Foreword D. Fairchild Ruggles

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).

In lived practice, designers and engineers have struggled to develop systems for managing water, treating it both as a resource and a dynamic force that shapes the environment. Early forms of water management took the form of dams, reservoirs, and wells for collecting water, with canals and aqueducts, both above ground and subterranean, for transporting water from source to village or field. Machinery—waterwheels, levers, and pumps—was invented to lift the water from place of storage to place of consumption. Finally, human society developed political processes for ensuring the fair distribution of the supply through water clocks and judicial courts, as well as for allocating the cost of either draining the land or obtaining and storing water to enhance the land, either through tax levies or required labor. In arid landscapes, such as northern Africa and the southwestern United States, the challenge was to obtain water; in wetter landscapes, such as the Netherlands and Illinois, the challenge was to remove it to maximize the amount of land available for habitation and agriculture. In a capitalist society, the drive to increase the area of usable land was directly linked to its value as a commodity.

The studies in this volume focus on the North American context, but they follow upon centuries of global concern for freshwater as an environmental and economic resource that humankind must manage wisely for its own survival. Where the contributions in this volume distinguish themselves is in their emphasis on water relationships stitched together through land, infrastructure, and human communities over the last 150 years in the specific geographies of the Mississippi River, Nelson River, and Great Lakes Basin. Authors observe not only the rivers but the entire contingent watershed of each, not only the lakes but the topography that gives them form. For example, the upstream-downstream relationship, which is structured by water flow, has a profound effect across and throughout the land. In North America, as the essays in this volume explain, there is ample evidence to show how the urban-industrialinfrastructural model for hydrologic manipulation is often very damaging to the downstream ecology and to the health of communities living there, especially those that are economically marginalized or indigenous.

Each of the editors of this visionary volume embodies a knowledge of water, Mary Pat McGuire, PLA has lived and worked in the multiple water contexts of the Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, the Great Lakes, and Venice’s great lagoon, where she experienced one of the highest recorded floods of its notorious aqua alta. She is the Principal Designer at the Water Lab where she collaborates with geologists, hydrologists, and engineers on urban water issues. Jessica Henson, PLA, an associate at OLIN, has worked on design projects for socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure in Philadelphia, the Midwest, and Los Angeles, her current project being the Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. Brought together as faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, they ambitiously convened a group engaged with the environment through design, policy, science, history, and literature, and challenged them to consider fresh water conceptually through the categories of connective lines, spatial and social bodies, and watersheds, and ultimately as a land-water relationship—a symbiosis, not a binary—with serious stakes for human welfare. The world urgently needs these new ways of thinking about fresh water because, while the fascination with water has always been present in the human consciousness, we are now faced with nothing less than an environmental emergency in which global warming is causing the shift of water from glacial ice to ocean, and from ocean to atmosphere, and from atmosphere to land, causing devastating storms, ocean surges, and droughts on a scale that is unprecedented in human history. We are reluctantly realizing that the disastrous consequences of global warming can no longer be averted, because our politicians have failed to reach consensus and take action. Instead, we must turn to designers to help us understand and plan for the changing environment. Their multidisciplinary approach to environmental problem solving, large-scale perspective encompassing the urban and connected hinterland, and recognition that any discussion of the environment must also include human society and human actors, is at the heart of Fresh Water.