{"id":13809,"date":"2026-08-12T00:39:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T22:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/?post_type=waterworlding&p=13809"},"modified":"2026-08-24T03:33:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:33:57","slug":"a-thesis-on-water","status":"publish","type":"waterworlding","link":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/waterworlding\/a-thesis-on-water\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thesis on Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

Abstract<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

If we are to rethink life, then water is the place to begin. \/ Wenn wir das Leben neu \u00fcberdenken wollen, dann w\u00e4re Wasser die Substanz, mit der wir anfangen sollten.<\/p>\n

\n

I\u00a0am\u00a0writing\u00a0this at\u00a0a\u00a0moment\u00a0that\u00a0many identify\u00a0as\u00a0a tipping point,\u00a0with\u00a0incremental crises compounding\u00a0and potentiating\u00a0each other to such a degree that the consequences become systemic and unstoppable. This is not only the case ecologically, but\u00a0also\u00a0socially.\u00a0The world is\u00a0already seeing the cascading effects of the geopolitical\u00a0shifts\u00a0triggered by\u00a0the war in Iran.\u00a0As\u00a0<\/span>Watts<\/span><\/a> puts it, the global balance of power is shifting away from a declining petrostate in the West to a rising electrostate in the East; as the world moves \u201c<\/span>from molecules to electrons<\/span><\/a>\u201d,\u00a0these\u00a0shifts\u00a0are\u00a0rewriting\u00a0not only the foundations of politics but\u00a0also\u00a0the\u00a0very\u00a0nature of human power.\u00a0Things might get nasty, Watts says. Much depends on the willingness of\u00a0the proponents of\u00a0<\/span>end-times fascism<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to use\u00a0their\u00a0deranged powers to crush the tidal wave toward clean energy autonomy.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is only one of the many\u00a0tectonic\u00a0shifts\u00a0that characterize\u00a0our contemporary\u00a0polycrisis.\u00a0The United Nations recently published a report arguing that the world has moved\u00a0beyond a water crisis and into a state of\u00a0\u201c<\/span>global water bankruptcy<\/span><\/a>\u201c (United Nations 2026). The choice of language is crucial here because the term crisis denotes a temporal structure peaking in ways that allow for resolution or even recovery. The term bankruptcy indicates a state of no return, with \u201cbankrupt or near-bankrupt systems\u201d having irreversibly altered the planet through \u201cinsolvency\u201d (ibid.) meaning that water is being withdrawn and polluted <\/span>beyond renewable inflows<\/span>\u00a0and safe depletion limits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The point of this piece, however, is not to compound an already existing sense of dread. My thesis is instead that water might very well be the substance and protagonist to lead the way at this point of no return, and that it may open up portals through which worlds can be remade. I make this point below by discussing the ways in which water invites us to dwell on questions of space, time, use, and possession.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Much is occurring already in the name of the protection of water, all too often via a peculiar form of financialized valuation that has accelerated since the 2008 global financial crisis. Here, all sorts of things (knowledge, housing, personal data, infrastructure, forests, water, whales) can be turned into assets in the name of \u201csustainability\u201d \u2013 investible objects and bankable resources whose value is derived not from immediate commodity values and one-time sales but from the asset\u2019s capacity to generate a stable horizon of future income streams. Anything transformed into an asset can be owned, traded and capitalized with the goal of generating endless returns, also called rent, often for decades to come. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Adrienne Buller analyzes this process beautifully\u00a0in her description of\u00a0the\u00a0International Monetary Fund (IMF)\u00a0attempting\u00a0to define the value of a whale.\u00a0<\/span>The IMF eventually\u00a0\u201csettled on an even $2 million per specimen (great whales only), summing to an impressive $1 trillion for the existing global \u2018stock\u2019.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>They based their calculation on whales\u2019 contributions to eco-tourism revenue (ironically detrimental to whale populations themselves) and their robust capacity for carbon sequestration: over their lifetimes, on average,\u00a0great whales capture the\u00a0equivalent of 33\u00a0tonnes\u00a0of carbon dioxide \u2013 more per pound than a tree.\u00a0Recognising\u00a0the potential for this stock, if allowed to return to its pre-whaling population, to sequester 1.7 billion\u00a0tonnes\u00a0of CO2 per year, the IMF researchers earnestly suggested investment in whale conservation over other carbon capturing methods. They estimated the cost of such conservation at a modest $13 per person on Earth. $13 \u2013\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0the value of a whale, as it turns out, to you or me\u201d (Buller 2022,\u00a01).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This appraisal of life through the register of investments in stocks is harnessed with green growth capitalism in mind \u2013 an economy that is said to offer endless new opportunities for accumulation in the face of the rapid deterioration of the natural world (ibid., 232). In fact, we know that after a certain point, growth only benefits the super-rich (in the past forty years, almost 30% of all new income from global GDP has gone to the top 1% (Hickel 2021, 33-34)). It also cannot be decoupled from environmental destruction. Since 2000, the total growth of material use (that is to say, the global consumption of raw materials) has <\/span>outpaced\u00a0GDP\u00a0growth (ibid.,\u00a096); a cannibalization of the living world (Fraser 2022)\u00a0that hinges on\u00a0growth for growth’s sake with no endpoint in mind.\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>We have come to<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>see the world from the perspective of capital,\u201d writes\u00a0Jason\u00a0Hickel,\u00a0\u201crather than from the<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>perspective of life. Indeed, there is\u00a0a bitter irony\u00a0to the fact that we have<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>been persuaded to use the word \u2018growth\u2019 to describe what has now become<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>primarily a process of breakdown\u201d\u00a0(2020:\u00a099).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My thesis is that if\u00a0we are to rethink\u00a0life, then\u00a0water is a place to\u00a0begin.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

The image evokes the biblical story in John 7:37 where Jesus says to a crowd “ Anyone who is thirsty may come to me. Anyone who believes in me may come and drink. For the Scriptures declare, \u2018Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.\u2019\u201d Picture of a poster taken by author in 2013 in Bologna, Italy. Artist unknown.<\/p><\/div>\n

Water has long posed profound challenges to capitalist incursions into life. Of all the classical Greek elements, water emerges as the element of all elements; the most foundational, abundant, and irreducible of them all. It is water that is so often equated with life and water that is central to all of life\u00b4s relations. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson put it, water allows us to map life and global connection; it \u201cholds a theory of living, organizing, and making worlds beyond the ones we\u00b4ve inherited from colonialism and racial capitalism.\u201d (2025) <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because water is everywhere, even in its absence (as in the case of drought), it is always in a \u201cforce-filled and ongoing choreography\u201d not only with other elemental worlds, but also with politics and the law (Ballestero 2019; Bj\u00f6rkmann 2015; Estes 2024; Hines 2021; Muehlebach 2023; Vel\u00e1squez 2025). Writing at the early stages of the British Empire, even William Blackstone, the jurist who laid the foundations of English common law and defined private property as the \u201csole and despotic dominion\u201d of individuals, wrote that water ought to be held in common because it was \u201ca moving, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue to be common by the law of nature so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/b>property therein.\u201d (Blackstone 2016) As an unruly substance that constantly circulates through rock, soil, air, and flesh, water troubles the fiction of bodily sovereignty, possessive ownership, and technical mastery (Cattelino 2015; Helmreich 2010; Neimadis 2019; Strang 2022). With qualities that are difficult to measure and temporalities that exceed human comprehension, there is perhaps no other substance that is as out of sync with the legal, political, economic, and material infrastructures humans have built in their attempt to master it. As a limit figure<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/b>situated uneasily alongside both markets and liberal law, it often escapes from or\u00a0resides\u00a0like a fugitive\u00a0at the edges of enclosure\u00a0(Kockelman\u00a02016).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Water has long been a charismatic protagonist in political insurgencies all over the world. There\u00a0is\u00a0no beginning and no end to these insurgencies since they erupt reliably when water is at stake. Take the beautiful case of the Klamath River, which flows over 250 miles from Southern Oregon to the coast of Northern California and that was choked for over a century with hydroelectric dams. For many years, indigenous peoples living along the Klamath fought to free the river of the dams that kept the salmon from migrating to their ancestral spawning grounds. Today, in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, the entire Klamath watershed of 420 miles of historic salmon habitat has been fully connected. \u201cIt was like witnessing a miracle,\u201d said Yurok lawyer Amy Bowers\u00a0Cordalis, \u201cwatching the moment that the water reconnected for the first time in over a hundred years.\u201d \u201cThe river is now free,\u201d as Frankie Myers, the vice-chairman for the Yurok Tribe, put it. The\u00a0<\/span>California Department of Fish and Wildlife<\/span><\/a>\u00a0reported a year after the dams were removed that \u201cthe speed at which salmon are repopulating every nook and cranny of suitable habitat upstream \u2026 is both remarkable and thrilling.\u201d The pathway of the river had been stitched back together. The \u201cwater remembered\u201d (Bowers\u00a0Cordalis\u00a02025).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or take the insurgencies that tend to erupt when water is privatized and when the question of water as a human right, commons, or sacred life force is undermined by radical price hikes, shut offs, or prepaid metering. In such cases, water often emerges as a life-giving substance that people insist should be \u201cfree\u201d. For example, massive social mobilizations in Ireland between 2015 and 2016 saw thousands of people barricading the entrances to their working-class estates and be surrounded by police as they shouted, \u201cFrom the river to the sea, Irish water will be free!\u201d When the Irish, like some of my Italian interlocutors who used similar language, insisted that water should run free, they were not naively insisting on nonpayment. What they meant was that water \u2013 what people often call \u201cour water\u201d \u2013 was a common good that should never be enclosed by private corporations. As a human right, water was to be kept accessible and affordable through a system of cross-subsidization and funded by general taxation. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These calls for water to run free were always accompanied by the call that \u201cwater is life,\u201d itself a phrase that circulates globally today but looks back on a specific history. Many of my interlocutors in Europe pointed to Cochabamba, Bolivia, as the foundational moment for their water movements. This was a moment when this conceptual register and its evocative power first came to their attention. The year was 1999, when an international consortium of US, British, and Italian multinationals signed a forty-year concession with the Bolivian government that guaranteed investors a 15 percent annual rate of return. The result was impossible water price hikes that led to the founding of the <\/span>Coordinadora\u00a0de\u00a0defensa\u00a0del\u00a0agua\u00a0y la\u00a0vida<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(Committee for the\u00a0Defence\u00a0of Water and Life), a mass coalition of unions,\u00a0indigenous and\u00a0peasant organizations, ecologist movements, and students that\u00a0enchanted\u00a0the political imagination around the world with its protests for\u00a0water as\u00a0life. By April of that same year, the\u00a0Coordinadora\u00a0had kicked the consortium out of the country (Olivera and Lewis 2004; Bakker 2010; Hines 2021), inspiring tens of thousands as its message cascaded outwards.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There were other insurgencies, too. The Irish, Italian, and German eruptions around water as life occurred between 2000 and 2016 (Muehlebach 2023) and were anticipated over a decade earlier by protests around prepaid water and electricity meters and other political struggles in places such as South Africa and India (von Schnitzler 2013; Bj\u00f6rkman 2015). But it was the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017 that became perhaps the most unforgettable forcefield around the call for \u201cwater is life\u201d or \u201cMni Wiconi\u201d in the Lakota language. Here, the people of Standing Rock Reservation tried to stop the construction of a 1,712-mile oil pipeline (the Dakota Access Pipeline or DAPL) that cut across four states\u2014North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois \u2013 and crossed under Mni Sose (the Missouri River) immediately upstream from Standing Rock, threatening the reservation\u2019s water supply and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe\u00b4s sacred lands and cultural resources (Estes 2019, 12). Faced by lines of armed police with attack dogs, tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and sonic weaponry, thousands of Native Americans and their allies congregated in their Sacred Stone Camp to block the building of the pipeline. As Nick Estes writes, the Lakota and Dakota water protectors were simply being good relatives to the river and honored their relation to it. <\/span>After all, if a river cannot be owned,\u00a0\u201chow can she be sold or alienated like a piece of property\u201d\u00a0(ibid.,\u00a021)?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or take\u00a0the\u00a0most\u00a0recent\u00a0protests against\u00a0data centers\u00a0in the US, which the New York Times described\u00a0as \u201c<\/span>the most bipartisan issue since\u00a0beer<\/span><\/a>\u201d.\u00a0With\u00a0data centers being built everywhere to power the AI\u00a0boom,\u00a0unusual coalitions have\u00a0emerged\u00a0across the country among people\u00a0who would normally not affiliate\u00a0\u2013 Left, Right, Republican, Democrat. At the time of writing,\u00a0at least 48 data center projects\u00a0<\/span>representing $156 billion in investment were blocked or stalled by local opposition in 2025 alone. As <\/span>Fortune Magazine<\/span><\/a> reports, more than twenty additional projects were killed in the first quarter of 2026. People have many reasons to block the centers, ranging from higher electricity prices and decreased home values to noise, fear of AI, strained infrastructure, and tax breaks that shift the cost of all of the above onto local residents. But it is water that is once again a central protagonist here. Signs held up during data center protests include \u201cWater for the People, not Billionaires,\u201d \u201cWater for Crops, not AI Slop,\u201d \u201cSave our Water, Save our Future,\u201d and, again, \u201cWater is Life.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of the insurgencies I mentioned above did not end in what we would call clear-cut \u201cvictories\u201d.\u00a0Outcomes\u00a0were\u00a0ambiguous,\u00a0and struggles\u00a0dragged\u00a0on\u00a0despite the exhaustion of the people involved. The recently freed Klamath River is warming\u00a0due to\u00a0climate change, leaving the salmon vulnerable to parasite infections.\u00a0In\u00a0<\/span>Bolivia<\/span><\/a>, people continue to struggle over water, with water rationing a possibility\u00a0by\u00a02030.\u00a0The poor all over the world continue to struggle for access to water as\u00a0a basic necessity, and the future of AI\u00a0centers remains to be\u00a0seen. Still, water\u00a0continues to appear\u00a0repeatedly\u00a0as the charismatic center of insurgent life.\u00a0It\u00a0teaches us\u00a0much\u00a0about\u00a0how\u00a0the world\u00a0could\u00a0be remade.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are\u00a0four axes of this\u00a0possible remaking: space, time, possession, and use.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The watersheds we grow up in infuse our bodies and leave traces forever. Scientists have determined that humans and the watershed they were born into can be identified thousands of years after their death. Archeologists of the Roman Empire, for example, determine where people were born and raised by analyzing the remains of the carbon isotopes in tooth enamel because human teeth absorb isotopic geological and geographic traces during early childhood and store this information without significant changes throughout life. There is thus a kinship not only between individual bodies and the water they were raised with, but between all other related water bodies as well. Our bodies, in short, are forever marked by the waters we drink \u2013 a \u201cchemical kinship\u201d that is sometimes far from benign (Agard-Jones 2013, Neimanis 2017).<\/p>\n

This profound intimacy of our bodies with the\u00a0water\u00a0bodies that feed us is\u00a0an\u00a0intimate\u00a0iteration of a basic infrastructural reality:\u00a0In many parts of the world, water is\u00a0used and\u00a0managed\u00a0locally\u00a0through community-controlled mechanisms (Bakker 2007,\u00a0442). In Europe, particularly in Germany, Italy, and Ireland,\u00a0where I\u00a0conducted my research, water\u00a0is\u00a0primarily\u00a0managed\u00a0by municipalities\u00a0via local water sources and infrastructures (Dukelow\u00a02016;\u00a0Fantini\u00a02014;\u00a0Lanz\u00a02005).<\/span>1<\/span> Contrary to the regional and national scales of publicly owned infrastructures such as railroads, telecommunications, and electricity grids, built in Europe and the United States from the 1930s onwards (Collier 2011, 205-206; Bakke 2016), water infrastructures have almost always stayed local. This is partly because water cultures and their attendant infrastructures have always grown out of highly localized histories and developed out of longue dur\u00e9e relations mediated by water (McDonald 2018, 49).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These\u00a0spatial\u00a0intimacies\u00a0come\u00a0with\u00a0specific\u00a0temporalities\u00a0that differ profoundly from\u00a0those\u00a0that organize\u00a0financial valuation. This was best described by the then head of the Paris\u00a0water utility\u00a0<\/span>Eau\u00a0de Paris<\/span><\/i> after Paris reverted to public ownership in 2010, ending twenty-five years of private management by Suez and Veolia. Suez had full control over water production and distribution on the left bank of the river Seine, while Veolia had the same responsibilities on the right bank. They said that \u201cfrom the point of view of the private corporation, your horizon as far as time is concerned is the end of your contract. You\u2019re not incentivized to develop policies for the long term. And if you look at it from the point of view of the challenges that water utilities have to face now, a lot of them are very long-term challenges, like climate change, or the water cycle\u201d (Muehlebach 2023, 170).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As we build\u00a0new\u00a0worlds, it is\u00a0water and its temporalities we need to work\u00a0from,\u00a0not the\u00a0man-made\u00a0temporalities of\u00a0private contracts\u00a0or short-term profits. The\u00a0question of\u00a0temporality\u00a0also\u00a0loops back to the question of space.\u00a0<\/span>Eau\u00a0de Paris<\/span><\/i>\u00a0today\u00a0cares for\u00a0its commons, its\u00a0<\/span>bien\u00a0commun,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0from the vantage point of the watershed. This means\u00a0that it manages the water from the point of\u00a0view of\u00a0the entire water catchment area, including\u00a0the springs, rivers,\u00a0and\u00a0aquifers\u00a0that\u00a0span Normandy in the north to Burgundy to the southeast. Since its\u00a0remunicipalization\u00a0in 2010,\u00a0<\/span>Eau\u00a0de Paris\u00a0<\/span><\/i>has\u00a0acquired\u00a0153 hectares of agricultural land to preserve environment and water quality through organic farming.\u00a0The goal is to\u00a0increase\u00a0the amount of farmland involved in the project to 40,000 hectares\u00a0so\u00a0that the entire catchment area is protected. Apart from the protection of\u00a0Paris\u00b4s\u00a0<\/span>bien\u00a0commun<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0there are\u00a0other benefits\u00a0as well<\/span>:\u00a0<\/span><\/b>from protecting biodiversity to sequestering carbon and providing millions of rural landowners with new sources of income.\u00a0Under\u00a0the\u00a02027\u00a0Sustainable Food Plan,\u00a075 percent\u00a0of the 30 million meals served each year in the 1,300 municipal restaurants\u00a0in Paris,\u00a0including\u00a0school canteens,\u00a0must be organic.\u00a050 percent\u00a0must be\u00a0produced less than 250 kilometers away. As one farmer put it proudly: \u201cThe lentils grown there end up on the plates of Parisian school kids\u201d\u00a0(<\/span>Yeung 2024<\/span><\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We see here that the\u00a0care for water\u00a0is\u00a0not\u00a0predominantly\u00a0one\u00a0of scaling \u201cup,\u201d\u00a0as\u00a0some one-worldist\u00a0planetary proposals\u00a0suggest.\u00a0Planetary\u00a0proposals\u00a0are, as the authors of\u00a0a recent article themselves put it, quite\u00a0\u201ccontroversial and complex\u201d\u00a0(Rockstr\u00f6m\u00a0et al.\u00a02024,\u00a07).\u00a0In contrast to\u00a0this\u00a0ambition toward\u00a0planetarity, we see in\u00a0<\/span>Eau\u00a0de Paris<\/span><\/i>\u00a0an example of what we might call\u00a0a\u00a0lateral \u201cscaling out\u201d \u2013 a\u00a0practice and politics of\u00a0\u201c<\/span>hereness<\/span><\/a>\u201d that, according to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, is the best path toward countering the life-destroying project of capitalism. To put it in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson\u2019s words, water \u201casks us to ground ourselves intimately in land and place, and relate that grounding to other movements, geographies, cultures and lands\u201d (2025, 7). This form of dwelling and grounding moves according to ecological and not necessarily political scales and rhythms; it is grounded in the watershed rather than in human-made forms. <\/span>Eau\u00a0de Paris<\/span><\/i>\u00a0acknowledges the many worlds that exist within the\u00a0substance of water,\u00a0including landowners, farmers who need to be coaxed into the project, schools that need to begin to buy locally grown food, legal and technical experts, and all others including the land\u00a0and all other life\u00a0that\u00a0depends\u00a0on water. None of\u00a0this\u00a0is\u00a0an easy process. The management of\u00a0its\u00a0<\/span>bien\u00a0commun\u00a0<\/span><\/i>is patiently\u00a0wrought out of\u00a0slow, highly localized processes that carefully,\u00a0and with\u00a0timescales\u00a0much longer and across generations,\u00a0draws together\u00a0the water and its abundant inhabitants\u00a0across place, time, and difference.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Water as a\u00a0moving, wandering thing also teaches us much about use and possession.\u00a0I like to quote Italian activist and politician\u00a0Tommaso\u00a0Fattori, who put it\u00a0beautifully when he recounted\u00a0Ovid\u2019s Metamorphosis, a classic of Latin literature written more than two\u00a0thousand years ago. In it, the goddess\u00a0Latona\u00a0asks\u00a0a group of peasants\u00a0who refused to allow her to drink from a pool, \u201cWhy do you\u00a0refuse me water? The common use of water is the sacred right of all\u00a0mankind.\u00a0Nature allows no one to claim as property the sunshine, the air, or\u00a0the water. When I drew near, it was a public good I came to share\u00a0\u2026 A\u00a0draught of water would be nectar to me; it would revive me, and I would\u00a0find myself indebted to you for life itself\u201d (Fattori\u00a02011).<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We often associate indigenous worlds with radical theories and philosophies about the inappropriability of life (Kimmerer 2013, Simpson 2025). But let us not forget that even Europe, the center of colonial and imperial power, also held some of these truths until they were violently suppressed or denigrated and forgotten (Federici 2004). Giorgio Agamben offers us a glimpse of this history through his narration of the eleventh century Fraticelli (Little Brethren) Franciscans, who were part of a group of religious movements that practiced a way of life in which no one claimed ownership of any possession (Agamben 2013, 93). The church considered them heretics because they proposed a new type of order\u2014the common life\u2014and held everything they owned in common. They renounced everything except de facto use itself, since use was necessary for survival and human life. Because the Fraticelli attempted to live outside of regimes of appropriation, ownership, and property, their way of life was thought of as an animal form of life; analogous to the lives of little children (who do not own but only use the property of the father) or madmen \u201cwho all lack the disposition to possess\u201d (ibid., 112). In response to these heretical religious movements, the pope established a juridical separation between the Church and its property, and the \u201cminor friar\u2019s\u201d use of books and other moveable property (ibid., 124-125). It was thus a Papal Bull, written by Gregorius IX, that first distinguished between ownership and use, retaining ownership for the pope and the Church while conceding use to the friars. It is from this sharp distinction between ownership and use, made by a pope in the eleventh century, that the first juridically explicit definition of ownership emerged. At this historical moment, the Church articulated a law of ownership in response to Franciscan heresy. \u201cBeing proprietary\u201d became a \u201cgenuinely distinct sociological type\u201d (ibid., 134). The Catholic Church was thus possibly the first institution that could buy and sell property in its own name. MacPherson, writing about North American settler colonialism, called this sociological type the \u201cpossessive individual\u201d (Mac Pherson 2011 [1962]).<\/p>\n

All over the planet, water movements theorize and often also practice water in these heretical ways. They see it as something that allows us to think outside of proprietary logics and to ask what a relation to the world as inappropriable would look like. These movements have insisted on a world that could flourish if water were collectively conceptualized around use rather than possession, such as when millions of people in Italy insisted that water as a <\/span>bene commune<\/span><\/i>\u00a0\u2013 a commons or,\u00a0when people in Berlin called for \u201ctheir water\u201d,\u00a0as a\u00a0<\/span>Gemeingut<\/span><\/i>. Of course, commons can exclude as much as they can include, but this exclusion is usually conceptualized as a form of access and care that carefully calibrates access to waters across neighboring communities and generations, not against them (Ostrom 1990). Like poverty or abundance, the commons are not a thing but a relation; they do not exist as static institutions but as processes that are set in motion to negotiate the things humans need to survive on this planet. These movements do not refer to use as a form of usufruct (a legal relationship in which someone may be granted temporary access to a thing while it remains owned by someone else (<\/span>Empson\u00a0and\u00a0Bonilla\u00a02019<\/span><\/a>)).\u00a0Rather, use is conceptualized\u00a0as a practice outside of ownership altogether, and as a practice that is always\u00a0temporary\u00a0until others, including\u00a0future\u00a0generations,\u00a0will need to\u00a0use it.\u00a0Indigenous water protectors\u00a0are\u00a0perhaps the\u00a0clearest and most powerful when they insist that water is a relation and relative, the\u00a0\u201cfirst environment\u201d and \u201cfirst world\u201d that all humans live in, inside the bodies of mothers (Simpson 2025,\u00a064). It is \u201ca matrix of bonds and attachments amongst living things of all kinds, a cascade of living beings across time and space, on a cosmic scale, extending into ancient times and into the future\u201d\u00a0(ibid.,\u00a0155-156).\u00a0As such, it defies\u00a0the proprietary ethic that dominates many human relationships to the world\u00a0and decenters\u00a0the possessive individual\u00a0which turns the world into\u00a0a\u00a0thing to be\u00a0possessed.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If this is a tipping point, then let us start with water.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/b>And let us hope<\/span>\u00a0that\u00a0what today seems like\u00a0a\u00a0choked-off\u00a0crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\n

Andrea\u00a0Muehlebach\u00a0<\/span><\/b>is Professor of Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water at the University of Bremen in Germany. She is the author of\u00a0\u201cA Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe\u201d\u00a0(2023, Duke UP).\u00a0<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Abstract If we are to rethink life, then water is the place to begin. \/ Wenn wir das Leben neu \u00fcberdenken wollen, dann w\u00e4re Wasser die Substanz, mit der wir anfangen sollten. I\u00a0am\u00a0writing\u00a0this at\u00a0a\u00a0moment\u00a0that\u00a0many identify\u00a0as\u00a0a tipping point,\u00a0with\u00a0incremental crises compounding\u00a0and potentiating\u00a0each other to such a degree that the consequences become systemic and unstoppable. This is not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[646],"class_list":["post-13809","waterworlding","type-waterworlding","status-publish","hentry","autor-andrea-muehlebach"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/waterworlding\/13809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/waterworlding"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/waterworlding"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/waterworlding\/13809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13841,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/waterworlding\/13809\/revisions\/13841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=13809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}