Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Learning from Rivers

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00138282-7309755

2573-3575

Allison Nowak Shelton,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

In the humanities, critics are reconceptualizing human history and culture in light of issues around hydrology, including climate change, water scarcity, water restoration, water resource infrastructure, and water rights. The "oceanic turn," of which this issue is part, is aimed at rethinking large bodies of water like oceans that traverse national and cultural boundaries as containing vast, submerged knowledge and history. Rather than bounded physically or historically, oceans are being acknowledged as crosshatched and networked, layered with human-nonhuman, material-discursive connections that challenge our notions of time, space, culture, history, and humanity at large. But what of rivers—those deceptively linear, bounded bodies that feed into the oceans and continually foil our efforts to control them? Rivers connect glacial melt and other headwaters to the seas, carrying nutrients, sediment, and animal life, and as such they bridge deep geological time and historical surface time. This relationship suggests connections between quantitative scientific study and qualitative, affective experience of the material environment. Fittingly, the great rivers of the earth often serve mythological and narratological functions, animating cultural histories not only as life givers but also as metaphors for our own human lifelines. Currently, rivers are at the heart of overlapping physical, political, and cultural aspects of water-rights discourses, bearing the brunt of overcrowding, pollution, industry, and climate change, and are therefore at the frontlines of concerns about the Anthropocene.The geoscientist Ellen Wohl's book A World of Rivers posits river degradation as a comparative field that informs and theorizes planetary anthropogenic engagement without overlooking site-specific struggles. She does not mention the Anthropocene per se but rather considers both ecological processes and cultural conceptualizations of rivers as vital to the future of water management, as well as hydro-criticism more broadly. The edited volumes Rivers of the Anthropocene and Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained put this conversation to work by examining relations between rivers and human settlement through the lens of history and globalization, which in turn provides a nexus for hydrologic issues. All three volumes under review regard river management as historically entangled with the narratives humans have told and continue to tell about rivers, and as such they encourage a combination of intersecting global and local approaches as key to the future of river ecosystems and, by extension, the future of the planet. A call to action emerges to transform the anthropocentrism that imagines humans as the primary beneficiaries of river resources in order to tease out interconnections between river management policies, social justice, and environmental degradation. Like other aspects of the environment, cultural and regional perspectives on rivers vacillate according to specific circumstances, creating competing demands that help define a river's meaning and value. An environmental policy enactment, a family engaged in their morning washing, a ceremonial ritual: these all exist as consequences of various material and discursive histories, and all contribute to changing a river's ecosystem. These are issues of imagination and perception as much as of ecology and management, which is suggestive of how literary studies may illuminate the power and potential of narrative river imaginaries. I briefly consider Arundhati Roy's representation of the Meenachal in her 1997 novel The God of Small Things at the end of this review essay.Rivers have always been a conceptual issue. The early cradles of civilization were all located along large river valleys, and as such rivers have occupied important symbolic positions from the earliest accounts of cultural and literary history. In particular, the combined importance of river resources to settled societies with the constant, imminent threat of catastrophic flooding and/or drought has facilitated powerful contradictory imagery of rivers as both origin and destruction of human life. This dichotomy is amplified today, as most of the world's largest rivers have been polluted and/or drained to the point of catastrophe. Our reliance on rivers for the survival of settled society is massive; therefore the potential impact of their degradation is equally massive. The Ganges, for example, provides water for 500 million people across eight states in India as well as for sizable populations of Bangladesh, Nepal, and China, and it is one of the most polluted and ecologically stripped rivers in the world. The story is similar for rivers across the globe: Amazon, Nile, Danube, Mississippi, Congo, and so on. Hence river management is of the highest importance for river conservation and restoration and the future of water security, public health, and a host of other issues. But there is no clear way forward for river management, partly because geologically and geographically specific issues clash with political, socioeconomic, and cultural boundaries and notions of river functionality and meaning. However, there is no question that something needs to change, especially in terms of our methods of modification that disregard the importance of dynamism for river ecosystems.In her introduction to A World of Rivers Wohl highlights this clash between the dynamic nature of rivers and the human need to control them: "People too often view constantly changing rivers as inconveniences. We try to stabilize them by confining them in single straight channels. . . . This confinement diminishes complexity and diversity of habitat that nourish abundant and varied species of plants and animals" (1). Wohl's book is an accessible foray into both the ecological processes of large rivers and their history with modification by humans. She is not an environmental historian and admits that she does not delve into the social and cultural histories of the riverine areas she surveys. Instead, she focuses only on the specific human modifications of rivers and the extreme diversity and dynamism that modification impedes. But rivers are not passive victims of the Anthropocene for Wohl. Rather, they are entangled with humans, as they are with so many biological communities: "Relative to the percentage of the landscape they occupy, river corridors host a disproportionately large number of plant and animal species. Rivers almost entirely dominate the transport of sediment to the oceans . . . [and] [b]iochemical processes along rivers and adjacent wetlands govern the amount of nitrogen, carbon, and other nutrients reaching coastal areas and thus strongly influence coastal and oceanic productivity" (4). As such, Wohl demonstrates that rivers are equally important to the planet's health as to settled society.Rather than individual units, Wohl encourages us to think of rivers as actually making up one "round river," a concept drawn from Aldo Leopold, that emphasizes the global connections between seemingly separate ecosystems and the cycling of nutrients and energy. She does take each of the ten rivers in turn, assessing three that are, so far, less affected, the Amazon, Congo, and Mackenzie; two "undergoing rapid change," the Ganges and Chang Jiang; and five that are "heavily altered," the Ob-Irtysh, Nile, Danube, Mississippi, and Murray-Darling (2). But to emphasize the global connections between these river systems, Wohl also follows a hypothetical water droplet as it travels from one river to another through the water cycle, finding its way into oceans, evaporating and entering the atmosphere, at times becoming precipitation and even runoff. This travelogue-style journey takes place in the interludes between chapters. Far from a gimmick, the ongoing narrative is highly educational, not only explaining how the rivers are connected over time and space, and how an event in one river can affect another even a continent away, but also explaining each ecosystemic possibility along the way. For example, in the first interlude Wohl's water droplet falls into the upper basin of the Amazon, then journeys for nearly four months down the river before joining the Atlantic Ocean. She first stops to explain the distinctive isotropic signature that allows scientists to track the Amazon's water movement, then briefly explores the "infinite possibilities" for the water droplet once it has moved northward, including being recycled through reef communities, ingested by a parrotfish, "expelled" and "taken up by" plankton, and so forth (39). But in the end, our hydrologic hero is evaporated and makes its way through several atmospheric convection cells before joining a polar-front jet stream above Europe. Unfortunately, while in the jet stream it picks up a variety of toxic materials released from European cities and carries them over Siberia, where they all enter the Ob-Irtysh together as snowmelt.This imaginative rendering of the cyclical nature of rivers, as well as the other ecosystemic processes related to and determined by rivers, helps us envision a truly relational, planetary fluvial environment, one inclusive of both human and nonhuman elements and one that, although fragmented, cannot be distilled down to those fragments in isolation. The water droplet may be hypothetical, but the "round river" is not, especially when paired with Wohl's geological analyses of the internal relationality of each of the ten rivers she considers. For example, in her chapter on the often-overlooked Mackenzie, which runs through Canada's Northwest Territories, she explains, "As it flows north to the Arctic Ocean, the Mackenzie collects sediment from western headwaters in the Rockies and water from countless ponds and lakes scattered across the plains in one of the world's largest wetland complexes" (297). In every chapter Wohl highlights the vast variety of elements created, moved, and changed within the scope of any given river by telling the "story" of the river: all the elements are characters, as is the river itself. In fact, though Wohl does not focus on human stories, the book helps retheorize the storytelling nature of our understanding of rivers and our alterations of them, in the vein of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann in their edited volume Material Ecocriticism. It is through all the "material forms emerging in combination with forces, agencies, other matter," Iovino and Oppermann explain, "that 'the world we inhabit,' with all its stories, is 'alive.'"1 Indeed, the network of languages, cultures, and traditions that have contributed to modifying rivers, suggests Wohl, are no more or less important than the network of tributaries, sediment, animal life, chemical processes, and movement of rivers. All must be taken into consideration when one assesses a river.In this way, A World of Rivers decenters the human while still acknowledging the human capacity to induce systemic change and put these rivers at risk. Large rivers flow through and alongside so many populations; they are transregional and transcultural, providing distinct ecosystems but with blurry boundaries. In deference to this fact, Wohl is vague on assigning agency for the rivers' modifications, though she walks her readers through the effects of levees, dams, industrial pollution, and other human endeavors.2 It is here that two recent interdisciplinary edited volumes in the social sciences nicely complement Wohl's geoscientific survey. It is, after all, important to face how policies, cultural encounters, population rise, and industrial escalations have accelerated the rise of river modification and produced a previously unparalleled scale of degradation, especially in terms of water-rights discourse. Rivers of the Anthropocene, edited by Jason M. Kelly et al., and Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained, edited by Martin Knoll, Uwe Lübken, and Dieter Schott, tackle these social entanglements more directly. Rivers of the Anthropocene is primarily interested in the coconstituency of human history and rivers. As Kelly explains in his introduction, humans have been modifying rivers as long as we have been relying on them. The volume takes this anthropogenic constant as its starting point, grappling with the idea that when it comes to rivers, there is no clear "return" to a preanthropogenic, "natural" condition for which it would be prudent to strive. "After more than a century of research on rivers and their physical and biotic makeup, we still lack robust baselines as to how these freshwater ecosystems function," admit Andy Large, David Gilvear, and Eleanor Starkey (24). "This paucity of reference points," they continue, "hinders widespread understanding of what ecosystem services are delivered by rivers either as natural systems with humans disturbing them or as human systems with remnants of natural aquatic ecosystems embedded in them" (24).This cyclical entanglement means that continued river modification is inevitable, but it is difficult to know the way forward. The volume explores narratological trends that create and define hydrologic goals and ethics, as well as ideological assumptions behind various quantitative analyses and policies. This is important work, as river governance alters livelihoods and tends to divide people, sometimes literally, determining access and appropriate use of water3 as well as the methods of river modification, which often displace and/or put at risk large populations of disenfranchised communities. A number of contributors bring up the problematic lens of the Anthropocene itself that frames the degradation and/or regeneration of waterways as a species issue, ignoring uneven and unequal contributions by and risks to various societies. Says Sina Marx: Current disaster research points out that marginal groups are more vulnerable to disruptions. . . . Any means taken to mitigate possible impacts of climate change and resultant extreme events have to effectively include those most vulnerable groups. Otherwise, existing inequalities within our "species" are likely to increase to the detriment of those who have contributed little to the sociogenic changes that the Anthropocene brings about. (53)Overall, the volume maintains that determining responsibilities to water sources and water issues requires studying what Richard Scarpino calls the "historical interplay between people and rivers," sizing up both historical approaches to rivers and their unintended consequences (113).Here we return to the problem of conceptualization; rivers must be reconceptualized to challenge current aggressive and harmful methods of modification in terms of both environmental degradation and environmental justice. Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained is a collection of case studies in chapter form that offer this kind of reconceptualization in action. The analyses, which span the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, show that the demands of development and urbanization have forced rivers to evolve in creative ways, yet those river transformations have then renewed the cultures and identities of the cities through which they run. Leaving aside the question of the Anthropocene, the authors simply make a case for city-river relations as being integral to the question of human-river relations. Relation is the operative word here, since, as I have mentioned, there is no going "back" for most of these rivers, yet the way forward is beset with clashing perspectives and interests. Fittingly, the volume is deliberately disjointed; the chapters jump around in both time and space in their level of specificity, using the interlinking of culture and ecology as their only overarching theme. In the words of Knoll, Lübken, and Schott, the case studies tease out "the entanglements between the peculiar rhythm of a river (as expressed by the irregular sequence of droughts and flooding, for example), the unique spaces and places that rivers create (by morphological changes, sedimentation, and erosion), and the multitudinous human interventions into these natural dynamics" (7). Though the subject is urban development, the authors do not overprivilege cities in isolation; Knoll, Lübken, and Schott assert that rivers exude a "fundamental influence on the spatial distribution of different types of agricultural and forestal production near urban centers," and the relationship between cities and what they call "their respective hinterlands," facilitated by river modification, "is of utmost importance not just for the city but for the hinterland itself" (5).The three volumes reviewed suggest that both interdisciplinarity and reconceptualization are necessary if we are to solve current river crises. This means not only that examination and analysis of the state of the world's rivers should cross academic boundaries so that knowledge and methods are shared and ideological assumptions are challenged, but also that various kinds of knowledge are necessary to envision the way forward. Literature offers an avenue for both broadening and deepening analysis of river imaginaries, allowing us to theorize river symbologies in light of pressing water conditions. Roy's novel The God of Small Things parallels a family in decline with the shrinking Meenachal and provides powerful imagery of the interconnectivity of river ecology, politics, and history. The river is depicted across the novel's multiple timelines as both context—in the sense of embodying an environmental network of natural imagery and the ways that environment changes during the life of the principal character, Rahel—and character with agency itself. Perhaps as a foreshadowing of Roy's activist work against the Sardar Sarovar Dam project on behalf of lower-caste and tribal Narmada River residents, the Meenachal, an important feature of the Ayemenem landscape and of Roy's own childhood home in Kerala, acts in the novel as a border between the upper-caste Ammu's Syrian Christian family and the untouchable Paravan Velutha Pappen's family. When Ammu and Velutha begin crossing the river to have sex, breaking the region's age-old Love Laws, the river brings together, in Divya Anand's words, "the touchable and untouchable worlds."4 The river is thus both boundary and connector, much like a pivotal node in a network of interactions. But it is also notably polluted; when Rahel returns to Ayemenem as an adult, the river smells "of shit, and pesticides bought with World Bank loans." She observes that a barrage (dam) built downstream has "choked" the river with oversalination and weeds. "Once it had the power to evoke fear. To change lives. But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent."5This ecological change in the river helps enact the novel's tension between stability and change, poignantly reflected in the family's Ayemenem house. In the earlier timeline, when Rahel is a child, the house is almost indistinguishable from the river landscape, while in the later timeline, even when the dwindling flow has withdrawn from view, Rahel notes that the house "still had a river-sense. A rushing, rolling, fishswimming sense."6 In this case, the river's movement is the setting for a loss of innocence, in the sense of both social transgression in the past and familial decline in the present. Yet Velutha's brother Kuttappen also describes the river as a woman with whom people should not trifle. She pretends to be harmless, he says, like "a little old churchgoing amooma, quiet and clean. . . . Minding her own business." But in reality, he reveals, she is wild, potentially destructive. "And minds other people's business," adds the younger Rahel.7 Thus the river as boundary and connector, limit and crossing, at once relates to its simultaneity as setting and character, images of spatiality and temporality, respectively.Reorienting the Meenachal as context and character also reacknowledges Sophie Mol's death, an incident that happens almost concurrently (despite the narrative's confusing chronology) with the outing of Velutha and Ammu and that prompts Velutha's brutal arrest. No one is really to blame for the Anglo-Indian girl's death; it is described in hauntingly peaceful terms: "There was no storm-music. No whirlpool spun up from the inky depths of the Meenachal. No shark supervised the tragedy. Just a quiet handing-over ceremony. A boat spilling its cargo. A river accepting the offering. One small life. A brief sunbeam. With a silver thimble clenched for luck in its little fist."8 The river has no real agenda in this description, yet this "offering" sets everything else in the novel in motion, especially the loss of innocence and the fatal beating of Velutha, the titular "God of Small Things." But the Meenachal as setting and character at once can thus be read as neither Big Thing nor Small Thing but rather as a conduit between them, both witness and actant in the ecological, social, and historical overlaps of the Ayemenem environment. In other words, the river can be seen to be boundary and possibility at once, a space of human-nonhuman connection that can both welcome and destroy, enabling the novel's nonlinear narrative movement.As a methodology, rethinking rivers in terms of their relational ecology, as well as their connections to oceanic discourse and to material and cultural history, allows for new readings of literary river imagery. We can rethink Roy's representation of the Meenachal as a conduit linking nature to culture, big picture to small, yet occupying both. Every river requires specific analysis of historical, cultural, political, and ecological specificities for the steps toward its restoration to be laid bare, but there are ways to resituate river knowledge that can decentralize human values more broadly, especially in the face of large-scale, industrial transformations of environmental landscapes that overprivilege humanity to the extreme. Instead, culture and cultural history, as well as political and economic approaches to rivers, are threads of a complex environmental network that determines and is determined by river ecology. These are ethical concerns. The way we approach our environment has everything to do with how it has been culturally conceived; therefore to balance considerations of both anthropogenic and nonanthropogenic shifts that affect the flow of rivers on the earth is to acknowledge that water can challenge our definitions of the world, and even the category of the human itself. The literature assessed in this review illustrates that the way forward is a conceptual issue, and river imagery can help us acknowledge that we, like rivers, are relational and exist on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. We are always already connected with the big and small elements of the nonhuman environment.