Fluid relations

Anthropology and archaeology have developed a variety of theoretical approaches to understanding how humans, other species and things interact over time. This paper suggests that ‘immersing’ these discussions in the materials themselves, and thinking about how their properties and behaviours enable human–non-human relations, allow us to see putatively incompatible theories in more complementary terms. Flowing between and connecting the human and non-human on multiple systemic scales, water is particularly ‘good to think’, offering new local and global perspectives on material relations. The first part of this paper therefore attempts to bring different theoretical approaches together in an attempt to dissolve their boundaries, and the second provides a case study intended to demonstrate the potential analytic gains of ‘thinking with water’.

We are all familiar with water's material properties: its fluidity, its transformative capacities, its conductivity and its connectivity. Its molecular structure is such that these properties pertain at every level: thus its ‘behaviour’ in becoming ice, liquid or steam in a domestic kitchen is echoed in its freezing and thawing at the edge of a polar ice cap, or in its evaporation from oceans and forests. Its capacity to hydrate casts water as an essential ‘matter of substance’ for even the smallest microbial organisms. It is vital in human, animal and plant bodies, irrigating cells, enabling the circulation of nutrients, and carrying away waste. It is similarly essential to all ecosystemic processes, whether local, regional, continental or planetary in scale. Water materially connects the tiniest microbe with human bodies, with ecosystems and with world hydrological systems, composing the relationships between them (Helmreich 2009; Vernadsky Reference Vernadsky1986). This connection is both spatial and temporal: water's fluid movements may be as fleeting as the tiny capillary shifts through which water crosses a plant membrane, or as glacial as the accumulation of meltwater in underground aquifers. Water is therefore an ideal medium for considering material and ideational flows between scales and for revealing how the properties of things are omnipresent in and active upon engagements between things and persons.

We think with water both literally, as it enables the neurons via which thought is carried, and metaphorically, by employing its properties to conceptualize notions of flow (Edgeworth Reference Edgeworth2011; Féaux de la Croix Reference Féaux de la Croix2011; Shields Reference Shields1997). As a material that regularly shifts between liquid and solid states, water highlights the conceptual opposition between movement and stasis. In the process of being ingested, water is incorporated, becoming (at 67 per cent) a major part of the body and thus demonstrating both the contingent stability of the body and the permeability of the person as an ‘assemblage’ of both internal and external matter. This helps to underline a reality that matter is neither ontologically nor literally distinct: all things – and living kinds – are dynamically composed of flows of condensed matter. In this sense one can ‘think with’ the properties of any material and these contribute to the meanings attached to them. Thus Boivin notes,

The anthropological and archaeological literature on minerals and other materials (such as clay) highlights the ‘substantial’ conceptual and material relations between bodies and environments (Boivin Reference Boivin, Boivin and Owoc2004, 7; Taçon Reference Taçon1991; Reference Taçon, Boivin and Owoc2004). One might have parallel discussions about the movements and meanings of other materials, or even air. However, water's ubiquitous capacity to flow between articulates most clearly that persons are bio-cultural beings, and that human–environmental relationships are composed of interactions between material and social processes. Knappett (Reference Knappett2007, 22) reminds us that these interrelationships are spatially and temporally processual and that ‘categories of persons are distributed across biographical time and space’ (Knappett and Malafouris Reference Knappett and Malafouris2008, p. xi). Strathern (Reference Strathern1996) describes ‘hybrid’ networks of relations, and Bird-David (Reference Bird-David1999, 77; see also Bird-David Reference Bird-David1990) promotes epistemically relational visions of human–environmental engagement, suggesting that we replace Cartesian dualism with ‘I relate therefore I am’.

This latter point coheres with a theoretical shift to less anthropocentric visions of human–environmental interactions. Seeking a more egalitarian bioethic of relationality, efforts have been made to recognize more distributed forms of agency: the agentive power of non-human species and the dynamism of human interaction with what Bennett (Reference Bennett, Coole and Frost2010) calls ‘vital materiality’. Describing Latour's (Reference Latour2005) ‘assemblages’ of things and persons and Deleuze and Guattari's (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) representations of life as a pulse or movement in which all entities constantly differentiate or transform, Harvey highlights the utility of actor-network theory (ANT) in expressing the fluidity of relationships between humankind and non-human species and things (Harvey Reference Harvey, Fardon, Harris, Marchand, Nuttall, Shore, Strang and Wilson2012; see also Harvey and Knox Reference Harvey, Knox, Bennett and Joyce2010). Ingold (Reference Ingold, Low and Hsu2007a) takes a more ecological view to argue that, rather than separating things and people, or earth and sky, we need to pay attention to the fluxes of wind and weather and to the ‘ecology of materials. . . in form-making processes’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2012, 427). This echoes Edgeworth's (Reference Edgeworth2011) nice description of water as the ‘dark matter’ of landscape archaeology, in which rivers shape and are shaped by human activities.

Social theory has therefore generated increasingly fluid and permeable visions of inter-human and human–non-human relations. Things and people mix in complex and constantly shifting relationships. ‘Previously taken-for-granted notions of “persons”, “things” and “relations” are now thoroughly destabilized’ (Busse and Strang Reference Busse, Strang, Strang and Busse2010, p. xv). Notions of personhood are highly contingent (Verdery and Humphrey Reference Verdery and Humphrey2004). Identities flow across boundaries; things and places are incorporated into social life (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell Reference Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007); and, as Knappett and Malafouris (Reference Knappett and Malafouris2008, p. xiv) put it,

As this implies, notions of mind and cognition have become similarly ‘extended’ (Clark Reference Clark2010), further acknowledging the co-constitution of things and persons. Current writing on relational materiality also highlights the ontological fluidity in which experiences, practices, technologies and representations undergo continual renegotiation, and multiple ontologies exist in tension, competing, dominating, subverting and altering (Law Reference Law2002; Mol Reference Mol2002).

Figure 2

Re-creating water on the South Bank of the Brisbane River.

Affective relations

Phenomenological perspectives on relationality have also been fruitful. For Ingold (Reference Ingold2000; Reference Ingold, Low and Hsu2007a; Reference Ingold2011a; Reference Ingold2011b) the environment is a ‘generative field’ in which people engage, simultaneously experiencing, dwelling in, assessing and utilizing its various elements. Analyses of sensory experience have similarly underlined both the processual nature and the intimacy of human interactions with the material world (Csordas Reference Csordas1994; Damasio Reference Damasio1999; Howes Reference Howes2005). Water is central to this engagement, permeating multiple everyday experiences with the dampness of rain, the relieving rehydration of a cold drink, the taste of spring water, the weightlessness of immersion. Human senses are entranced by the mesmerizing shimmer of water surfaces, the excitement of waterfalls, the calming rhythm of waves, the movements of water through the material world, and the vagaries of the weather. In every cultural and historical context, weather is integral to people's experiences of landscape and their cosmological understandings of it over time (Pillatt Reference Pillatt2012, 33). The temporal depth of experiential engagement with water is highlighted, for example, by Harmansah (Reference Harmansah2007), who notes how key water places, such as the source of the Tigris, enabled the construction of mytho-poetic landscapes in ancient Assyria. Edgeworth (Reference Edgeworth2011) similarly describes long-term archaeological traces of material relations between rivers and people.

The more immediate notion of embodiment expresses the simultaneously affective, cognitive and material nature of these interactions and the incorporation of their emotional, imaginative and physiological effects into long-term relations with place. Such engagement is not static: it entails constant flows between the subjective phenomenological experience of things and the objective perusal, classification, evaluation and representation of them. Hegel (Reference Hegel1979) described this as a dialectical process and, following Merleau-Ponty's (Reference Merleau-Ponty2003) seminal work in this area, Tilley (2004, 1) observes that ‘knowledge of a thing is grounded in our bodily experience of it’. Schlanger (Reference Schlanger2009) reminds us of Mauss's point: that the body is the first tool, and the ‘technology of the body’ includes the cognitive schemes through which things are described and categorized.

Categories, and the meanings and values attached to them, are foundational to relationships. But such categories are not arbitrary: to compose and represent them, people draw directly on the material and behavioural properties of things (Tilley Reference Tilley2007, 17). In this sense, if we accept Deleuze and Guattari’s's vision of mutually constitutive being – which builds on Spinoza's (Reference Spinoza2001) critique of Cartesian dualism – engagements with the world are not dialectical so much as emergent, dynamically integrating material and human processes of ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987; see also Bennett Reference Bennett2009; Reference Bennett, Coole and Frost2010; Coole and Frost Reference Coole and Frost2010).

In anthropological and archaeological debates, material-culture analyses have often been placed oppositionally to more phenomenological approaches (see Johnson Reference Johnson2012). However, their immersion in water reveals more complementarity than has been acknowledged. Analyses of material culture have also encompassed sensory engagement, articulating relationships between things and persons. They have shown how meanings are encoded in objects and communicated intergenerationally, evoking affective responses, transmitting ideas and practices and inspiring religious fervour (see Boivin Reference Boivin2008; Edwards Reference Edwards2012; Gell Reference Gell, Coote and Shelton1992; Reference Gell1998; Hodder Reference Hodder2012; Morphy Reference Morphy1994b; Pinney and Thomas Reference Pinney and Thomas2001). Such approaches are as readily applied to ‘natural resources’ as to human-made artefacts, and I have drawn on both these and more ecologically oriented theories in considering recurrent patterns in people's relationships with water (Strang Reference Strang2004; Reference Strang2005a; see also Edgeworth Reference Edgeworth2011).

Informants describe aesthetic, emotional and spiritual responses to water that highlight, in particular, its capacities to ‘revive’ or ‘re-create’ the self. As well as focusing recreational activities around water, they engage with it through painting, poetry and music. They sprinkle it in important rituals, especially those signifying social inclusion. They also use water for a vast range of practical purposes. In every instance, it is encoded with powerful meanings that draw imaginatively on its particular properties. Material flows of water are employed conceptually and linguistically in metaphors for time (Lakoff and Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980; Strang Reference Strang2004; Tilley 2004). The literal vitality of water to human life and the recognition that this is equally essential to all organic beings – its ‘upwelling’ and down-pouring, and its dynamic movements through the material environment – lead consistently to its categorization as the primary life-generating substance. There are obvious comparisons that could be drawn with the studies noted earlier, focusing on the generative capacities of minerals and in particular oil, which, like water, ‘wells up’ dynamically to enable ‘energy production’.

Keane (Reference Keane and Miller2005, 186) observes that meanings are not merely communicated through language and semiotic signs, noting that materiality itself ‘gives rise to and transforms modalities of action and subjectivity regardless of whether they are interpreted’. Co-substantiality between persons and things, and the flow of water between bodies and environments, also lead to deeply relational ideas about common substance and connection: for example in imagining the co-identification of people and places (Strang Reference Strang2002; Strang and Garner Reference Strang and Garner2006). Thus water is useful in dissolving theoretical divides between ‘textual’ analyses of material culture and more abstract processual views of how ‘human beings and other organisms are bound in webs of life’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2012, 428).

Water and agency

Implicit in discussions about affect is some acknowledgement of the agency of things in forming human–non-human relations. This issue has been much debated: as Knappett and Malafouris observe, many anthropologists remain committed to the notion that agency can only be constituted by human consciousness and intentionality, and that ‘the only true agents in history are human individuals’ (Knappett and Malafouris Reference Knappett and Malafouris2008, p. x). But Tilley argues (Reference Tilley2007, 19) that agency is inherent in ideas about affordances (see also Gibson Reference Gibson1979; Gibson and Ingold Reference Gibson and Ingold1994): things and landscapes ‘influence forms of perception and activity, but they do not determine thought and action, and not anything can be made of them. They offer a series of affordances for living and acting in the world, and a series of constraints’ (Tilley Reference Tilley2010, 29). Extending Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1986), Tilley (Reference Tilley, Keane, Küchler, Rowlands and Spyer2006, 10, original emphasis) adds that ‘if things have their own biographies, it is but a short step to consider these things as having their own agency and actively having effects in relation to persons’.

This suggests that the perceived qualities of things are actively promoted by their particular properties. In the constantly negotiated and transforming relational materiality of things and persons, agency may therefore be said to be distributed between human actors and non-human ‘actants’ that ‘variously enable and support, or resist and disrupt, human intention’ (Harvey Reference Harvey, Fardon, Harris, Marchand, Nuttall, Shore, Strang and Wilson2012, 117). And in less anthropocentric bioethical models, the agency of things – or, as Coole and Frost (Reference Coole and Frost2010, 9) put it, their ‘agentic capacities’ – are not confined to their interactions with humankind, but are equally concerned with their abilities to co-constitute their relations with other things/species (see Chen, Macleod and Neimanis Reference Chen, Macleod and Neimanis2013). Ingold (Reference Ingold2007b, 9, 10) accepts that things are ‘active constituents of a world-in-formation’, but rejects the idea of locating agency in them, maintaining that, in a ‘lifeworld’,

As Pels (Reference Pels and Spyer1998) says, it is important not to assume some form of intentionality or sentience or to ‘fetishize’ material objects. Anthropologists have provided many ethnographic accounts of the animist beliefs of particular cultural groups, for example ideas about sentient landscapes (Bradley Reference Bradley2000), the spiritually generative power of stones and minerals (Bender Reference Bender1998; Boivin Reference Boivin, Boivin and Owoc2004; Taçon Reference Taçon, Boivin and Owoc2004), or the notions of ‘living water’ that recur with stubborn consistency in a wide range of religious and purportedly secular cosmologies (Krause and Strang Reference Krause and Strang2013). However, while intellectual engagement with these modes of thought has clearly contributed imaginatively to debates, this does not imply the incorporation of animism into anthropological theories, nor does it obviate the potential for acknowledging the dynamic co-constitution of things and persons. Tsing's (Reference Tsing2004) writing on ‘friction’ is useful in this regard, describing a generative sea in which people, processes and things collide, abrade and affect each other, shaping and being shaped in the process.

Notions of generative seas or ‘flux’ are appealing, resonating with Latour's (Reference Latour2005) view that agency emerges neither from people nor from things but from their combination. However, I would argue that, while these ideas provide invaluable metaphors for describing dynamic and complex processes, such wholly distributive approaches do not give sufficient weight to the specific materiality of things and the formative capacities of their particular properties. ‘Collisions and abrasions’ do not take place by chance, and the properties of things and persons are not random. They reflect long-term evolutionary adaptations and co-development, and consistent patterns of engagement over time.

In this sense a focus on the materiality of things offers some counterbalance to rather absolute postmodern notions of fluidity. If things (and persons) have abiding properties, processes and behaviours, which are formative of their relationships, it is reasonable to consider the characteristics of objects (and, for that matter, human and other living kinds) relative – though by no means fixed – constants in an evolving ‘flux’ of emergent relations. That is not to say that things, even water, are homogeneous: all have their own specific material variations and micro-historical trajectories (Gell Reference Gell1998; see also Appadurai Reference Appadurai1986). But there is room for both continuity and change. The perceived qualities of things and their meanings and uses may change radically according to temporal and cultural context, and new relational forms will emerge, but their material properties provide consistent cognitive stimuli and phenomenological experiences and encourage recurrent ideas, values and practices (Strang Reference Strang2005a; Reference Strang, Strang and Busse2010).

In anthropology a disciplinary commitment to cultural relativity, and a concern to stress the particularity of each ethnographic context, have tended to discourage comparative analyses of how material things contribute ontologically to human–non-human relations. Archaeology, meanwhile, has been more open to this notion: for example, Richards (Reference Richards1996) notes that, in its disciplinary representations, elements retain ontological status. As Andrew Barry has commented (pers. comm., 2013), both materials and cultures are specific, but both need to be located within broader processes of imagining relations between things and persons. I have argued previously (Strang Reference Strang2005a) that cultural specificity and cross-cultural commonality in meanings are not mutually exclusive (see also Morphy Reference Morphy and Weiner1994a). Anthropological theory fundamentally relies upon spatial and temporal comparison (Gingrich Reference Gingrich2012). In fact, a repudiation of human-centred views, and an acknowledgement that material things have a role in forming human–non-human relationships and engendering meanings, offer a compelling logic that their capacities to do so must necessarily cross cultural boundaries and persist over time.

There is ample ethnographic evidence to this effect. For example, as Rival, Bloch and others have shown (in Rival Reference Rival1998), recurrent ways of thinking about and engaging with trees in diverse cultural and geographic contexts suggest that these relationships are formed in part by the particular physical properties and behavioural characteristics of trees themselves. As noted above, work on minerals suggests similar material agency. Research on the meanings of water (Strang Reference Strang2004) also offers some rapprochement between cross-cultural themes and cultural specificities. While highlighting the diversity of human–water relations, it provides abundant ethnographic and historical evidence demonstrating major spatio-temporal continuities in societies’ engagements with water, and in the metaphors associated with it. Water's core meanings as a life-generating, life-connecting source; as the basis of wealth, health and power; as a transformative medium; and as a metaphorical base for concepts of movement and flow, recur so reliably in different cultural and historical contexts that there is little choice but to conclude that its material properties are relationally formative.

Resourcing water

Water is categorized as a resource at various stages in its movements through persons and landscapes. This is critical because it demonstrates very clearly multiple impositions of human agency and control. As notions of ‘resources’ have become increasingly reductive, reframing things as purely economic ‘assets’ or ‘services’, contests for the ownership and control of water have increased in number and intensity. Water is quintessential in its ‘resourcefulness’ – this is, after all, a term which quite literally suggests a constant wellspring of generative power. It has the fluid potential to effect transformations in every sphere of human endeavour, and in this sense constitutes ‘über-potential’ in material form. It readily illuminates the relationship between political ecology and materiality (see Bakker and Bridge Reference Bakker and Bridge2006; Coole and Frost Reference Coole and Frost2010; Braidotti Reference Braidotti, Coole and Frost2010). Thus Hudson observes that, while Marx conceptualized economy as containing processes of value creation and transformation, there is also ‘a need to understand production as . . . a material transformation process’ (Hudson Reference Hudson2012, 2).

As I have noted elsewhere (Strang Reference Strang2005b), it may be helpful to frame this process as a shifting continuum of agency. At each stage, things retain their material properties and their agentive capacities, but their re-formation as ‘resources’ is enabled by the application of more and more human (and specifically cultural) agency, materially enacted through technology, the ‘prosthetic’ extension of human physical capacities (Gell Reference Gell1998). The phrase ‘raw materials’ is telling, implying that to be ‘cultural’ things have to be physically and/or imaginatively transformed or ‘cooked’ into a different state. At various stages they may also be categorized as ‘waste’ or ‘dead matter’, with the implication that all potential (or life) has been extracted; this can be regarded as the polar opposite of ‘resource’ – unless other ‘potentials’ can be accessed via reclamation, reconstitution and recycling. As Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2006, 2–3) observes, ‘it is in the dynamics of these relations that it is possible to see the mutual constitution of human subjects and inanimate wasted objects’.

As materials flow through spatio-temporal and bio-cultural processes, what is considered to be potentially valuable or ‘waste’ is mediated by cultural ideas and values, but how things move is also a fundamentally material business, dependent upon the physical characteristics of the resource in question and on technologies of transport. Ephemeral resources – intellectual property, ideas etc. – require living people and communicative media. Physically substantial materials such as stone and timber require stalwart oxen, large trucks or hefty ships. Cotton requires space. Crops generally require storage that prevents or at least delays decomposition. Water, other liquids and gases can only be moved in large quantities through channels and pipes, and require effective containment if they are not to escape or evaporate.

Each material ‘resource’ thus shapes the technology of its transport. Also materially relevant is the topography and climate of its location. Just as they produce particular resources, particular locations may also impede or assist infrastructural developments such as the roads, pipelines, airstrips and canals necessary for their movement. Carrying capacity affects population levels and thus the workforce available to grow, harvest and dispatch crops; to extract minerals and load them into trucks; to dig irrigation channels or lay pipelines. In a global economy physical distances to markets are important, constraining the possible technologies of transport, the energy required to move objects, and thus the practical and economic feasibility of doing so. In moving through processes of production, exchange and consumption, the material characteristics of ‘resources’, the materiality of their original locations and destinations, and the material bodies of human beings therefore participate in dynamic and mutually constitutive relationships.

Flowing through Queensland

A useful way to articulate material relationality is to follow a water stream as it flows through a specific social and material context. In Queensland, the Brisbane River begins as run-off from inland ranges that, 200 years ago, with the river and wetlands emerging from them, supported a self-sufficient Aboriginal economy. Archaeological traces of this low-key engagement with the local environment remain in stone tools, shell middens, domiculture and so forth. Today the Jimna Ranges primarily support cattle grazing and forestry. Gathering at the base of the hills, small streams merge and form the larger river. Over millennia, the river has cut a wide valley eastwards to the coast, from time to time flooding the flat plains it has created. Its movements have both provided fertile farmland for colonial settlers and, with the clearance of land for this purpose, increased the risk of inundation of the expanding urban areas near the estuary.

The impoundment of water is the most basic application of human agency. For 60,000 years hunter-gatherers in Australia cleared and protected springs and dug wells, and since the first city pipeline was built by colonial settlers in 1893, the purpose of the dams and weirs in the Brisbane River Valley has been fundamentally the same: to ensure a reliable supply of potable water for the local population. The increasing scale and instrumentality of human activities in the region are readily evident. Determined that topography should not be destiny, successive Queensland governments have built larger and larger dams to assure supplies of drinking water, to irrigate crops and to provide flood mitigation. The fluid nature of the balance of human–water agency is clear in that water regularly subverts this control, disappearing in lengthy droughts, or arriving in unmanageable quantities, as it did in the floods that subsumed much of Brisbane in 2011. The subversive agency of water is combated with deeper bores and desalination plants, flood prevention infrastructure, pipelines for recycling, and more sophisticated forms of water treatment.

Figure 3

Moogerah Dam in the Brisbane River Valley.

Through these extensions of human agency, water is drawn into socio-technical systems that transform it into ‘drinking water’. It is dammed and filtered, microbial organic presences are killed off with chlorine, fluoride is added. It becomes ‘drinking water’ or H₂0, the product of science and engineering (Illich Reference Illich1986; Linton Reference Linton2010). As ‘water supplies’, it is piped into the city, underlining Miller's (Reference Miller2005; Reference Miller2007) point that even the most basic things that people engage with are rarely ‘raw’ or ‘virgin’ materials, but complex artefacts incorporating sophisticated levels of acculturation.

Transformed and distributed through a network of supply pipes, the ‘drinking-water supply’ gathered from the Jimna Ranges flows down to the household tap, through which it enables the various functions of a domestic context: food preparation, hygiene and sanitation. Here, on an even more immediate scale, water also loops through an interface with bodies, engaging not only with individual human bodies and their cells, but also, as Neimanis (Reference Neimanis2013, 217–18) points out, with the ‘gut sociality’ of their microbial inhabitants. Its interaction with the human body entails an internal cycle of cellular hydration and waste removal. Infused with waste and with the nomadic microbes of the intestines, water carries these ‘outwards’ to be diffused/defused (via sweat, breath, urination and excretion). The larger domestic body of the house expels it into sewage pipes and treatment plants. It is then returned to the river for rehabilitation through the agency of the environment, nicely expressed in the idea of the ‘magic mile’: a distance in which the river below sewage treatment plants is expected to dilute, absorb or at least ‘take away’ the flow of waste.

Demonstrating water's capacities to enable scheme transfers across scales, there is ready coherence between ideas about the ‘right’ balance of water flowing through the body and in a wider material environment. Houses, cities, rural and urban landscapes all depend upon an orderly flow of water. Running eastwards through the Brisbane River Valley, this flow is regulated with various forms of impoundment. One of the most important is Lake Wivenhoe, the vast ‘reservoir’, created in 1983. Irrigators describe such reservoirs as ‘liquid gold’, highlighting a view that this is an economic reserve in which water and its potentiality are captured and held. Lake Wivenhoe's water is diverted into farm dams, sprayed onto crops, and so transformed, ‘becoming’ the products that express the agency and identity of the region's ‘primary producers’ (Strang Reference Strang2006b; Reference Strang2009). Thus its culturally and historically ubiquitous generative potential is realized in the ‘fruitbowl of Australia’.

Until recently, many local products were transported down the river to Brisbane. Today these flows happen primarily by road, but the river still enables the movement of goods outwards via the large port constructed in its estuary. The port – one could say portal – is indeed the raison d’être of the city, linking Brisbane umbilically to larger social and economic bodies. Thus the water that began in the Jimna Ranges is exported from the state into global circulations of trade.

Throughout all of these transformations, water retains its material properties and capacities to compose relationships. Shared drinking water links bodies and places, and water's incorporation into human bodies co-substantiates extended networks of ‘blood relations’ in the river valley. Water is used in local churches to baptize newcomers into congregations. The river connects farms and settlements, providing a sense of community and shared productivity; the networks of water pipes linking domestic households compose particular social and material connections. The river's winding course through Brisbane forms the city's distinctive identity. Thus multiple social relations are enlivened by water's material properties and by its capacity to carry core meanings as the substance of social and spiritual being.

However, although water connects, it is also implicit in regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Locally, these are defined by who has piped supplies, independent boreholes or riparian land; who has licences to abstract, to impound or to harvest water; who has access to use it recreationally. Cities consume water that would otherwise feed the ecosystems from which it is abstracted. Larger regional, national and international networks are focused on long-running contests about who owns and controls the flow of potentiality – and who is therefore advantaged or disadvantaged. Water, like other ‘reserves’, is physically located, but the transformations that realize its potential convert it not just into other material things but also into virtual resources.

Transpiration

Like the water that flows up through trees, transpires from their leaves, and evaporates upwards and outwards, the water diverted into production in south-east Queensland flows outwards into larger relational scales. Queensland's exports – pineapples, mangoes, fruit juice, wine and also water-thirsty but highly profitable crops such as rice and cotton – are composed of vast amounts of ‘virtual water’ (Allan Reference Allan2011). There are beef and dairy products from cattle watered from the Great Artesian Basin or local aquifers and fed on irrigated pastures. There is timber grown most effectively along waterways, gravel formed by the river's ‘work’, and manufactured objects made in water-dependent production processes. All are influenced not only by the properties of water, but also by the material characteristics of the local environment: the river that allowed settlers, 200 years ago, to dispossess the indigenous inhabitants and clear land for farming; the local and imported flora and fauna; the climate and rainfall; and the topography permitting flows of goods downriver. Via the combination of material processes and the human agency enacted upon these, the water that flows through Queensland is thus appropriated to serve human interests and transformed into the products that generate the wealth and well-being of the state.

The export of material goods from Queensland entails a further transformation of water. Initially, with a prerequisite that they would produce things, landowners were given licences to abstract water in unlimited quantities and then, as farming intensified, in limited volumetric amounts. In the last decade another transformation has occurred: the federal government introduced a system of water trading that converted licences for water allocations into private assets tradable on a virtual ‘water market’. Thus water was allocated to particular people via a system of rights, then quantified, then reconstituted as their private assets. Held initially by farmers and local industries, these privatized allocations are now being bought up by giant irrigation companies (see Strang Reference Strang and Wagner2013). In this way fresh water has been commoditized and enclosed and, in Polanyi's (Reference Polanyi1957) terms, ‘disembedded’ from its locality.

Rising to a global scale, this ‘dematerialized’ water gets caught in the jet stream and captured by the jet set to be dispersed into the streams of wealth circulating the globe and connecting local, national and international economies. Reconstituted as cash flow, some of it might rain back down into the local economy; some might enable the extraction of resources elsewhere in the state – for example through investment in mining ventures. But most will flow in virtual form into the fluid financial resources of transnational corporations. Where it pools and whom it benefits depend on an increasingly volatile balance of international relations in which non-human agency has little impact.

Dehydration

What transpires when water ‘resources’ flow out of social and ecological systems into levels of consumption that these cannot sustain? Like other material resources, water is diverted into production processes that, for the most part, externalize their costs, creating increasingly unequal bioethical relations. Australia, the world's most arid continent, has become a massive net exporter of water to wetter and more densely populated countries. In the process, ‘water footprints’ of various kinds are left: the ‘freshwater footprint’ of the water abstracted from local ecosystems, and the ‘greywater footprint’ of the polluted waste water of production (Meissner Reference Meissner, Hahn, Cless and Soentgen2012). Most of the social and ecological costs of such footprints are treated as external to productive processes, to be borne by less powerful human groups and the non-human inhabitants of the material environments from which these ‘resources and services’ are (over)drawn.

Queensland's rapid agricultural intensification and dependence on irrigation has led to chronic overuse of water, with multiple effects. For example, rivers’ seasonal flows synchronize with the reproductive cycles of aquatic species: when flows are altered, this orderly pattern of symbiotic agency is disrupted. Where forests and wetlands previously absorbed run-off and maintained hydrological stability, the radical clearance and drainage of these has removed key non-human habitats as well as causing soil erosion and pollution, and leaving areas highly vulnerable to flooding, often followed (because of lost storage capacity) by water shortages. Falling water levels in the Great Artesian Basin are causing springs to disappear, requiring ever deeper boreholes and producing water infused with arsenic and fluoride. Crop irrigation has salinated vast land areas, rendering them incapable of supporting even native flora and fauna.

Rapid urban expansions have increased demands for water supplies and waste management, placing ever higher levels of stress on ecosystems and their dependent species. Low flows, quarrying and dredging compromise water quality, as do the chemicals used in farming and industrial production. The waste products of all of these activities flow into coastal areas, with concomitant impacts on marine species. As well as massively transforming water in the immediate material environment, Queensland's enlarging human population is also burning fuel, consuming other resources, and in this way contributing to the production of CO₂ and so to climate change. Thus the impacts of human production and consumption, like the water of the Brisbane River itself, are carried outwards into larger-scale human–environmental interactions.

As well as affecting local and planetary ecosystems, water-use practices in Queensland have immediate social, economic and political effects. The drinking water in Aboriginal communities located on the edge of the Artesian Basin contains rising levels of harmful chemicals. Upstream water impoundment and redirection has deprived many downstream farmers of their livelihoods and impinged upon the activities of recreational water users. Primary producers are locked into a mercilessly competitive water market: many small farmers can no longer afford to buy water allocations, and have traded the water away from their land and retired. Farmers must also contend with rising competition for water from urban populations, and with the decisions of politicians dependent on urban votes. They are also subject to the wider pressures of global economic markets, which make it impossible for them to remain economically ‘viable’ without intensifying and irrigating at materially unsustainable levels.

Not everyone agrees that these are reasonable costs: groups concerned about social and ecological justice are campaigning against the activities of commercial water users and a state government doggedly committed to continued growth and development. As in other countries where water privatization has occurred, many people resent the enclosure of previously collective resources (Albro Reference Albro and Nash2005; Strang Reference Strang2004; Reference Strang and Wagner2013). This is not merely a matter of distribution of material wealth. Given the links between water and power, the privatization of water has direct impacts upon democracy, contributing to the disenfranchisement of all but a powerful international elite of water owners and political decision-makers. What transpires, then, is that the redirected flow of Queensland's water is benefiting smaller and smaller percentages of the human population, and the overriding of alternative forms of agency is impacting negatively on many human groups and non-human species in Queensland and elsewhere.

International relations

The patterns of water use evident in Queensland, and their social and material consequences, are being repeated all over the world. Widespread drainage of water from wetland areas to extend agricultural activities has destroyed the habitats vital for a range of species, contributing to vastly accelerated rates of extinction (Strang, in press). Over-abstraction has reduced many rivers to poisonous trickles (Reisner Reference Reisner2001). Too much water is being poured onto farmland to irrigate shallow-rooted crops, drawing salts to the surface and degrading delicate soil systems. Increasing demand for urban and industrial water has not only caused humans to compete for water with other species, but also produced complex forms of waste, further compromising the health and sustainability of aquatic ecosystems. Though these impacts are far from evenly distributed, there is no place, no society, in which people, non-human species and material environments are not experiencing the effects of the overuse of water and other ‘resources’. Even social elites are being confronted with the extreme negative potentials of irreversible environmental change, wilder variations in rainfall and weather, and political unrest. As Hansen (Reference Hansen2009) says, there are storms on the horizon.

More sustainable human–environmental engagements cannot be achieved if societies continue to expand their populations and remain wedded to growth-dependent economic systems. Recent economic crises have resuscitated both a robust critique of these and the promotion of ideas about ‘degrowth economics’ (Georgescu-Roegen Reference Georgescu Roegen1971; Meadows et al. Reference Meadows, Randers and Meadows1972; Schumacher Reference Schumacher1973). While some analysts (e.g. Latouche Reference Latouche2004) seem to elide the political implications of a shift in this direction, others (e.g. Daly Reference Daly1996; Harvey Reference Harvey2010) have been more open about its potential to spark radical social and political change. Thus Harvey (Reference Harvey2010) suggests a need for a ‘co-revolutionary movement’ brought about through a coalescence of countermovements critical of the status quo.

Intrinsic to such a groundswell is the flow of information between groups, which, like water, circulates between the grass roots and global media. But seeing and comprehending the complex material connections between local, regional and global events is challenging. It may be useful, therefore, to focus on the exemplar of flows between scales that water provides. By thinking with water, it is possible to see sustainability not just as an abstract measure of resource use and its ecological and social costs, but as a matter of material flows – or indeed as a flow of material matter. Sustainability relies on the orderly movements of things, i.e. at a rate which permits the material renewal not just of resources themselves, but also of the other elements of the social and ecological systems upon which their production and use depend. As well as being an ‘orderly system’ in Douglas's (Reference Douglas1975) terms, the flow of material things is also a system with its own agentive order, a set of adaptive reciprocal relations that has evolved over evolutionary time. This temporal stability is now being anthropogenically disrupted, with emergent effects on all scales. Following the flow of water from local into larger resource movements is useful in rematerializing these relationships and serves to connect individual and local actions with larger flows of events.