Foreword D. Fairchild Ruggles
Because water is critical for human survival, it is an elemental force in our consciousness. We depend on fresh water for sustenance, yet it seems to appear by divine will, raining from the heavens, gushing upward from mysterious subterranean springs, flowing from trickles and streams to become powerful rivers that do not simply traverse the landscape but give it life and form. While water visibly creates rivers and lakes, less observable is the way that it affects the land. Much of the character of the land that we inhabit has been shaped by water, although its present or former presence is not always discernible to the eye: deserts exist due to water’s scarcity, swamps are the result of its abundance, and when the great Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated from the northern half of the North American continent, it left behind a vast, flat, Midwestern landscape and immense lakes. For millennia, humankind has sought to understand the ways of water and to manage its behavior through design, engineering, and social organization so as to enhance its benefits and mitigate its destruction. As a force for creation and destruction, water figures in much of the world’s earliest literature, from the Epic of Gilgamesh flood story in which an evil king’s hubris causes divine flooding, to God’s punishment of immoral humanity in the 40-day flood in Genesis which Noah survives by building the ark. In Hindu belief, the Ganges River is the great mother, falling to earth in the Himalaya, entwining herself in the hair of Shiva, and winding her way in streams to the Gangetic plain of India and Bangladesh. The Ganges is also a crossing place, both literally as a body of water and conceptually as a crossing point in the journey from life to death, and thus enabling rebirth, attracting millions of pilgrims annually to bathe in its purifying waters. Similarly, the concept of spiritual transition occurs in Christianity through baptism, beginning with John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. In Judaism, purity is restored by the ritual bath, the mikvvah. In Egypt, the Nile was imagined in antiquity as the God Osiris, god of the dead but also associated with agriculture and wine. A benevolent king, he was murdered by his jealous brother who first cast him on the river’s waters in a sealed casket and then cut the body into pieces which he scattered across Egypt, the genitals cast into the Nile. According to myth, the fecundity of Osiris’s genitals was such that it caused the river to swell with an annual inundation and then subside, a metaphor that extended to the fertilization of the agricultural landscape by the nourishing flood which brought not only water but also rich silt. In the modern world, we seek scientific explanations for floods and droughts so as to better manage them, yet we remain susceptible to metaphor and anthropomorphism, giving human names to hurricanes such as Katrina (2002) and Maria (2017).
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Fresh Water
