Parliament of Waters is an international arts, science and social action programme that aims to bring together artists, curators, environmental activists, scientists and lawyers, along with local communities and bodies of water from around the world, in order to ‘give a voice to water’.

The maxim ‘Water is Life’ has never had more serious implications than it does today. Around two-thirds of the human body is water. The oceans cover nearly three-quarters of the world’s surface. Without water there is no life. Yet from the Poles to the Equator, from ice and rain to rivers and oceans, virtually every ‘body of water’ on Earth has now been diminished or polluted by human actions. The whole inter-connected web of life is impacted, and climate change is rapidly amplifying this harm. If water could speak and hold humans to account what would it say? How can we begin to take collective responsibility for our actions in relation to water? As activists, artists and curators, working with environmental groups, lawyers, scientists and local communities, we want to inspire many local responses that flow towards a generative international conversation.

INTRODUCTION

The word ‘parliament’ literally means a ‘speaking together’. A Parliament of Waters is being developed as an arts, science, law and social action partnership that re-balances the relationship between the environment and humans, by giving a voice to water. Artistic practice is a primary way to hear that voice, while law and science offer that voice in other dimensions. Indigenous cultures have long paid attention to the sacredness of water and, in the traditions of the Commons, the equitable sharing of water has been crucial for agriculture and industry. Parliament of Waters aims to weave these different voices together place by place in order to transform the human relationship to water, from extraction to restoration. Climate change is the context and the imperative to action.

Climate change

As a result of the climate emergency, scientists and citizens across the globe are noticing rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly higher tides that push more and more water directly into the places we live – from our most vibrant, historic cities to our last remaining traditional coastal villages. A 2017 report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says global sea-level rise could range from one to more than eight feet by 2100. This would mean that, by the end of this century, hundreds of millions of people will be retreating from the world’s shorelines, as climate refugees. Temperature-wise, 2016 was the hottest year on record, with 2020 a close runner-up, and the Arctic is now thirty-six degrees warmer than previous norms. Yet, despite international efforts and tireless research, we are still in denial about the effects of climate change and the coming catastrophe.

Law

The status of water and its governance is under review, not just as part of the debate around the rights of nature and the Ecocide movement. On March 20, 2017, after 140 years of negotiation by the Maori in Aotearoa, the New Zealand government finally recognized the ‘legal personhood’ of the River Whanganui, declaring that Te Awa Tupua—the river and all its physical and metaphysical elements—is an indivisible, living whole, and henceforth possesses “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of a legal person. Elsewhere in the world there have been attempts to establish legal rights for water, including for India’s sacred Ganges and Yamuna Rivers. In February 2019, voters in Toledo, Ohio, voted to grant legal standing to Lake Erie. On a much smaller scale, in South Devon (England) the Bioregional Learning Centre has just finished making the first River Charter in the UK for part of the River Dart. Created with the local community around Dartington, the charter gives moral rights and responsibilities to water as well as to the people in the watershed who uphold them. It also imagines civil society playing a role in water governance. As part of Parliament of Waters we aim to open up conversations between different bodies of water, such as the River Dart and the Whanganui in Aotearoa. Lawyers working on the rights of nature will be invited to participate in imagining how the voice of water itself can be heard in law.

Science

In inviting scientists to help us surface the voice of water we want to explore its origins, how it cycles around our planet and what the implications of climate change, toxicity and changing supply patterns could be for all life. We also want to give more agency to local ‘water protectors’ for measuring and monitoring its wellbeing and for that we will need scientific collaboration. The water on Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Some scientists have suggested that this entire body of water travelled here through space, carried on asteroids from a giant ‘spring’ in the Milky Way where oxygen and hydrogen atoms collided. Thus, H2O could be thought of as an ‘extra-terrestrial’ that fell to Earth, bringing life with it to our planet. This living entity constantly recycles itself through the ‘water cycle’, falling to the ground as rain or snow, eventually travelling in rivers to the sea, before evaporating back into the atmosphere as mist and clouds.

Place

The era of venturing forth to explore the wild frontiers of the planet has come to an end. No place is wild any longer. Uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean on which no human has made a home are littered with tons of washed-up plastic. There are toxins in the flesh of polar bears. Our forms of transport by land, air and sea all put CO2 into the atmosphere. Differences between places and peoples have been eroded by globalisation but so has the relationship of humans with place. The venturing forth that many of us are now turning to is back into place. We see that we are both citizens of the world, globally connected, and stewards of our local places. The global challenges we are now facing are shared by all but specific to place. And the land on which we live is defined by rivers and their watersheds, draining into the ocean.

Because each place experiences these challenges differently we are working in a place-specific way, led by local communities. These ‘citizens of place’ will be invited to explore their relationship to their river, creek, lake, aquifer or the seas nearby.

In its final joined-up expression, the Parliament of Waters aims to offer a forum for the voices of many waters, spoken by the people who care for them and supported by the development of ‘stories of place’, water charters and community self-monitoring of environmental assets. Along the way, we aim to pair up bodies of water and the communities who are in relationship with them with other waters around the world so as to develop a locally based, global conversation about climate change. Story of place is a regenerative design process that layers up the many ways of knowing a place (geology, landscape, ecology, social history, economy, human culture, etc) in order to get to the core features of how that place functions.

The Commons

In the hands of humans, water has become a resource for exploitation, a tool of extraction, a vehicle for contamination. What should be protected as a life-giving ‘commons’ resource; i.e. no one’s property, rightfully belonging to all of humanity and to the Earth itself; is traded as a commodity, cut off from rival communities, poisoned against enemies, thoughtlessly polluted in the pursuit of profit, and lavishly squandered by the so-called developed world while the climate vulnerable inhabitants of the Global South are dying of thirst. Three in ten people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, six in ten lack access to adequate sanitation facilities. Meanwhile US citizens flush 5.7 billion gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet every day. Reviving the very old concept of the Commons and treating water as a common pool resource brings all of us back into a relationship of collective responsibility.

Indigenous Cultures

If it is the Enlightenment conception of the world, with its distinction between humans and nature, that has brought us to the brink of extinction, then it is imperative that we look to other knowledge systems to begin to rethink our relationship with the environment. Indeed, if the history of progress and civilisation referred to as ‘modernity’ cannot be disconnected from enslavement and extraction in the form of ‘coloniality’, and the ensuing mass consumerism is accelerating us towards ‘ecocide’, then it is vital that we look for alternative ways of thinking as a matter of urgency. The sociologist, Noam Chomsky has declared, in the face of “environmental catastrophe”, that “Indigenous people are our only hope for survival”. The very identity of Indigenous peoples is inextricably bound up with their lands, and thus with water. Located predominantly at the social-ecological margins of human habitation; small islands, tropical forests, high-altitude zones, coasts, desert margins and the circumpolar Arctic; it is here that the consequences of climate change are felt most powerfully.

Indigenous peoples, however, are not merely victims of climate change. Comprising only 4 percent of the world’s population (between 250 to 300 million people), they occupy 22 percent of the world’s land surface. In doing so, they maintain 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity in, or adjacent to, 85 percent of the world’s protected areas. As the modern world moves ever faster to exploit natural resources in order to meet growing consumer demands, First Nation and Indigenous peoples have gained increasing visibility for raising their voices against the aggressive development policies that threaten the world’s remaining ecosystems and the biodiversity that depends on them. The community-based and collectively held knowledge of Indigenous people offers valuable insights, complementing scientific data with chronological and landscape-specific precision and detail that is critical for evaluating climate change scenarios developed by scientists at much broader spatial and temporal scale. Moreover, Indigenous traditions of knowledge provide a crucial foundation for community-based adaptation and mitigation actions that sustain resilience of social-ecological systems at the interconnected local, regional and global scales.

Process

We are in the process of designing a template that enables any place that wishes to be part of the project to lead its own process, within a co-curated framework. Local ‘Parliaments’ will be established in relation to the region’s waterways, but the project ultimately aims to establish conversations with other bodies of water globally. The defining characteristics of the Parliament of Waters in each location, which we refer to as our ‘boundary objects’, are that it should incorporate:

1. Voices of the water
2. Presence of communities and artists
3. A local, place-sourced world view
4. The rights and responsibilities of humans and water
5. A conversation that can be shared

One of the key challenges is, how to engage civil society in behaviour change in relationship to water? This will vary in each location and there will be specific local sensitivities which need to be taken into account. In order to include different local groups, it will be vital to work with existing organisations, already embedded in the community, to co-create a ‘story of place’ that is meaningful and specific to that place. This will incorporate knowledge of the local geology, geography and hydrography, as well as the impact on water of land use and human culture.

When it comes to joining up places into a growing conversation between bodies of water in the Parliament, the different component parts need to include the voices of:

1. Water (it’s personality in a range of dimensions)
2. Science (to include climate change modelling and local environmental groups)
3. Law (specifically rights and responsibilities of water and the stewarding of common pool resources)
4. Art, Design & Architecture (both historical and contemporary)
5. Communities that are local to place

Isabel Carlisle and Tom Trevor, December 2019