Water futures, biosociality, and other-wise agency: An exploratory essay

Abstract

This article maps the confluence of biosocial relations through the agential networks of water. In the language of the environmental humanities and social sciences, such relations and networks are biosocial and sacralised (Meloni, Williams, and Martin 2016; Mangiameli 2013). The self-organisation of aquatic environments in these relations towards humans is engaged in an ongoing process of entanglement and adaptation in parallel with human understandings and approaches to water. This article imagines new and conscientious behaviour that might treat the ubiquitous river more gently, against the tensions and provocations of the Anthropocene Epoch. It argues for the development of fresh sustainability logic; a hydro-logic that cultivates connectivity, adaptive capacity, and broader water values that exist beyond the containment of the commodification paradigm, (that are particularly evident among First Nations peoples). This logic necessarily includes a reconsideration of economic, ecological, customary and recreational values in more balanced measure. By configuring water as a complex adaptive stream of intra, inter and extra-relationships, this research champions waters’ multi-dimensional capacity and agency for the purpose of advancing more sustainable biosocial water futures within a geosocial matrix.