Stefanovic, I.L. (2019). The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy & Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781487524036 (paperback, $40)/ ISBN: 9781487532970 (ebook, $40)/ ISBN: 9781487505936 (hardcover, $97)
(URL: www.routledge.com/Global-Water-Ethics-Towards-a-global-ethics-charter-1st-Edition/Ziegler-Groenfeldt/p/book/9781138204294https://utorontopress.com/9781487524036/the-wonder-of-water/)
Kim De Wolff
University of North Texas, Kim.DeWolff@unt.edu
To cite this Review: De Wolff, K. (2023). Review of “The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy & Practice”, University of Toronto Press, by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/344-wonder
The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy & Practice explores how western traditions of phenomenology can inform water policy. This shared approach – that begins with descriptions of embodied experience – ensures a strong unifying focus for the volume’s twelve main chapters and extends well beyond the broader shared topic of water.
The resulting collection demonstrates the breadth of what doing environmentally attuned phenomenology can look like, and, in turn, reveals the multiplicity of water itself, as molecular and oceanic, salty and fresh, liquid and solid, life-giving and itself alive. Collectively, the contributions push against dominant frameworks for understanding and managing water by "seeing water as more than a calculative resource" (115). The volume is a welcome offering from philosophy to the burgeoning “blue” and “hydro” humanities literature, and to associated efforts to inform policy and other decision-making processes.
Beyond the well-conceptualized thematic focus, the volume’s organizational structure is where the editing work truly shines. Care has been taken to consider emergent themes across submissions and how they build toward policy conversations. The contributions (about half the authors are in philosophy departments, joined by a variety of environmental scholars and writers from outside academia), are meticulously arranged into three sections. Part 1: The Lived Experience of Water, provides a near-dizzying tour of water across scales and sites, from chemical processes to multi-species encounters, through immersive, affect-eliciting descriptions. Part 2: Water and Place, establishes water’s presences and absences as intrinsic to being rather than mere setting, particularly in urban environments. Part 3: Rethinking Water Policy, Practice, and Ethics, challenges conceptions of what it means to do philosophy, pushing beyond theorizing or applying rules to outlining possibilities for engagement that emerge from lived experiences. The essays are thoughtfully ordered within these sections. Martin Lee Mueller’s outstanding chapter 4, for example, is perfectly located to both bring Part I’s rich accounts of lived experience closer to overall policy goals while transitioning toward Part II’s focus on place. Finally, the framing of the twelve conventional chapters with the poetry of Kirby Manià and Dilys Leman performs a kind of openness that points to the ‘something more’ of lived experiences of water as they exceed scientific management practices, but also the conventions of the academic essay format.
The framing text for the volume, however, is somewhat limited. The introduction in particular is noticeably sparse at barely six pages including chapter outlines. As a result the volume often implicitly shows thought in its organization, but does less to explicitly detail how it fits with and builds from existing work of thinking with water in the humanities. I also kept wishing more had been done with this space to help sympathetic readers from outside this particular area of philosophy, such as STS scholars and Anthropologists who similarly begin with vivid descriptions of lived experiences, to situate themselves within the discussions that follow. For those looking for a more explicit discussion of phenomenology before immersing themselves in the volume, I suggest following the book introduction with all three section introductions and the first sections of chapter 11 (p. 197-205), for an overview of some of the key thinkers and concepts as they relate to water. For similar reasons, I see the volume as a necessary intermediary step toward policy, rather than a text decision-makers would reach for themselves. For those most interested in policy implications, chapters 4, 7, 11, and 12 address them most explicitly.
Reading this volume as a feminist science and technology studies (STS) and environmental humanities scholar, I was especially encouraged by the attention given in many chapters to the specificity of situated experiences and why they matter. Embodied, relational perspectives are so necessary not only because ecosystems are relationships, but because of their potential for making visible and countering systems of domination. It matters who has water to give and who is thirsty. It matters whose lived experiences are brought into decision-making and how. The contributions by Irene Klaver, Sarah King, Bryon Bannon, Trish Glazebrook & Jeff Gessas, and Dilys Leman show this especially well. However, I was struck by an underlying tension between understandings of lived experience as inextricable from specific places, and appeals to universal human experience (ie. “the lived experience” or generic sites like “the desert”). At times, even within the same chapter, default academic writing styles (i.e. the language of an unspecified “we” or lack of attention to citation politics) seemed to get in the way of performing the very kinds of reciprocity and good relations that were being argued for. Explicitly dwelling with these contradictions and with each author’s own rootedness (Klaver’s discussion of “with” and “being in common” on p. 97 is excellent example and starting point), could provide a striking demonstration of the theoretical work in action while helping to ensure experiences are not abstracted from specific people, places and power relations.
Overall, The Wonder of Water shows the potential of phenomenology to challenge dominant logics of western science, capitalism, abstraction, universals and more at work in reducing water to a modern substance to be managed. It is perhaps strongest, however, when not simply articulating what is missed, but when water itself becomes a coconspirator in the project to “reframe the question of legitimacy” (66), where the voices of the status quo "cannot, once and for all, contain the persistent upwelling of wonder." (72).
