Flows From the Past
Many modern water-resource issues cannot be understood without appreciating the history of water use. Conflicts over water are often tied to the hidden social meanings that water has traditionally carried in a given culture. By looking at how conflicts or challenges have been overcome in the past, we can ensure we use water in the best possible way in the present.
Historically, the North East of England was heavily industrialised, leading to water pollution in major rivers such as the Tyne, Tees, and Wear. Over recent years, following successful programmes to improve water quality by bodies such as Northumbrian Water, the rivers, a major regional feature, have been returned to a state where they provide its people not only with safe drinking water, but with a recreational resource as well. Documentary film-maker and IAS Fellow Sudheer Gupta produced a 73 minute film entitled ‘Black River Business’ which explored the recent history of deindustrialisation in the UK, looking at how it has affected the identity of the North East’s coal miners but also involved the positive cleaning-up of the region’s rivers which provide such an important focus for its people. He related the recent history of the North East to ongoing issues in his native India, where the farmers on the bank of the River Yamuna in Delhi suffer as a result of the pollution of this river. He intends to use this film to inspire water improvements in this part of the world.
As the North East’s rivers show, water is often a formative influence on a region’s identity. Given this, it is important to recognise that water should not be dealt with in legal or political ways that exclude the attitudes and opinions that local people hold towards it. In the New Zealand indigenous communities that Veronica Strang researched during her Fellowship, water is imbued with notions of cosmology and ancestry which can affect attitudes towards the conservation and chemical treatment of local water sources. Strang’s co-Fellow Andrew Baker has involved her in his new research project to develop simple scientific tests that can be used by remote indigenous communities to test the quality of their water, using equipment that does not conflict with the sacred way in which water may be handled in such communities.
Studies of water must consider what water means to people, a feature true of the Ancient World also. A set of Workshops on Water and Identity and Water and Power brought together Classicists, Archaeologists and contemporary Geographers to explore the role of seas and rivers in the Ancient World.
The stance of the Water and Power workshop was to contextualise ancient water systems in the Mediterranean and Middle East and to place their development within the exertion of political power. Water enabled cultures such as Ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome to expand and define their power, and remains a feature of the geopolitics of the modern world.
Sudheer Gupta’s film, ‘Black River Business,’ can be viewed at:
www.durham.ac.uk/ias/fellows/0910fellows/gupta
Reflections
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