Publications

‘The Yellowstone as the longest undammed river in the contiguous United States: An environmental historical geography of a mythic landscape’ by Nicolas T. Bergmann

Abstract: This article contributes to a body of scholarship examining the relationship between myth and geography. Specifically, I integrate a posthumanist understanding of assemblage theory to better account for the role that more-than-human entities play in the creation and transformation of mythic landscapes. To support this line of inquiry, I adopt Bowden’s geographical traditions model to help trace the origin and evolution of a particular myth – the Yellowstone River as the longest undammed or free-flowing river remaining in the contiguous United States – from its beginnings in the wild and scenic rivers movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s to contemporary environmental conflicts that expose its contradictions and threaten its continued existence. I argue that actors within the Montana Department of Fish and Game – embedded within an active and dynamic environment – created a new myth for the Yellowstone River throughout the late 1970s as a political tool to gain legal protection for the river. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, I argue that this myth transformed and took on the aura of an inviolate landscape. Consequently, I argue that the myth’s relationship to environmental protection became more ambiguous than its creators had originally intended.

‘An assemblage of urban water access: The geography of water marginalization in Amsterdam, 1690-1840’ by Bob Pierik

Abstract: This article delves into the urban environmental history of early modern Amsterdam through the examination of water access. In this coastal city, environmental change combined with the late 16th and especially 17th century urban growth made ground and surface waters brackish and polluted. As a result, access to clean drinking water required substantial efforts. A combined system of mainly rain containers (cisterns) and surface water imports from upstream made for a complex and continuously changing water infrastructure. In this article, I employ novel data on the different ways in which people accessed potable water to explore the neglected spatial and environmental inequalities of early modern Amsterdam’s water access. I discuss new data on thousands of previously underexplored rain containers that laid in public space but were for private use. I map and analyse the unequal access to water on a city-wide level, on the level of individual streets and on the level of individual households and their everyday practices.

Book Review: ‘Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China’ by Xiangli Ding

Hydropower, derived from river flows, has been used to produce electricity for various purposes. This process requires technological, political, and social efforts, making hydropower projects and political regimes deeply intertwined. As the title suggests, this book tells the story of the planning, construction, and operation of hydropower projects in twentieth-century China. Through case studies, the author examines the complex interplay between energy, politics, and state building. – Xiaojia Hou (San Jose State University)

Book Review: ‘When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature’ by Hui-Lin Hsu

Hui-Lin Hsu’s When the Yellow River Floods makes two important interventions in the field of environmental cultural study and the materialistic turn in the study of modern Chinese literature. The first intervention combines the history of the Yellow River’s environmental change, hydraulic engineering, and nation building with the creation of modern Chinese literature, through a case study of The Travels of Lao Can (Lao Can youji, hereafter The Travels). As the protagonist Liu E spent his peak years serving as a hydraulic engineer in Shandong, where most of the stories in The Travelstake place, he was, as shown in the book, actively involved in the examination and regulation of the unruly Yellow River. The connection between flood management and nation-state building in the late Qing, as Hsu points out, has received very limited scholarly attention. The Travels thus provides a proper literary perspective to the further examination of this connection through the role of the local gentry, as represented by Liu E, which mediated between nation-state formation and local river control in “flood-ravaged late nineteenth-century Shandong” (p. 4). – Chuanhui Meng (Brown University)

Oct 22, 2024

‘Water in World History’ by Ellen F. Arnold

This book takes a thematic approach to the global history of water, covering a wide range of human interactions with water and the ways in which it carries both life and death. Water in World History is an accessible introduction to water history and is an ideal resource for undergraduate students in environmental history and world history courses.

Book Review: ‘Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor’ by Lisa Yin Han

Lisa Yin Han’s new book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor, takes us into the world of this latter group to ask how the technologies of ocean science mediate particular, uneven relationships between the more-than-human world of the seabed and terrestrial, human concerns. As a scholar of critical media studies, Han understands media and acts of mediation to be key in shaping “the material-discursive becoming of the deep ocean, where power is encoded into naturalizations of human technological feats” (p. 4). Mediation is one step in an alchemical reaction, which Han maps as happening across multiple stages: “Knowledge about elemental transmutation is the basis of underwater mediation and underwater mediation, in turn, enables the final step of alchemy: the transformation of the elemental into the economic” (p. 6). Yet, Han says, “when it comes to the seabed, the true alchemy, perhaps, is the continued naturalization of an association between surplus capital and power” (p. 5). – Jonathan Galka (Harvard University/Yale-NTU Singapore)

Book Review: ‘We Live in the Water: Climate, Aging, and Socioecology on Smith Island’ by Jana Kopelentova Rehak

‘Puddles, creeks, and drainage: connected histories of water and malaria in Zanzibar, 1910–2021’ by Melissa Graboyes

Abstract: This article draws on a combination of archival and oral sources in order to highlight the connected histories of water and malaria on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar (Unguja) over the past century. We argue that in both the past and the present, water and malaria have been deeply connected, through the lifecycle of the disease, through control measures enacted, and in how Zanzibari residents continue to talk about the relationship between rain, puddles, stagnant water, and disease. Archival sources show that between roughly 1913 and 1957, the British colonial government managed malaria by managing water. That entailed a focus on watery breeding sites that included attention to both the micro: cattle hoofprints, and the macro: a multi-decade drainage of the tidal creek and surrounding swamp. These water-based malaria control efforts were limited in their efficacy by being geographically restricted to urban Zanzibar Town, and often limited to just the Stone Town area. 98 interviews conducted with Zanzibaris about malaria indicate that people continue to draw strong connections between malaria and the environment (mazingira), and that they most commonly discuss water’s relationship with malaria in terms of puddles (dimbwi/madimbwi), small puddles (kidimbwi/vidimbwi) and stagnant water (maji yaliyotuama).

Book Review: ‘Medieval Riverscapes: Environment and Memory in Northwest Europe, c. 300–1100.’ by Ellen F. Arnold

Arnold draws from a variety of contemporary literary and visual sources to trace the ebb and flow of cultural meanings and memories attached to rivers across northwestern Europe (modern-day France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) between about 300 and 1000 CE. Her interest lies in how these meanings and memories both changed over time and became “entangled with time” (p. 11). In other words, rivers acted “as the ultimate semi-permeable barriers of the natural world,” enabling medieval writers to transpose onto them, and into them, their evolving hopes, fears, self-identities, and values (p. 14). – Lori Jones (University of Ottawa and Carleton University)

‘“Winterreise”. Sci-Arts Winter Season Journey Through the Human-Nature Relationships of the Land-Sea Continuum, from North Sea to Baltic Sea’ by Anatole Danto

Abstract: Crossing art and science, this text explores topographically the category of Land-Sea, both in the field, during collection phases, and from a more analytical point of view. To this end, it draws on collective surveys carried out between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, focusing in particular on the question of the winter season. This article thus engages in a methodological and analytical dialogue between different complementary approaches, with the aim of deciphering, in depth, territorial socio-ecosystemic complexities, between mutations and perpetuations.

‘Uncertain Waters and Irony in Australian Settler Literatures’ by Teresa Shewry and Philip Steer

Abstract: Critics are increasingly recognizing the presence of irony in environmental cultures, often stressing its ability to highlight disjunctions between the individual’s convictions and their compromised behaviors. This article extends this work by taking up the relationship between irony and settler-colonial imaginaries in writings about unpredictable bodies of water. Focusing on settler writing in Australia, the article juxtaposes nineteenth-century author Henry Lawson and contemporary novelist Jane Rawson to argue that irony constitutes a form of environmental knowledge, calling up norms and hierarchies regarding water but also creating openings toward waters that cannot be given meaning. Lawson’s writings about ephemeral rivers and lakes stress their divergence from metropolitan ideas of water’s continuity, presence, and visibility. Largely ignoring Indigenous peoples’ relationships with water, his ironies of overturned expectations and norms make contact with but also disparage water in unfamiliar forms. By contrast, Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) employs irony to grasp how climate-changed floodwater disrupts settler norms founded upon the erasure of floodplains and of Indigenous and colonial histories of urban rivers. Juxtaposing Rawson with Lawson illuminates an ongoing need to be cautious about the ideals that irony may evoke in response to changing and uncertain waters. At the same time, irony provides a multivalent tool to critically address what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” to glimpse the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives, and to acknowledge occluded forms of environmental agency.

Abstract: Water plays a dual role in the context of cultural heritage: it can be of great importance, but it can also threaten the existence of built heritage. This article explores the intricate relationship between water and built heritage, focusing on the risks posed by climate change-induced events such as heavy rainfall, which can lead to flooding and surface water run-off. The research project Resilience and Built Heritage focused on how built heritage contributes to urban resilience and emphasizes the imperative of integrated risk management, which requires collaboration between heritage professionals and risk managers. The challenges identified include mutual understanding of the disciplines of heritage protection and risk management and a lack of clarity in defining common objectives. Hence, integrated risk management is proposed as a comprehensive concept, encompassing an all-hazards approach and analytical as well as normative steps of risk evaluation and management. Integrated risk management can help develop consistent, holistic, integrative strategies to sustainably protect our built heritage – and thus strengthen its resilience to risk.

Book Review: ‘Water: A Critical Introduction’ by Katie Meehan, Naho Mirumachi, Alex Loftus, and Majed Akhter

Like major tourist destinations, some fields of study are so old and so rich that they require a tour guide or travel book to properly navigate and understand. Thus is the situation with the study of water. Every aspect of life on Earth stems from water. Naturally, scholars from every discipline, from ancient and modern and in the natural sciences and humanities, have analyzed water with different interests, leaving behind a giant jumble of facts and insights. The challenge is, how do we organize all this knowledge about water to better benefit from it and chart new paths forward? Water: A Critical Introduction does just that. Its authors, Katie Meehan, Naho Mirumachi, Alex Loftus, and Majed Akhter, all based in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, provide readers with a handy and stimulating road map to navigate the labyrinth of water studies. – Faisal H. Husain

Book Review: ‘The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America’ by Thomas Blake Earle

In The Liberty to Take Fish, Thomas Blake Earle reminds readers of a historic liberty unlikely to be vaunted in the political rancor of our own times. In his debut monograph, Earle argues that Americans’ freedom to procure a livelihood from North Atlantic fisheries—including those in ostensibly British waters—was a central material and symbolic issue in the wake of independence. By showing how fish and fishermen drove treaty-making, war, and diplomacy, the author convincingly places the industry and its backers at the heart of the Anglo-American affairs in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Equally, by showing how fishermen were ultimately sidelined from federal concern, Earle helps to explain our own forgetting of this once championed liberty. – Jesse Robertson

Book Review: ‘Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean’ by Christina Gerhardt

Sea Change is a beautiful book. It deploys maps, indigenous poetry and testimony, images, and original scholarly writing to center islanders and island nations in the context of rapidly rising oceans. It elucidates the past and present effects of European imperialism on archipelagic landscapes and peoples, and how the latter contest imperialist and monothetic climate discourses. It is, in many ways, a radical and historically grounded work of art that responds to current calls for decolonial scholarship and climate justice. – Philip Gooding

‘Border Water: The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945-2015’ by Stephen Paul Mumme

Border Water places transboundary water management in the frame of the larger binational relationship, offering a comprehensive history of transnational water management between the United States and Mexico. As we move into the next century of transnational water management, this important work offers critical insights into lessons learned and charts a path for the future.

Abstract: This paper discusses water in Afghanistan from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century. This broad chronology is periodized using the historical themes of colonialism, nationalism, international developmentalism, and global warfare. Modern hydraulic technology arrived in the domestic architecture of Kabuli state elites beginning in the 1860s and accelerating greatly in the 1890s. The first decades of the twentieth were marked by continuing developments regarding palatial hydrology (pools, fountains, etc.) and new forms of modern hydraulic engineering (piped water, dams and bridges) primarily in and around Kabul involving the Kabul river and its tributaries. The middle decades of the twentieth century involved substantial engagement of rivers throughout country under the various ideological and material regimes of international development sponsored by the US, USSR and a number of other global actors and sanctioned by local political elites who became increasingly dependent on the global system. The decades surrounding the year 2000 have been marked by intense and sustained overt and covert global warfare. The effects of war on the environment of Afghanistan from the perspective of Human Rights, particularly Afghan Peoples’ Rights to Water, constitute the final section of the paper.

Abstract: This paper examines the dynamics of water governance in South Africa during the colonial and apartheid periods, focusing on the socio-economic and political invented water scarcity experienced by black communities. By exploring historical policies and legislation, such as the Irrigation and Conservation of Water Act No. 8 of 1912, the Riparian Rights principle, and the Water Act of 1956, this study sheds light on black people’s systemic exclusion and marginalisation from accessing water resources. The analysis reveals how water governance practices were utilised as instruments of power and control, disproportionately favouring European settlers and reinforcing racial inequalities. Implementing discriminatory policies, forming reserves and forcing removals to Bantustans, establishing segregated water supply systems, and discriminatory practices in farms, mines, and urban townships, resulted in invented water scarcity for black communities. The deliberate exclusion of black communities from equitable water access created systemic disadvantages, impacting health, livelihoods, and socio-economic development. This paper argues that invented water scarcity was integral to colonial and apartheid strategies, further entrenching power imbalances and exacerbating socio-economic disparities.

Review by de Hinojosa on Mestaz, ‘Strength from the Waters: A History of Indigenous Mobilization in Northwest Mexico’

Mestaz demonstrates how state-imposed hydraulic infrastructures, water policy, and property laws enact unequal power relations in the region—principally, by deliberately constraining and sometimes outright limiting Mayo access to the Fuerte River. Strength from the Waters, therefore, offers a rigorous analysis of the impossible position of colonized Native peoples in a world built on their dispossession and elimination and on the commodification of their ancestral lands. This analysis, however, importantly shows us how Native peoples have and continue to defy settler logics of Indigenous elimination.

‘Water: A Dutch Cultural History’ by Lotte Jensen

Floods are a fundamental part of Dutch history. Indeed, having ‘tamed’ the threats associated with living below sea level is part of Dutch national identity. In the cultural depictions of these devastating events, however, national pride at a certain collective resilience goes hand-in-hand with the collective trauma of exposed vulnerability. All too often, the Dutch were the losers in these battles against the elements. In a time of rising global sea levels, cultural scholar Lotte Jensen dives into the stories and images of the past to unpack this paradox for today.

Whose Ocean? Exploring multidisciplinary perspectives towards ocean sustainability and implications for the un(der)represented

The ocean is crucial to life and climate, but its voice is barely heard in (international) law and policy decisions. While the UN explicitly speaks about “our ocean”, it is completely unclear who the “our” refers to. Does the ocean belong to humanity? To states? Or does the ocean belong to itself?