Learning from Rivers

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 the authors not cities in Knoll, Lübken, and that rivers a influence on the of of and urban and the relationship between cities and what they call facilitated by river modification, of importance not for the but for the three volumes that both and reconceptualization are we are to current river This means not only that and of the of the world’s rivers boundaries so that knowledge and methods are and ideological assumptions are but also that various of knowledge are to envision the way forward. an for both and of river us to river in light of water Roy’s novel The God of Small Things a family in with the Meenachal and provides powerful imagery of the of river and history. The river is across the as both the of an environmental network of natural imagery and the that changes the life of the with agency itself. as a of Roy’s work the on of and the an important of the landscape and of Roy’s own in in the novel as a between the family and the and the river to have the the river brings in “the and The river is thus both and much like a in a network of But it is also when to as an the river and with World She that a has the river with and it the power to change But its were its ecological change in the river helps the between and change, in the In the when is a the is almost from the river while in the even when the flow has from that the a A In this the river’s movement is the for a of in the of both social in the and in the also the river as a with people not She to be like little and . . . her own But in she is other the the river as and and at once to its as and of and the Meenachal as and also an that almost the with the of and and that one is to for the it is in no up from the of the the a A its A river the life. A a for in its little The river has no in this yet this in the novel in especially the of and the of the of Small But the Meenachal as and at once can thus be as Small but rather as a between them, both and in the and historical of the environment. In other the river can be to be and possibility at a space of that can both and the narrative a rethinking rivers in terms of their as well as their connections to oceanic and to material and cultural history, allows for of literary river We can Roy’s representation of the Meenachal as a nature to culture, to yet river requires specific of political, and ecological for the its restoration to be but there are to river knowledge that can human more especially in the face of industrial transformations of environmental that humanity to the Instead, culture and cultural history, as well as and approaches to rivers, are of a environmental network that and is determined by river These are The way we our has to with how it has been therefore to of both anthropogenic and that affect the flow of rivers on the earth is to that water can challenge our of the and even the of the human itself. The in this review that the way forward is a conceptual issue, and river imagery can help us that like rivers, are and exist on both and We are always connected with the and elements of the nonhuman environment

Anthropocene · Environmental ethics · Geography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Flood Risk Assessment and Management · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Transboundary Water Resource Management

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