us is immaterial. Their equal existence is what’s important, and how we may come to notice that through the witnessing experiences, reflections, and decline of our own mortal lives. He really is writing and creating work about passageways through time and air, led by avian species that live their lives in focussed flights of movement, within landscapes of loss and life.
“Across the continent many species are on fire, crops withering in the prolonged drought and vulnerable people dying. Every single community on Earth, human or wild, has now encountered losses caused by the depletion of nature and by global warming. Unless we find a way to heal the damage we’ve done the losses will accelerate. It will take a huge shift in our psyches to achieve this. Every country, city and village, every community and family needs to ask the question: who speaks for wolf, for bear, for fox, for gull, for heron, for kingfisher – for all species, not just our own?”
You can read a sample chapter at the link above — and explore much more at Night River Wood, James Roberts’s website and his Instagram.
In our Quarantine Connections series, you can read A River of Sound, a piece that James Roberts contributed during Week 8 of our communal sharing of creative content and reflections during the UK’s first Covid lockdowns of 2020. James said of this piece: “I wrote this piece a year ago as a response to an increasing awareness of my own gradual loss and also the almost unnoticeable fading of natural sounds from the landscape. A year later there is a noticeable increase of birds in the landscape, and particularly in the surrounding uplands where the curlews are calling more than I’ve ever heard before. I’m not sure if this equates to me being hopeful for the future of declining species, but it shows how very easy it would be for us to give the wild the space it needs to thrive.”
James Murray-White mentions The Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, a network developing an understanding of geopoetics as the creative expression of the Earth. “It looks for signs of those who have attempted to leave ‘the motorway of Western civilisation’ in the past in order to find a new approach to thinking and living … It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world, and requires both serious study and a certain amount of de-conditioning of ourselves by working on the body-mind.” You canalos explore the International Institute of Geopoetics.
All the Little Gods Surrounding Us, his review of James Roberts’s earlier Winged is one of 14 posts that James Murray-White has written for us. ClimateCultures was seven years old this March! James was one of our first authors back in 2017. Throughout this year we’re delighted to celebrate our anniversary with new posts from some of those inaugural contributors, alongside other returning — and new — ClimateCultures authors.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care.
Maisie Royal offers us a cup of matcha, and places the latest coffee shop trend in a deeper historical and geographical context. Once used to aid meditative contemplation of the beauty of human-nature coexistence, now it is a fully-fledged global commodity and challenging coffee as the chemical enhancer of choice for exhausted minds labouring under late capitalism. Nonetheless, Maisie suggests that matcha still embodies a deep desire for (re)connection with nature, even as its cultivation in Japan is increasingly challenged by changing weather patterns.
Bethany Waite similarly explores the juxtapositions of beauty and industry through the lens of crochet. She traces the mechanisation of this craft skill and its increasing entanglement with ‘fast fashion’ and synthetic fibres, but points too to emerging craftivism movements by which crochet, as a form of “slow, handmade work” is interjected “into fast, industrialised spaces, disrupting the speed and disposability that define modern fashion systems”. In so doing, crochet promotes a new ethos of care, community and sustainability.
Lastly, Joanna Edwards also examines the tension between materiality and meaning. Their object is a handmade Pride flag, stitched together from fragments of industrially-produced cloth to produce something fundamentally different: a defence and a celebration of queerness. Drawing on notions of ‘queer ecology’, Joanna diagnoses the Anthropocene as an age defined by the rejection of the inherent queerness of both natural and human worlds, and by the enforcing of boundaries and hierarchies. By gathering around Joanna’s flag, we can see how fighting against the Anthropocene requires solidarities that cut across the categories industrial modernity has bequeathed to many of us.
Eco-artist and designer 
Artist and writer 
