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What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydroflourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.
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The asymmetrical anthropocene: resilience and the limits of posthumanism
In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has been little engagement between these two responses to the human/world binary. This is important for changing the terms of the policy debate: engaging resilience through the asymmetrical Anthropocene framing shines a different light upon policy discourses of adaptive management, locating resilience as a continuation of modernity’s anthropocentric will-to-govern. From this vantage point, resilience is problematic, neglecting the powers of nonhuman worlds that are not accessible or appropriable for governmental use. However, this is not necessarily grounds for pessimism. To conclude, we argue that human political agency is even more vital in an indeterminate world.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025954
- PAR ID:
- 10304221
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- cultural geographies
- ISSN:
- 1474-4740
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211029278
