Five weeks have passed since we all first began this journey together. 10 classes, 5 tea times, 2 weekend trips and it’s brought us here. To a more informed and more conscious place where we have begun to look benieth the visible surface of the world and see the bigger structures and smaller interactions. If you look back at my first post it seems a bit naive, I even corrected myself in the following week’s comment because I was entirely wrong. That we because I only took things at face value, judged them without bothering to look into why or how or what was really going on.
I’ve always had some knowledge about the effects of humans on the environment, I’ve taken classes in school about it but I’ve never really had the chance to experience it first hand the way this class has given me the opportunity to. When we went and explored just the small section of the Little Westham Creek and then wrote about it I learned just how much of an effect a small community can have on a single body of water. We read in week 3 about Forsyth’s Awareness-Appraisal model, and now many of us have come to live it. I joined this community for the diversity of options and voices that I could listen to and discuss with about water regulations and environmental law and policy and what we should be doing to fix a planet that generations in the past have barely given any thought to. I don’t think any of us were uneducated coming into the class about the dangers of water pollution or carbon emissions but I can see that all of us are starting to understand and become more aware of our impact.
The trips have been something special and unique. Some classes take little field trips here and there to emphasize and idea or engage the class in an otherwise difficult discussion or topic but it isn’t very often that you get a class trip whose sole purpose is to just kayak the river, maybe talk about a few things related to the class (namely trees) but not a full and true class. It was a chance for us to connect with our nearest river, to absorb it’s beauty and hopefully make it a part of us. Even the more educational focused trips to Brown’s Island or The Wetlands always lead us to water and beauty and the river community.
The river community on the James is different from what I’ve experienced from river cities before. The people in Richmond really love their river, most want to see its beauty and partake of the recreational opportunities it offers. Back home on the Potomac at Algonkian Park you rarely see people. Some families will take their kids to the river edge or walk their dogs there; I’ve had a few picnic dates there. Even if you include the occasional kayak or other boater that goes out on the river you don’t see a third of the people who flock to the river daily here in Richmond. Now part of that may be because I’m not in Washington but I am in the most populous county and wealthiest county in Virginia, surely some people must regularly go to the river. On our Brown’s Island trip we saw at least 100 people on the island doing some sort of activity but at home you’re lucky to see 10. As a kid I used to love the creek that ran behind my neighborhood but as I grew older and grew away from the water, now that I’m here in Richmond the water has once again become a huge part of my life.
I mentioned how I now look beyond face value and try to understand the underlying attributes and effects of humans on the world around us and I think I can attribute a large part of that to this return to water. In many of our readings there in mention of the mother river and how all of civilization started from and around rivers because they gave us the chance at agriculture and settled life. On multiple occasions in class have we touched on this idea as the driving factor behind why we as humans are still so draw to naturally flowing water and why we go out of our way in some cases to horde, take, redirect, or steal water from where it would rightfully go. After returning to a place where water recreation is so prevalent I cannot imagine why I ever let it slip away from me. While we have only had one graded and posted writing on our reflection spots I have revisited mine multiple times to feel the water talk back to me and to try and look beyond the man made lake that I’m staring into and see the bigger picture. This water is so important to everyone, so integrated into our everyday life, and most of us take it for granted not because we don’t know it’s value but because we are uneducated into what water really means.
I’m going to take a small turn and talk about two things from other classes that I think are relevant to the idea of water, water culture, and water economics. First, water is today more of a commodity than it ever was. We are ruining the hydrological cycle by damming rivers and bottling water; damming creates ecological destruction and is essentially stealing or hording a water resource for some purpose. Bottling water is no better, it takes water out of its local cycle and replaces it elsewhere creating imbalance and billions of gallons of freshwater to be displaced globally. While there is a moral argument here for stealing a resource away from those who have come to rely on it what is more is that we are commercializing the very life blood of the planet, effectively beginning to sell of the last remaining resource which we thought could never be disturbed and big corporations are now dangling water in front of governments to get favorable legislation passed. Second, in the rice lands of Indonesia there existed an issue with competing farmers blocking and rerouting water supplies to their fields and away from competitors. The governments of the area came together and designed a system of breakways in which a farmer was assigned a series of notes on the musical scale. At major junctions of water diversion carved pieces of wood, carefully tuned to a particular note were placed so that when water ran across the wood you could hear the sound all though the valley. Farmers learned to listen for their notes, knowing that if they didn’t hear one that there must be an issue. Third world areas like Indonesia struggle with water resources and yet they still manage to plan and devise ways to get around water thievery and maintain the local water system while First world countries can’t comprehend the massive damage they are doing to their water resources.
We have a duty to look beyond what we see and try and help fix the issues our world is facing right now. This class has helped my and I hope my fellow peers open their eyes to what could work or at least get us moving in the right direction.
When I walk by the lake now I see more than just a body of water, I see my body of water, the one I’m responsible for making sure I don’t ruin, I see the greater watershed which I am a member of and what I am doing for that. Five weeks in and this is only the beginning, all I can hope for what’s next.