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.
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.
‘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.
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 linesas 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.
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.
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 beingsconstellatelike 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 voiceswith 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 echoesbouncing off the sterile walls -
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.
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.
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.
Writer Peter Reason explores the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways as participants in a kinship ecology.
1,890 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes
How can those of us enculturated into a Western worldview engage with our world as sentient, as responsive, as kin? This is the question we address in Living Waters, our series of on-line co-operative inquiry workshops involving both human and River persons; the next workshops run online from 11th March to 29th April 2025 and usually attracts an international participation (see below for registration details).
In these inquiries we have been asking questions of the kind:
What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?
These questions focus our attention on whether we experience our world as something ‘out there’, which however wondrous and valuable is nevertheless separate from humans; this is the taken-for-granted perspective in Western society. Or is the world an animate presence, experienced as kin, as “all our relations”?[1] as do my Indigenous and Settler colleagues in Western Australia, who write in ‘Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world’:
… the ways we see, feel, and hear the world is associated with how we relate to and respond to our places. If we see the ground we walk on and the places we live in as animate, responsive, and relational, we are highly likely to care for Country with love, gentleness of spirit and fullness of heart. We are all able to hear and participate in the music, the soundscape of our places – to honour and celebrate the lyrics of life’. [2]
This way of seeing allows Indigenous people in their traditional cultures to experience the places they live – places their people have inhabited for tens of thousands of years – as living and responsive, with the whole community of beings as participants in a kinship ecology. These Indigenous elders draw on words that don’t translate easily, if at all, into English – pirlirr in Walmatjarri, liyan in Nyikina, and wirrin in Noongar – words that refer to a visceral way of knowing shared by people, all beings, and land itself. Through this way of seeing, feeling, and hearing Country, people know that “when you care for Country, Country will care for you”. [3]
When we use the terms Country (capital C), Land (capital L) or River (capital R) we refer to a broader, stronger, Indigenous use of the English language concepts of country, land, and river. These terms refer to places as relational, animate socio-ecosystems that are living and responsive. Country, Land and River include people as participants in a kin-centred ecology of being.
Those of us socialized into a Western way of being have been taught to think of humans and nature as separate and mutually exclusive opposites. In Western culture, although some of the ‘higher’ mammals are credited with intelligence, by and large the other–than–human is experienced as brute matter, only of value in so far as it serves human purposes. This perspective is clearly in error, as it has proved to be astoundingly destructive of the quality and complexity of the planetary ecology. Can we Westerners find this quality of relationship, can we learn to see our world in the way of kinship? Writer Amitav Ghosh entreats us to listen once more to the voices of the more-than-human world:
Voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. [4]
Living Waters inquiries are based not only on Indigenous perspectives but are rooted also in Western philosophy, specifically contemporary ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ which has its roots in the writings of Spinoza. We understand our world not as inanimate ‘stuff’ but as imbued from its origins with some kind of innerness – call it mind or sentience. Everything is integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. And from this we see that all beings form a communion of subjects, reaching out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return. If we invoke a world of brute stuff, as is normal in Western society, then that is what we will experience. If we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response – as the living world configures itself on poetic, metaphorical response to our invocation, a process Freya Mathews refers to as ontopoetics.
The point of our inquiries is to learn to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives and to explore ways of invoking the living presence of a sentient world. This is where Cooperative Inquiry comes in, a profoundly democratic approach to learning about and making sense of our world. This approach to living inquiry has three central characteristics that make it profoundly suitable for panpsychic inquiry because it treats all those involved – human and more-than-human – as subjective self-directing beings and therefore as equal participants in the inquiry process. It also emphasizes the experiential ground form of knowing, and it asserts the primacy of practice.
In orthodox scientific research the roles of subject and researcher are mutually exclusive, the researcher contributes the thinking that goes into the project, the subjects contribute the action to be studied. In co-operative inquiry these exclusive roles are replaced by mutual relationships. All involved work together both as co-researchers and co-subjects. Everyone is engaged in the design and management of the inquiry; everyone contributes to the questions to be asked and how to go about exploring them; everyone participates in the experience and action that’s being explored; everyone is involved in making sense and drawing conclusions; everyone draws on the learning from the inquiry in their future practice.
So how does this apply to the Living Waters workshops? We start with each participant identifying a River or waterway near where they live which they can engage with as a living, sentient being. They may sit with or walk by River, offering it quite simply attentive love. This can evolve into ceremony, gift-giving, song, prayer, always addressing River as a living being, always attentive to River’s response. We ask participants to compose accounts of their experiences and share these with an inquiry group of about six of their fellows; and periodically through the eight weeks of the workshops we work as a whole community of about twenty human persons to identify themes and shared questions. These cycles of inquiry are punctuated by seminar sessions at which the faculty offer perspectives on a view of the world as sentient – living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory – which may inform the inquiry process.
Personal encounters – towards a sentient world
About one hundred human and River persons have participated in this inquiry process over the past four years. Our encounters with Rivers drew forth a wide range of responses, both inner and outer.
For many co-inquirers the initial challenge was to get over the internal voices that questioned the whole activity – this even though they joined the inquiry sympathetic to its aims. We all needed to quieten our minds and hush our expectations sufficiently to give fuller attention to River. Many found themselves at first distracted and self-absorbed.
Once inner voices were somewhat quietened, it was still easy to drop into a traditional subject-object relationship, to look at the river as still ‘out there’.
However, with persistence, practice, and support from the human inquiry community, most were able to sustain a feeling of sentient presence, and then move into what one group called ‘getting in the zone’. This is the experience of a sentient, embodied world, and of one’s own animal body as part of it; usually accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and gratitude, maybe wonder and enchantment at the sheer beauty of it all.
Going deeper, there sometimes arose a curious juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary; and close to that a profound feeling that the ordinary is all extraordinary.
Some inquirers also developed a complex imaginative or psychic response, as if the world is somehow ‘speaking’ directly in words and images. In time, many participants found themselves ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’ or ‘lifting the veil’, with the illusion of separation slipping away.
Finally, there are on occasion active ontopoetic responses, ‘moments of grace’ when the world and its beings actively gesture back in response to invocation: animals and birds appear; there is a gust of wind or a shower of rain; leading to narratives of experience incontrovertibly linked to one’s invocation.
Offering to River Fowey. Photograph: David Peters
Many participants report experiences of a sentient and responsive world that are deeply felt, unassailably authentic. Such experiences have an authority of their own. They offer intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized. As an outcome, our metaphysical assumptions are radically re-arranged. It is evident that experiences of a sentient, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.
In Peter’s previous post for us, Bristol Climate Writers Presents … ‘Desert Island Books’ — a collaborative piece with fellow members of both ClimateCultures and BCW on fiction and non-fiction books they discussed at a public event — he talks about – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. He also contributed Lines Written While Reading Hunger Mountain to Day 4 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. And with his Songs for Earth, featured in our Creative Showcase, he asks: How does one sing in the face of the ecological crisis — the disruption of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being?”
A writer linking the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical and spiritual sources and participatory perspectives.
Visual artist James Aldridge shares his art and research on neuro/queering nature, helping us all to explore how valuing different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences can expand our ways of seeing and being with the natural world.
2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes
In Spring/Summer 2024 I carried out a residency with SPUD, a New Forest-based arts organisation. SPUD have been supporting residencies by artists who are exploring Queer Ecology in some way, for the last few years, funded through Arts Council England.
In my proposal I wrote:
“I believe that the sensory and systemising differences experienced by Autistic/ADHD people… can provide us with inspirational perspectives and awareness of ecological and social systems, which can be communicated to the wider community through art… I want to promote a valuing of different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences, deconstructing inherited ways of seeing and being with what we have come to call Nature, and developing new models built on dialogue and relationship.”
Titling the residency and the resulting installation Neuro/Queering Nature, I included a forward slash to allow Queer and Neuroqueer to sit together, drawing on both experiences/identities in my research, and in my work with LGBTQAI+ and autistic young people.
This work with SPUD forms part of my emerging Neuroqueer Ecologies research, which in turn grew out of the Queer River research project, set up in 2020, and about which I’ve written for ClimateCultures in the past.
Neuroqueer Ecologies is a term I coined and an area of research that I have continued to develop, starting with my own experience of places as a neuroqueer person, and drawing on the ways that I experience places and make sense of the resulting sensory information, using my arts practice to map and share my relationship with other beings. In this I draw on the writing of Nick Walker:
“I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. It was an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory; I was expanding the Queer Theory conceptualization of queering to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms…”
Neuroqueer: An Introduction – Nick Walker
Neuro/Queering nature to open up experiences of place
For the Neuro/Queering Nature residency, I wanted to take the trappings of Natural History study and layer them with neuroqueer experience, Neuroqueering the concept of Nature as something that we name, classify, collect, and experience as separate to ‘us’ (us being those humans viewing the world through a Eurocentric lens).
While at SPUD I walked with a river called Avon Water, including the bogs and mires that feed into it, and the marshes that it flows into as it reaches the coast. I drew and wrote with collected clays, recorded sound and video, and set up a camera trap for animals to record themselves.
“Unsurprisingly there are many different types of wetland in Britain. As with the apocryphal fifty words for snow, the lines of differentiation are considerably blurred. Marsh, bog, swamp, mire, fen, carr… The kind for which the New Forest is most famous are known as lowland acidic valley mires… Cranes Moor, Duck Hole and the wonderfully named Slap Bottom: there are hundreds.”
Goshawk Summer, James Aldred
Whilst following the passage of water through these wetlands, I also wrote, drew and applied collected materials onto natural history illustrations taken from books bought in charity shops, layering the ‘official’ images and descriptions with my own immediate response to water, heather, curlew, clay.
Working with the Together, Make Art group (the young people that I mentioned above), and artist Hannah Buckingham, I supported the young artists to explore their embodied experiences of the Forest, and their identities as human animals, through collage, mapping and wearable artwork.
Neuro/Queering Nature was about opening up space to facilitate and communicate different experiences of place, and of what we have come to call Nature, through playful and experimental processes. It definitely wasn’t about swapping one set of rules and classifications for another. I also wasn’t originally planning on working with another river, but water is such a good teacher when it comes to blurring boundaries and cutting across binaries. It refuses to be contained.
In between walking and making, I read a lot, and three books stand out as having informed my thinking and my experience of the New Forest:
Goshawk Summer by James Aldred – I was so inspired by James’s descriptions of time spent in the Forest, the exploration of language used to name its different parts, and the way he writes about the Forest as a place that is wild, protected and man-made all at the same time.
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Woelfle-Hazard – I kept returning to passages of this book that looked at rivers from both a queer and indigenous perspective, and from the perspective of beavers or salmon as well as humans.
Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Champion – a brilliant book which makes so much sense, essentially (this my take on it) looking at the development of the concept of normality, in relationship to human difference, and the impact of models of work and education that prioritise productivity and profit, over wellbeing and creativity.
One paragraph in particular from Robert Champion’s book has stayed with me:
“A radical politics of neurodivergent conservation is also consistent with a radical politics of environmental conservation. After all, it has been the same logics, the same system, that has ravaged the biodiversity of the planet as has sought to eliminate the neurological diversity of humanity…”
Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman
What insights is our society missing from ignoring the voices of autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people?
What if we extend our sense of what is normal and desirable to include sensory and processing differences that might provide us with an expanded awareness of our relationship with non-humans?
Focusing on ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being with the world, that fit within what is understood to be acceptable human behaviour, whilst affirming the human/nature binary, and increasing economic growth no matter what the cost to both human and ecological wellbeing, hasn’t done us any favours so far. In fact I’d say that the inability to directly perceive ourselves as interconnected with the rest of the world is what prevents us from seeing the damage that we are doing until it’s too late.
Holotropism — an experience of oneness
So what can someone like me offer? I’m poking my head up above the parapet a bit here. I’m not claiming that autistic people are the saviour of humanity, or aligning myself with the idea of neurodivergence as a superpower, just that we might bring a different awareness of the place of human bodies and actions within the wider web of life.
Autistic people are often described as being disordered (i.e., not normal). Our differences are medicalised, our abilities pathologised. My experience is that I build up a sense of the world and the relationship of its parts, through being extremely sensitive to sensory information, and by focusing on particular areas in depth. I don’t tend to trust inherited models of understanding the world, and prefer to construct my own from the bottom up. I am also very sensitive to other people’s emotions and intentions, contrary to many people’s preconceptions of what autism looks like.
This ability to focus intently on one subject or one element of experience is sometimes called ‘monotropism’. In addition, artist Hendl Helen Mirra offers up the term ‘holotropism’ to describe an experience of oneness. A sensitivity to everything around you that can be a bit of a nightmare (for me) in a crowded room or shopping centre, but can offer a sense of belonging and a dissolution of boundaries in a less human-dominated environment (e.g., the bogs and marshes mentioned earlier).
“Synthesising monotropic theory with deep ecology and holistic anatomy, we feel we have found a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain under the monotropism map. We are calling it holotropism. This perspective may elucidate the high co-occurrences of synaesthesia, mirror-touch, dyspraxia, and hypermobility among us autistic people.
“To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through both of these processes — less consciously in hyper focus, more consciously in coherence.”
Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain, Hendl Helen Mirra
More-than-human collaborations for neuro/queering nature
Since my time at SPUD I’ve moved on to new places and opportunities, including a residency with Groundwork Gallery, as one of almost 20 artists taking part in the Ground Up extraction-themed programme this Summer, and now exhibiting at the Ground Up exhibition in Kings Lynn, Norfolk.
In Norfolk I continued to focus on wetlands, this time looking at the impact of the extraction of animal bodies from wetland and marine environments (through whaling, the hunting of beavers for fur, meat and castoreum, and wetland birds for ‘sport’, feathers and taxidermy).
To make sense of the human impact on wetlands, and how we might collaborate with other animals to reverse some of the damage, I’m currently considering what Neuroqueer Ecologies can bring to inter-species collaboration, how it’s done and what might emerge out of it, in this time of climate breakdown. I’m taken by the term ‘collaborative survival’ used by Anna Tsing, and the potential within ‘passionate immersion’:
“Passionate immersion can take many forms. At its core it involves attentive interactions with diverse lifeways. Beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans…
“Artists have also become core participants in scholarly projects that question conventional approaches to speaking for Nature, exploring opportunities for immersion in the lives of others…”
Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness, Eben Kirksey
Through my Neuroqueer Ecologies research, and inspired by the work of other neuroqueer artists and researchers such as Kai Syng Tan, I’m starting to explore what happens when neurodivergence is decolonised and valued, and in turn impacts upon how we perceive and place ourselves within multi-species communities.
As Joris Lechêne writes in Decolonising Autism:
“The emergence of the conceptualisation of autism (and Aspergers) is ‘rooted in socially constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, disability and productivity, and those notions are connected to the colonial ideas of anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and capitalism’ (Lewis, 2021)…. Furthermore, Quijano (2007) specifies that decoloniality can be understood as the struggle for liberation from all forms of oppressive power that leads to inequality, discrimination, exploitation and domination.”
At the moment I’m exploring how human-beaver collaborations can enable humans to learn from the indigenous, pre-colonial knowledge of beavers, previously hunted to extinction and now being reintroduced to the UK, either unofficially through ‘beaver bombing’or within enclosures, waiting for the government go-ahead to set them free.
Whilst in Norfolk we visited Wild Ken Hill’s beaver enclosure, and I followed that up with a visit to the Norfolk Rivers Trust beaver site at the headwaters of the River Glaven. I’ve since tracked down my own local Wiltshire beavers, living wild in and around the Bristol Avon, and have been looking at the intersection of human and beaver infrastructure, as beavers re-make places through dam and canal building and the incorporation of man-made structures and materials.
Dams and lodges in Norfolk included a brick and a Muntjac deer skull, and incorporated the ruins of a WW2 sewage treatment facility, whilst those in Wiltshire included a wooden pallet and a warning sign from a nearby construction site. Beavers don’t recognise the perceptual barriers and boundaries that humans often use to divide, order and classify, and as a neuroqueer maker, I feel a real kinship with, and a desire to learn from them.
My work in the Ground Up exhibition represents the beginning of this relationship with beavers. Titled ‘The Beaver and the Whale’, it documents my research into some of North Norfolk’s rivers, and their connection to animal extraction/local extinction and reintroduction.
It’s not the first time I’ve sought to collaborate with non-humans, and considered the threshold at which such work might appropriately be called collaboration. My photographic series ‘The Ash Looks Back’ for example, informed by research into Ash Die Back Disease, considered the tree’s perspective by strapping camera traps onto ash trees and allowing their community of life to document themselves.
Similarly, my installation at SPUD brought together photographs of animal footprints and camera trap footage of deer, ponies and foxes, with birdsong and river clays, to give a voice to the network of human and non-human inhabitants that makes up the Forest.
“Thinking with beavers and rivers and mountains and salmon, out in the watershed commons, I have sketched a way to transfigure what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘capitalist ruins’ into substrates for new models of life. Practices of world-making with beavers and salmon unveil the multi species commons that is always-already there, in the land, ready for human acknowledgement and recognition.”
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, Cleo Woelfle Hazard
Find more
This short video shows James’s Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition from his SPUD residency in the New Forest:
And you can explore more at Queer River, James’s practice-led research project, and his website. His previous ClimateCultures posts include A Queer Path to Wellbeing, and he also reviewed for usCreative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book co-authored by fellow member Iain Biggs.
James is showing work as part of the ‘Ground Up’ exhibition until 14th December at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn, England. ‘Ground Up’ is the first of two exhibitions formed out of works of art made in response to a GroundWork residency with the underlying theme of Extraction. A second exhibition, ‘Ground Water’, will run from July to September 2025.
In this January 2024 post for The British Psychological Society, Decolonising Autism, Joris Lechêne offers advice for research and practice drawing on his experience as a trainer in anti-racism, bias, and decoloniality who has lived experience of autism and ADHD.
Nick Walker’s post (2015, updated 2021) Neuroqueer: an introduction describes how the concept of neuroqueering came to inform her thinking, embodiment, and approach to life.
Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness is a 2016 research paper by Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey & Ursula Münster (Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23) that explores “the cultivation of ‘arts of attentiveness’: modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.”
You can explore the work of SPUD, the arts and education charity where James undertook his New Forest Neuro/Queering Nature residency and which creates opportunities for people to engage with art, architecture, design and the environment; also, the Norfolk Rivers Trust’s The Beaver Project.
You can find more on Kai Syng Tan, the artist and researcher James mentions has inspired his exploration of decolonising of neurodivergence, at her website.
A visual artist working with people and places, whose individual and participatory practices generate practice-led research into the value of artful, embodied and place-based learning ...
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.
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. 
