Water, Water, Everywhere - Reflections on the Eco-Emotions: On Water Conference

Oslo is a city with water at its heart. From its magnificent fjord and fountains to the rain that pelted down onto the city and roof of the Professorboligen, Oslo provided the perfect setting for the second instalment of the Eco-Emotions conferences: On Water.

Featuring four keynote speakers, an artistic session, and ten panels spaced across two and a half days, the Eco-Emotions: On Water conference inspired a variety of emotions capable of matching the breadth of those discussed. With individual papers spanning the period from the sixth century CE to the present-day, perhaps one of the conference’s biggest achievements has been to illustrate the consistency with which humans have maintained an emotional relationship with water. This connection, as the papers and keynotes collectively showed, applied to water in all its forms. Ice, snow, rain, springs, wells, rivers, seas, and oceans all inspire emotion, and they have been used by humans to elicit emotion throughout the centuries. Whether it be through text, art, interpretive dance, videography, or sound, the language of water and emotions is a global phenomenon that unites humans when we are at peace and when we are in crisis. Fear, hope, desperation, love, sadness, desire, empathy, horror, serenity, and distress. These are the feelings that water inspires in its many settings.

One of the main themes that manifested throughout the conference was the role of language and the power that this has to shape our perception of water and emotional relationship with this. Andri Snaer Magnason’s opening talk on ‘Looking for Words in A Paradigm Shift’ introduced this concept through its suggestion that we are undergoing a major change in which the language of economy has overtaken the language of emotional connection. When discussing the impact of melting glaciers, for example, it is no longer enough to say we should do something about this because we care, because people have an emotional connection with that glacier, or because it forms a part of local and global history. Instead, we have to say that we must prevent melting glaciers because it can bring changes (e.g. rising sea levels) that will generate negative economic consequences. The language of economy and the prioritisation of this is affecting our systems of knowledge and reducing the power of emotions to affect socio-political change in its turn.

This same message appeared in Slyvain Briens’ paper on ‘RISE. Eco-Emotions of Ice and Icebergs in Artic Poetry’. Here, the feelings of anger and loss that are being experienced in relation to rising sea levels and the destruction of human worlds and cultures caused by this took centre stage. Despite emphasizing the impact that melting glaciers have in the erasure of human and emotional memory, the limitations that emotions can exert in generating political action to stop this were also apparent. One reason for this, as Tarek El-Ariss’ keynote ‘Against Nature’ highlighted, is that environmentalism has a dualistic side to it. On the one hand, a concern for the environment is something can often appear in times of crisis. Yet it is also something that most people in crisis cannot afford to care about. Those living in war-torn regions or territories experiencing severe drought may start to reevaluate their approaches to water and water supplies more carefully. Yet their immediate context means, understandably, that they lack the energy, time, and resources to care about environmental issues on a global scale. The freedom to act and engage emotionally with climate change and its consequences is not a luxury afforded to everyone. Although substantial effort and resources are being invested into tackling issues such as melting ice caps and rising oceanic temperatures, differences in the immediate needs and priorities of the global population work to limit the power of eco-emotions, or those feelings associated with ecology, environment, and environmental activism, to translate into cohesive and sustained action.

For all its revelations about the language of feeling’s decreasing ability to affect political and environmental approaches to water, something that the conference simultaneously emphasized was the centrality of human emotion in bringing water and the other natural elements to life. This narrative appeared in several papers including Sylvie Dagallier’s ‘By the Water and With the Water’ which argued for an approach to water as a living being. Central to Dagallier’s paper was the notion that the human ability to recognise the impact that it has on water and the wider environment has led us to apply and impose emotions and emotional frameworks on this. Water’s role as author and sufferer of violence gives it a living quality that makes it easier for humans to forge an emotional bond with it. Yet the duality of water’s power as life-giver and life-taker means that our emotional connection with it is decidedly complex. Ingvild Boberg’s analysis of the different colours and shapes that were used to depict the sea in those picture books created to help children navigate their grief following the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami, revealed a dualistic approach to water in which the pain and sorrow that accompanied the sudden and unexpected loss of loved ones coincided with a hope for the future and eventual healing. This ability of water to inspire simultaneously positive and negative emotion also surfaced in Bidisha Banerjee’s portrayal of the Mediterranean Sea as a site of serene beauty and migrant graveyard. The image of bodies concealed beneath the generally calm and vivid blue surface of the sea elicited a jarring combination of guilt, helplessness, horror, awe, wonder, and serenity.

This complexity also appeared in the writings of the sixth-century bishop, Gregory of Tours. While Gregory was consistent in his depiction of springs and fountains as sites of positive feelings such as joy, his rivers inspired a blend of terror, joy, and hope. The presence of this spectrum of feeling in Gregory’s approach to particular bodies of water attests to a complex and layered emotional relationship between humans and the natural environment that has survived the centuries. The interest of early medieval contemporaries in water and its role within the world sat at the heart of Marilina Cesario’s keynote lecture on the references to ‘bloody rain’ that appeared in Alcuin’s letters along with the Annales Cambriae (698 CE), and Annales Fuldenses (838 CE). In pointing to the existence of present-day examples, including the iron-rich Blood Falls in Antarctica, Glastonbury’s Red Spring (Chalice Well), and Camargue’s salty red marshes, Cesario showed that references to ‘bloody rain’ ought not just to be understood as the product of biblical metaphor, but of genuine environmental curiosity. The ability of natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, to produce unusually coloured waters means that interpreting references to bloody rain as allegory works to limit our understanding of early medieval attitudes towards water and the environment. To enrich our knowledge of feelings that were maintained in relation to water and the environment in the late antique and early medieval world, scholars must look beyond the Christian framework.

The need for scholars to broaden their established methods and horizons a notion that Victoria Young also advocated for in her keynote on ‘The Sea is her Story: An Archipelagic Approach to Writing from Okinawa’. Young’s call for adopting an oceanic approach to depictions of water and the environment in modern literature analysis represented a development of the archipelagic perspective in which the various landmasses of the world all become islands that are ultimately surrounded and infiltrated by water. One of the benefits of such an approach is that it facilitates the creation of new world cartographies, allowing scholars to redefine established parameters by viewing all the world’s societies as archipelagos. Although this method could prove useful for producing scholarly narratives that are more globally representative, the ramifications of an archipelagic or oceanic approach to the study of emotions remains unclear. The same issue also emerged in the transcorporeal approach that featured in Tomine Sandal’s discussion on ‘Ocean, Oil, and Illness’. While transcorporeality’s emphasis on the interconnected nature of humans with the elements looks beneficial for generating a more nuanced understanding of humanity’s relationship with water, its ability to advance our understanding of the human race’s emotional relationship with the elements appears uncertain. This is because the socio-cultural and linguistic differences that exist between the societies of present as well as the past means that human feelings and attitudes towards water are not necessarily consistent. Gregory of Tours, for example, experienced fear and joy in connection with water much like the eighteenth-century contemporaries who featured in Ellen Marie Krefting’s keynote ‘Affected by the Ocean’, but he would not have known what an ‘emotion’ was much less an ‘eco-emotion’. The same could be said for the eighth-century Japanese poets discussed by Yashuhiko Komatsu. Writing several centuries before the term emotion was invented and applied to the act of feeling, these poets used idealised imagery of what they thought rivers should look and sound like to convey feelings of purity or displeasure. This implicit use of the visual and soundscape to express feeling in relation to water stands in contrast to the explicit Latin used by Gregory and his peers. Even though the conference’s contributions collectively showed that is a unity to be found in the human act of feeling in connection with water, the differences in the ways that individuals and societies approach, express, and understand these feelings raises questions about the usefulness of methodological frameworks that encourage global or planetary approaches to water and feeling.

In the three days following the conference, I took some time to explore Oslo and reflect on all that had been shared. From the ocean-focused books I encountered in the Deichman Bjørvika to the water that lapped the sand on Hovedøya beach, water continued to accompany me and generate further questions. Is it possible for us to find a way of harmonizing or fusing the language of economy together with the language of feeling and experience? Can we reach a stage where the whole world, not just the developed and peaceable parts of it, will have the leisure and resources needed to work together to protect our waters and the emotions they carry? Will and how will humanity’s relationship with water change once the repercussions of melting glaciers and rising sea levels fully take hold? And, from a scholastic point of view, is the category of eco-emotions helpful when it comes to the preservation of existing knowledge and the generation of change? These are all questions that require further meditation. Yet regardless of whether the focus is on the writings of a sixth-century bishop or the present Eco-Emotions research being conducted by the Blue Humanities, one thing that the Eco-Emotions: On Water conference has shown is that humanity is united by the feelings that it experiences in relation to water. In a world that being increasingly torn apart by socio-political differences and environmental crises, remembering those points of connection has never been more important.