Working as a teacher at an environmental education centre, I have introduced countless water conservation lessons to children of all ages by showing them an image of the planet we live on. ‘What is this?’ I would ask. ‘Earth!’ they would chorus in reply. I then ask them to look more closely at the picture. ‘What is the earth mostly covered with?’ ‘Water!’ they would shout. More often than not, a discussion would then ensue on why humans have decided on the moniker of ‘Earth’ for a planet that has 71% of its surface area covered in water. One bright spark would inevitably suggest that we should change the name of the planet to ‘Planet Water’; everyone would laugh and agree, and feeling happily revolutionary, we would continue on with our lesson.

Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), never suggests we change the name of our planet to ‘Planet Water’. She does, however, offer some important and somewhat revolutionary concepts to environmental educators and researchers in both her analysis of what she terms watery embodiment and in her intentional melding of posthuman feminist theory with phenomenology. Neimanis is immediately frank about the reasons why embracing both of these concepts is crucial in these times, citing increasing Anthropocenic global water crises as an obvious instigator of the need to reconsider how we understand, and act on, the impact of our human bodies on our surrounding ecology.

The introductory chapter in this short but weighty book scaffolds the ensuing discussion by both defining and defending the importance of a watery embodiment in the world. Neimanis reminds us that two-thirds of the human body is constituted of water, and that we are in a constant state of liquid dynamism and exchange with our environment; as she points out, ‘discrete individualism is a rather dry, if convenient, myth’ (p. 2). Our human bodies are an ‘always hybrid assemblage of matters that constitutes watery embodiment’ (p. 2), with these matters both human and more-than-human. In other words, the idea of watery embodiment reminds us that we are always already interconnected with the planetary commons, and that the idea of human privileging is biologically erroneous.

In Chapter 1, Neimanis deepens her definitions. Citing the work of feminist thinker Adrienne Rich, Neimanis presents the conundrum of how an interconnected hydro-commons can intersect with materially watery yet specifically located human bodies. Her answer is a posthuman feminism, which is examined throughout the book especially through explorations of embodiment and gestationality, and ‘reminds us that the waters we comprise are both intensely local and wildly global: I am here, and now, and at least three billion years old, and already becoming something else’ (p. 39). Terminology fundamental to exploring the world through a posthuman feminist lens is presented and discussed: transcorporeality (Alaimo), naturecultures (Haraway), intra-action (Barad). Neimanis suggests phenomenology, more specifically a feminist posthuman phenomenology, as the appropriate method for exploring these already embodied concepts, and suggests that what a feminist posthuman methodology can do is demand from phenomenologists to ‘activate and amplify the more-than-human modes of living that are also always part of existence and part of our “own” corporeality’ (p. 63, italics in the original). The purpose of this is also made clear: a call to wade into the murky depths of environmental ethics, wearing feminist gumboots. This insistence on our human responsibility to consider our ethical entanglements with the other-than-human world is a consistent theme throughout the book and is one of the reasons why it is so relevant to environmental education.

Another feminist theorist who provides scaffolding for Neimanis’ exploration is the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Chapter 2 flows into a fascinating discussion where Neimanis shares some of Irigaray’s key ideas, citing the potential for connections to posthumanist thinking, with their ‘attention to materiality, embodiment, imaginaries, and corporeal relational ethics that begins to extend beyond the individual human’ (p. 7). Irigaray’s work on the topic of the ethics of differentiation between the sexes has been fundamental, and controversial, in the development of feminist theory over the years, with accusations of essentialism and humanism being among the most prevalent critiques of her theories (pp. 71–72). Neimanis meets this head on by first suggesting that Irigaray can be understood to be ‘practicing a kind of feminist posthuman phenomenology’ (p. 74, italics in the original), then analysing Irigaray through a Deleuzian lens (specifically, his theory of difference and repetition), and finally, redefining Irigaray’s thinking as an ontologic of amniotics (p. 96), which expands on the ideas of transcorporeality and gestationality: ‘we must come to understand bodies of difference as also bodies that flow into and through one another. In a posthuman feminist move, this is a logic of “both/and” rather than “either/or”’ (p. 99, italics in the original). While this chapter would be a challenging one for those who are unfamiliar with the body of work of Irigaray and/or Deleuze, it does serve the purpose of situating Neimanis’ ideas in the wider world of feminist critical theory.

Chapter 3, ‘Fishy Beginnings’, further explores the idea of an ontologic of amniotics by considering evolution and origin stories. The discussion is wide-ranging and interwoven between evolutionary biology, feminist philosophy, science fiction and postcolonial theory, with the resultant feeling of being at a dinner party with erudite guests discoursing about the same topic, but all from different angles. The idea of ‘gestation’ is an important common thread: ‘as bodies of water, we rely on water for our continued proliferation, but we are also reservoirs for this proliferating force of life-in-the-plural’ (p. 111). Gestation is not limited to human female maternality, however, with an emphasis on the gestationality of water itself, challenging the reader to extend their thinking to consider the possibilities of posthuman gestationality, in which we ‘find an empathy with our strange kin in and through our embodied difference’ (p. 140).

The final chapter flows from ‘modern water’ to ‘global water’ to ‘Anthropocene water’, helpfully defining these terms, but more importantly, unpacking them through the posthumanist feminist phenomenological lens that has been carefully constructed throughout the book. Neimanis argues that the dominant imagery of the Anthropocene and its geologically groundedness can (or even should) be reconsidered by paying ‘more attention to the hydrosphere … that lubricates and connects’ (p. 160) all elements of the planet. The author thus takes this final opportunity to delve ever deeper into the implications of thinking as bodies of water — and this is where the true relevance of this book is summarised nicely for those of us who work in the field of environmental education and research.

Neimanis says succinctly: ‘My wager in this book has been that the figuration of “bodies of water” might enable us to create a more capacious aqueous imaginary for being responsive to other human and non-human bodies with whom we share a planetary existence’ (p. 182). If one of our goals as environmental educators/researchers is to re-story the old tired tales of bounded individualism, limitless growth and survival of the fittest, these ‘aqueous imaginaries’ provide an embodied discourse from which to launch. The story that we are all intraconnected via our watery bodies could provide the core concept needed, not only to encourage ethical decision making towards the other than human world, but to help us move towards a truly interdisciplinary practice in our teaching and our research.