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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
What would happen if we were to awaken one day and suddenly realize that the world we live in appeared eerily alien, as if we’d been teleported to some other distant world? That frightening prospect is now. Our planetary hydrosphere, which animates all of life on Earth, is rebelling in the wake of a global warming climate, spurring biblical spring floods, devastating summer droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires and powerful autumn hurricanes and typhoons, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and society.
For too long we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have come to believe that we live on a land planet when the reality is that we live on a water planet, and now the Earth’s hydrosphere is rewilding in the throes of a changing climate, taking our species and our fellow creatures into a mass extinction event as it searches for a new equilibrium.
Jeremy Rifkin calls on us to rethink our place in the universe and realize that we live on Planet Aqua. He takes us on a new journey into the future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live – how we engage nature, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space. The next stage in the human journey is to rebrand our home Planet Aqua and learn how to readapt to the waters of life.
Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world’s leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Epigraphs
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
Part I The Imminent Collapse of Hydraulic Civilization
1 First There Was the Waters
Déjà Vu and the Second Deluge
Our Aquatic Self: How Humans Emerged from the Deep
Notes
2 The Earth Be Dammed: The Dawn of Hydraulic Civilization
The Making of a Social Organism
The Invention of Economics
Drowning in Progress
Notes
3 Gender Wars: The Struggle Between Terra Firma and Planet Aqua
Picking Sides: The War of Goddesses and Gods
Women: The Carriers of the Water
Notes
4 The Paradigmatic Transformation from Capitalism to Hydroism
The Water–Energy–Food Nexus
Leaving Capitalism Behind
Notes
Part II The Canary in the Mine: How the Mediterranean Eco-Region Became Day Zero on a Warming Earth and a Bellwether of the Second Coming of Life
5 The Near Death and Rebirth of the Mediterranean
Day Zero: When Nations Run Dry
Renewables to the Rescue and a Second Life for the Mediterranean Ecosystem
Water, Water, Everywhere, But Not Any Drop to Drink Until Now
Notes
6 Location, Location, Location: The Eurasian Pangaea
The Bridge to Europe and Asia
Notes
Part III We Live on Planet Aqua and That Changes Everything
7 Freeing the Waters
Opening the Floodgates
Harvesting the Hydrosphere
Notes
8 The Great Migration and the Rise of Ephemeral Society The Renaissance of the Ephemeral Arts and the Reset of Time and Space
How Plato Took Our Species Down the Wrong Path
Notes
9 Rethinking Attachment to Place: Where We’ve Come from and Where We’re Heading
Stepping into Neo-Nomadism
Ephemeral Cities and Ephemeral Waters
A New Business Model: Additive Manufacturing and Provider–User Networks
Notes
10 Bringing High-Tech Agriculture Indoors
Vertical Farming
Notes
11 The Eclipse of Sovereign Nation States and the Gestation of Bioregional Governance
Mass Migration and the Issuing of Climate Passports
Military Defense Gives Way to Climate Resilience
Notes
Part IV Sublime Waters and a New Ontology of Life on Earth
12 Two Ways to Listen to the Waters
Vanquishing the Waters or Riding the Waves
Reorienting Ourselves in Time and Space in a Liquid Milieu
Notes
13 Swallowed by the Metaverse or Buoyed by the Aquaverse
An Ecological Vision or Dystopian Nightmare: Two Paths to the Future
Planet Aqua: Rebranding Our Home
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Epigraphs
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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“The subtitle of Jeremy Rifkin’s new breakthrough book ‘Rethinking our Home in the Universe’ is an appropriate description of this amazing masterwork. Rifkin is asking us to literally rethink everything we know and do. His premise is that we have misunderstood the planet we live on over all of history. We’ve long believed that we live on a land planet when in reality we live on a water planet. And that rethink requires an entirely new playbook for how we live and thrive in the future. The book delivers a multidiscipline tour de force for rethinking every aspect of our lives: our concepts of time and space; the way we organize economic life; how we educate our children; and how we relate to nature. Rifkin has dared to suggest the ultimate heresy – asking us to rebrand our orb in the cosmic theater. We live on Planet Aqua.”
–Jerry Wind, Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, and Founding Director of the Joseph A. Lauder Institute at The Wharton School
“When humans decided to tame the vast waters of our planet for the exclusive use of our species, it set in motion a time-bomb and now a somber day of reckoning. Rifkin’s Planet Aqua asks us to listen to the cry coming from the very heart of nature warning us that the hydrosphere, not the human-sphere, is the prime mover of life on our small corner of the universe. Rifkin has given us a powerful blueprint for rethinking our home, reminding us we live on a water planet not a land planet, and that changes everything if only we heed him.”
–Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Board of Directors – Food & Water Watch
“Rifkin offers a much-needed wake-up call to rethink the very nature of our existence on a water planet. The stakes of forgetting this primordial human relationship with water are high. This book surveys the full scope of human interactions with water, diving into the ideas that have given rise to urban hydraulic civilization around the world and the new ways we will need to adapt in the throes of a rewilding planet. Rifkin offers a hopeful reorientation of our relationship to the hydrosphere that can help redirect humanity toward a safer and more prosperous future.”
–Ani Dasgupta, President & CEO, World Resources Institute
“Rifkin’s Planet Aqua is an enlightening read. Like a timely beacon in the darkness, the book offers an urgently needed guide for our lost species confronted by a rewilding hydrosphere. In oriental Asia, ‘water is life’ is the centerpiece of our cultures and shapes our behavior and relationships, defining our very existence. In Asian philosophy, poetry, and mythology, water is where the ancient sages find peace and freedom. Seeing with water and thinking with water is ‘the highest virtue.’ It is time for a great turnaround by relearning how to adapt our species to the hydrosphere rather than adapting the hydrosphere to the utilitarian whims of our species. Rifkin’s Planet Aqua guides us on that journey.”
–Changhua Wu, Chair, Governing Council of the Asia Pacific Water Forum
“In Planet Aqua, Rifkin reminds us that the waters animate all of life on the Blue Planet. As he writes ‘To “be of the waters” is to steady our course and secure our place in a complex living organism, of which we are but one of the players, whose own resilience and well-being depends on “going with the flow.”’”
–Vandana Shiva, Environmental Activist and Recipient of the Right Livelihood Award
“Jeremy Rifkin’s Planet Aqua is a paradigm shift when we suddenly realize that we live on a water planet and not a land planet. Rifkin digs deep into our species’ history, asking what is truly valuable to our existence and our fellow creatures and concludes with a simple observation that it is all about how we distribute real wealth: water for all life. I loved Planet Aqua.”
–Gordon Gill, Principal, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (ranked the number one architecture firm in the United States by Architect magazine)
Dedication
To Carol L. GrunewaldFor a lifetime of sharing ideas.
Planet Aqua
Rethinking Our Home in the Universe
Jeremy Rifkin
polity
Copyright © Jeremy Rifkin, 2024The right of Jeremy Rifkin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Polity Press in 2024
Polity Press 65Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6374-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951427
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Claudia Salvador and Daniel Christensen for their keen editing of Planet Aqua. Their intellectual insights, command of the language, and dedication to the mission, were invaluable. I’d also like to thank our research director Michael Ricciardi for aligning the vast data that we worked with to make sure that our mission stayed on track … a great and dedicated team.
A special thanks to John Thompson and Elise Heslinga at Polity Press for jumping in at a moment’s notice to speed the final manuscript to press. Their enthusiasm, acute editorial suggestions, and deep commitment to the project have kept us buoyed.
Introduction
What would happen if we were to awaken one day – all eight billion of us – only to realize that the world we live in and experience, and to which we are deeply attached, suddenly appeared eerily alien, as if we’d been teleported to some other distant planet where identifiable markers by which we’ve come to understand our existence were simply missing – no less our sense of agency? That frightening prospect is now. Everything we thought we knew about our home in the universe now seems so misbegotten. All the familiar signposts to which we’ve been attached, and which gave us a sense of belonging and direction, seem to have disappeared in a puff. In their wake, it’s we who feel dispossessed and lost on our own planet. And each of us, in our own way, is frightened and unable to conjure up options as to where to turn for solace and engagement.
What’s occurred to make us feel like aliens in our own small orb of the universe? It’s difficult to hear this, but for a long time – at least the past six millennia of what we’ve come to identify as “civilization” – we misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. To put it bluntly, our species, particularly in the Western world, has come to believe that we live on terra firma, a verdant green expanse of solid ground upon which we stand and thrive and which we call our home in the cosmic theater. That sense of place was shattered on December 7, 1972.
The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its journey to the moon took a quick photo of the Earth from a distance of 29,400 kilometers, showing in vivid detail a beautiful blue orb illuminated by the sun, changing the very way humanity would come to perceive our home. The long-held vision of a verdant and green Earth was instantly reduced to a veneer atop of which has always been a water planet circling the sun and, to date, seemingly alone in its multiple shades of blue in our solar system and perhaps in the universe. On August 24, 2021, the European Space Agency introduced the term “Planet Aqua.” America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) concurs, saying on their website that “looking at our Earth from space, it is obvious that we live on a water planet.”
Of late, our water planet has become the center of attention around the kitchen table, in our neighborhoods and communities, in the halls of government, and in industry and civil society. The reason is that the planetary hydrosphere is rewilding in ways that were seemingly unthinkable just a few years ago, taking us into the early stages of the sixth extinction of life on Earth. Our scientists tell us that upwards of 50% of the species on Earth are now threatened with extinction within the next eighty years, many in the lifetime of today’s toddlers.1 These are species that have inhabited the Earth for millions of years.
Our climate is heating up from the emission of global-warming gases into the atmosphere – CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. Here’s why the planet’s hydrosphere is affected. Every one degree Celsius rise in temperature on Earth from global-warming emissions results in faster evaporation of water from the ground and the sea into the atmosphere and a seven percent increase in the concentration of precipitation in the clouds and more violent and exponential water events – frigid winter weather that brings with it powerful atmospheric rivers and blockbuster snows, massive spring floods, prolonged summer droughts, deadly heatwaves and wildfires, and catastrophic autumn hurricanes and typhoons – each devastating the planet’s ecosystems with the loss of human life and the lives of our fellow creatures, along with destruction of the societal infrastructure.2
Take a look at the following short list of the damage inflicted thus far. It’s sobering to read but needs to be vetted if we are to shake ourselves from either denial, somnolence or, worse still, despondency.
Today, 2.6 billion people experience high or extreme water stress. By 2040, a total of 5.4 billion people – more than half of the world’s projected population – will live in 59 countries experiencing high or extreme water stress.
3
3.5 billion people could suffer from water-related food insecurity by 2050, which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today.
4
Over the past decade, the number of recorded water-related conflicts and violent incidents increased by 270% worldwide.
5
One billion people live in countries that are unlikely to have the ability to mitigate and adapt to new ecological threats, creating conditions for mass displacement of populations and forced climate migrations by 2050.
6
Flooding has been the most common natural disaster since 1990, representing 42% of recorded natural disasters. China’s largest event was the 2010 floods and landslides, which led to 15.2 million displaced people. Flooding has also dramatically increased in intensity across Europe, accounting for 35% of recorded disasters in the region, and is expected to rise.
7
Droughts, heatwaves, and massive wildfires are spreading across every continent, ravaging ecosystems and destroying infrastructure around the world.
In the late spring of 2022, “severe to extreme drought” affected 32% of the contiguous United States.
8
As of 2023, 1.84 billion people – nearly 25% of humanity – were living in countries experiencing serious drought. 85% of people impacted by drought reside in low or middle-income nations.
9
Record temperatures ranging from 110 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit are being reached in regions across the planet. Death Valley in California recorded a temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit on July 9, 2021.
10
Even Antarctica set a world record of 65 degrees Fahrenheit in an extraordinary heatwave in April 2021. The years between 2015 and 2021 were the warmest on record.
11
This record was shattered two years later in July 2023 when the planet experienced the three hottest days in a row ever documented.
12
Within the first nine months of 2023, 44,011 wildfires had burned 2,342,143 acres of land in the United States.
13
The U.S. forest fires were eclipsed in 2023 with the burning down of 45.7 million acres of boreal forests in Canada in just a six-week period.
14
These forests contain 12% of the world’s land-based carbon, which, if burned to the ground, is equivalent to 36 years of global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.
15
Smoke pouring down from Canadian wildfires created air quality so bad that the sky over New York turned bright orange and the air quality was deemed the worst on Earth, followed by Chicago, Washington DC, and other cities, and millions of people were told to remain indoors.
Nineteen countries are at risk of rising sea levels, where at least ten percent of each country’s population could be affected. This will have significant consequences for low-lying coastal areas in China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand over the next three decades – as well as cities with large populations like Alexandria in Egypt, The Hague in the Netherlands, and Osaka in Japan.
16
By 2050, 4.7 billion people will reside in countries with high and extreme ecological threats.
17
Scientists reveal the alarming discovery that the melting of polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers and the extraction of an unprecedented volume of water pumped out of the ground for irrigation and human consumption have changed the way mass is distributed across the planet and altered the Earth’s spin on its axis with untold implications for the future of life.
18
Oxygen levels in the oceans have plummeted in the wake of climate change by as much as 40% in some regions.
19
By 2050, 61% of all the hydropower dams on the planet will be in river basins at “very high or extreme risk of droughts, floods, or both.”
20
Twenty percent of all the remaining fresh water on Earth is in the five interlinking Great Lakes of North America.
21
The World Bank reports that “in the last 50 years, fresh water per capita has fallen by half.”
22
If we are the despoilers of life, we might at long last also be the saviors – maybe. There are reasons to be guardedly hopeful, although not naively expectant. But this dramatic turnaround will depend on a change in how we conceive of human agency and our relationship to the planet. We will need to undertake a powerful post-mortem on how it came to be that our species broke rank some six millennia ago from all of the other living creatures inhabiting the Earth, who, from time immemorial, adapted moment-to-moment to an animated and ever-evolving planet.
Our earliest ancestors were animists and conceived of the world around them as alive, vibrant, and brimming with spirits continually interacting in a boundaryless nature, of which our species’ agency was intimately intertwined. The big turnaround came when our forebears began to use their extraordinary mental acumen and physical dexterity to change course and adapt all of nature to the utilitarian caprice of our species, at the expense of the depletion of the natural world.
Six millennia ago, along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers23 in what is now Turkey and Iraq and, shortly thereafter, the Nile River in Egypt,24 the Ghaggar-Hakra and Indus rivers in the Indus Valley, which today covers parts of India and Pakistan,25 and the Yellow River in the Huang He Valley in China26 and later across the Roman Empire,27 our forebears began to harness the planetary waters for the exclusive use of our human family. They constructed elaborate dams and artificial reservoirs, erected dikes and levees, and carved out canals across the great rivers, sequestering, propertizing, and commodifying the waters for the use of their populations, fundamentally altering the natural ecology of their bioregions. These hydraulic infrastructures gave rise to what historians call urban/hydraulic civilization. The capturing of waters in regions around the world continued unabated, reaching a high-water mark in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
Although scant attention has been given over to this extraordinary reorientation of the planetary hydrosphere by historians and anthropologists, and even less economists and sociologists, the fact is that the emergence of dense urban life is an inextricable derivative of the hydraulic infrastructure whose sole purpose is to serve the needs of only our species.
Much of the sociology, economy, and governance that has accompanied the human journey over these six millennia is enshrined in hydraulic infrastructure. While pockets of our species have remained outside these massive infrastructure bubbles – some until the present era – it’s the great urban hydraulic civilizations that mark much of what we’ve come to regard as the historical footprint of human history.
Now, in the grips of a warming planet, brought on in large part by a fossil fuel-driven water/energy/food nexus, the urban hydraulic civilization is collapsing in real time. This vacuum is giving rise to a great reset in our species’ relationship to the planetary hydrosphere. We are just beginning to relearn how to adapt our species to the requisites of an animated and ever-evolving and self-organizing planet, in which the hydrosphere plays the central role as the orchestrator of life. What we’re talking about is a new form of neo-animism, driven by a sophisticated science-based and technologically deployed rapprochement with our aqua home.
Finding our way back on a fast-rewilding planet has triggered what our philosophers call the “sublime.” The term was first introduced in 1757 by the Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, who penned an essay entitled “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” thereafter taken up by the philosophers of the day to become a centerpiece of the Enlightenment and Romantic Period, and later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Age of Progress.
Burke describes the feeling of utter terror one feels in the presence of an overwhelming force of nature: it can be an imposing mountain range, a deeply sculptured canyon, a massive wildfire, a raging flood or hurricane, a line of deadly tornados touching down, an erupting geyser, a red-hot volcano spewing ash across the land, or a powerful earthquake prying open the very seams of the planet and swallowing everything in its wake. If viewed from a safe distance, and from harm’s way, one’s terror turns to a sense of “awe” in the presence of nature unleashed. Awe, in turn, leads to “wonder” about the powerful forces of nature and sparks our “imagination” about the meaning of existence, and, on occasion, leads to a “transcendent experience” – a reorientation of our sense of attachment to place in the bigger scheme of things on our shared planet.
This experience of the sublime has spawned a heated debate between two very different schools of philosophy about the meaning of life and our own personal relationship to existence. As our human family edges ever closer to an environmental abyss and the potential extinction of life on Earth, the question of how to respond to the sublime of nature has become a crossroad. It’s here where each of us in our own way is beginning to ask the big question: which approach will take us to a transcendent experience, and will that experience be in the form of a new utilitarianism or a mindful and empathic biophilic reattachment to our home in the universe?
The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that at the juncture where the trail of terror, followed by awe, wonder, and imagination in the throes of the sublime, meet, the “rational mind” – a non-material force, independent from nature’s tempest and even immune to its overwhelming agency – steps in and takes over, using cold, detached, objective reason to subdue, capture, sequester, and tame nature’s excesses, in order to meet the utilitarian needs of our human family. In short, human reason neuters the beast.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, however, would have none of Kant’s rational detachment. He argued that although the sublime at first conjures up terror and a sense of helplessness in the eyes of the beholder, shortly followed by the triggering of one’s sense of awe, wonder, and imagination when enveloped by powerful planetary forces, it can lead to a different path to transcendence – a feeling of compassionate belonging on an animated planet in which each individual is an agent and participant, enveloped by the irreducible unity of all of life that makes up existence.
Today, that standoff between cold objectivity and detached utilitarianism versus engaged biophilic attachment is playing out on every front as the forces of AI, technological singularity, and the metaverse square off against the forces of an enlightened neo-animist reattachment. The issue at hand is whether our species will continue to bend nature to our rational will or embrace nature’s calling and rejoin the community of life on Planet Aqua. Where does all this come down and around? When we come to understand that we live on Planet Aqua. It’s our milieu – the medium in which we dwell. The hydrosphere is not a thing but, rather, the animating force of the story of life on the planet. It’s the driver of the other three principal spheres on Earth – the lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere – and the incubator of all of life yet to come.
Getting our ontology right – the nature of our being – is of the first order. Putting ontology into practice is of the second order. The chapters and pages that follow are in the way of a story and an account of where we’ve been, which has taken us and our fellow creatures to the brink of extinction, and where we will need to go in a “new order of the ages,” novus ordo seclorum, that’s just beginning to take wing. This new narrative and accompanying journey might give our species and fellow creatures a second lease of life on Planet Aqua.
None of the mentions in the chapters and pages that follow is theoretical but, rather, they are all phenomenologically grounded in the real-life experiences that have taken our species to this point in history on the planet. How a new “sublime” might unfold is an unknown that awaits the kind of future we embrace, subject to the butterfly effect and the good fortunes and misgivings that come our way with life on Planet Aqua.
What the data tell us is that we are on the cusp of an imminent collapse of urban hydraulic civilization after six millennia of history. The warming of the planet has unleashed a long-sequestered hydrosphere. Our water planet is evolving in wholly new ways that we can barely fathom. Ecosystems everywhere are collapsing, infrastructure is being devastated, and the lives of our species and our fellow creatures are increasingly at risk. The entire human-built environment is now a stranded asset and will have to be rethought, reimagined, and redeployed in new ways.
Consider, for example, a new study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University in the United States and published in 2023.28 This study found that global warming is heating up and deforming the ground below the surface, meaning buildings, water and gas pipelines, electric utilities, subways, and other underground infrastructures are increasingly at risk. Chicago, for example, is already beginning to experience the early stages of sinking infrastructure, threatening the iconic building stock that made the city an architectural landmark in the twentieth century. Other urban megalopolises on every continent will inevitably sink, and not over a millennium of history, but more likely over the next 150 years or so, posing a potential winnowing of urban life, at least as we’ve come to know it.
As the saying goes, crisis creates opportunity. Our species finds itself mired in the greatest crisis since we first inhabited the planet – a massextinction event taking place in real-time. Rethinking every aspect of where we’ve come from, what we’ve believed in, how we’ve lived, and where we need to go to adapt and reaffiliate on Planet Aqua, whose hydrosphere is transforming itself in novel ways, is the business before us.
That process is already well underway. Urban “hydraulic civilization” is collapsing in various regions in real-time, while “ephemeral society” cued to an unpredictable hydrosphere is emerging in bits and pieces and just beginning to scale. If the former is characterized by long periods of sedentary life and shorter periods of migratory existence, the latter is wound around longer periods of migratory life and shorter periods of sedentary existence.
With this epoch shift comes a whole new vocabulary to accompany the processes, patterns, and practices that ride alongside a rewilding hydrosphere on Planet Aqua. Innovative affordances are flooding into the public square. The “slow water movement,” “water internets and microgrids,” “sponge cities,” “water calendars,” and the demarcation of the “water year” are among the numerous new terms becoming part and parcel of our daily lives, realigning our species’ comings and goings on Planet Aqua. Communities are even introducing the new term “depaving,” also known as “desealing” – a process of dismantling impermeable surfaces across neighborhoods and communities and replacing them with permeable green spaces, in order to free water and allow it to seep into the ground and, from there, follow its natural pathways. Solar and wind-generated “alchemic desalination” of saltwater is also trending. It is estimated that by 2050 more than a billion people on Earth will be drinking desalinated water produced by solar-powered osmosis. Already, portable suitcase-sized osmosis devices using less electrical power than cell phones are coming onto the market and becoming an indispensable accoutrement in a droughtridden world.29
Now, an incipient neo-nomadism is emerging in the throes of a warming climate, transforming the very notion of infrastructure. Popup cities, tear-down and recycled infrastructure, poured-out 3D-printed temporary habitats, scaled vertical AI-driven indoor agriculture, including insect farming, using 250 times less water than conventional outdoor farming, are changing the socioeconomic landscape. Mapping of migratory corridors are now nascent, and the issuing of millions of climate passports are likely to follow and scale, as our species increasingly abandons conventional highly dense urban habitats caught up in global warming. A rewilding hydrosphere is fast changing the settlement patterns of our population on every continent, letting the waters determine how our human family is distributed, along with our fellow creatures.
National governments, long locked into sovereign states and fixed borders, are being challenged as well by “bioregional governance” across political boundaries, as local communities begin sharing the responsibility of stewarding their common ecosystem. Globalization, already dwindling as the climate warms and climate disasters undermine logistics chains and trade across ocean and air corridors, is giving over to glocalization as new more agile high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and cooperatives in regions begin to engage directly with one another across digitally driven provider–user networks, at near zero marginal cost, bypassing traditional seller–buyer capitalist markets.
“Geopolitics,” now senescent but fighting a torturous endgame to the ruin of the world, is being challenged – if still only lightly – by a fervent new “biosphere politics,” as our human family comes to the realization that all of us and our fellow creatures live in an overarching biosphere that we have to share. The shift to biosphere politics, in turn, is being accompanied, if only tentatively, by the transition from military preparedness to defend political boundaries and property to climate-disaster rescue, recovery, and relief missions across shared ecosystems.
The rise of ephemeral society also comes with new terms to describe economic life. Ecological economics, which takes its cues from the First and Second Law of thermodynamics, edges us to a hybrid economic system only partially cued to what we call market capitalism, while increasingly entwined in an economy where finance capital becomes increasingly less important than ecological capital. Hydroism becomes the new rallying point in an ephemeral society.
On Planet Aqua, efficiency gives way to adaptivity as the primary temporal value, productivity becomes far less important than regenerativity, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is pushed aside to make room for Quality-of-Life Indicators (QLI), and zero-sum games lose currency, while the network effect increasingly becomes the norm.
Learning to live on Planet Aqua comes with new ways to measure performance. Understanding the “water–energy–food nexus” and using the “virtual water index” to gauge how water is distributed both domestically and for export and import become the gold standards and as important as the carbon footprint in commerce and trade on a water planet.
Perhaps most encouraging, the collapse of urban hydraulic civilization and the rise of ephemeral society is being accompanied by a growing recognition of the “rights of waters” as the prime mover and animating force of all of life on Planet Aqua. Countries have begun enacting laws guaranteeing the legal rights of oceans, lakes, rivers, and floodplains to flow at will, as the hydrosphere rewilds in search of a new balance, and they are backing up these rights with the authority to bring infringements to court for adjudication.
These vast changes in the way we’ve come to think of our planet in the cosmic theater reboot the human story, taking us into a new life-affirming future. We live on a water planet and every aspect of our existence flows from this incontrovertible truth. Rebranding our home in the universe as Planet Aqua, and introducing this second naming of our planet into government constitutions, bylaws, codes, regulations, and standards, is the first giant step toward a realignment with the waters that animate our very existence. This epiphanic moment marks the beginning of a new transcendent journey to rekindle the pulse of life on our water abode. These and countless other choices we make over the course of the next several generations will determine whether life on the planet will be re-endowed and our species renewed. There is only a single agenda before us: making peace with a rewilding hydrosphere and finding new ways to flourish along with our fellow creatures. All else is a distraction.
Notes
1.
“Biologists Think 50% of Species Will Be Facing Extinction by the End of the Century,”
Guardian
, February 25, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/25/half-all-species-extinct-end-century-vatican-conference
.
2.
Kevin E. Trenberth, “Changes in Precipitation with Climate Change,”
Climate Research
47 (1), March 31, 2011: 123–38.
https://doi.org/10.3354/cr00953
.
3.
“Ecological Threat Register 2020: Understanding Ecological Threats, Resilience and Peace,” Sydney: The Institute for Economics & Peace, September 2020: 38.
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/ecological-threat-register-2020-understanding-ecological-threats-resilience-and-peace
.
4.
Ibid., 2.
5.
Ibid., 4.
6.
Ibid., 2.
7.
Ibid., 3–52.
8.
“State of the Climate: Monthly Drought Report for May 2022,” National Centers for Environmental Information, June 2022.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/drought/202205
.
9.
“International Drought Resilience Alliance: UNCCD.” IDRA.
https://idralliance.global/
. Sengupta, Somini. “Drought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally.”
The New York Times
, January 11, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/climate/global-drought-food-hunger.html
.
10.
Jeff Masters, “Death Valley, California, Breaks the All-Time World Heat Record for the Second Year in a Row,” Yale Climate Connections, July 12, 2021.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/death-valley-california-breaks-the-all-time-world-heat-record-for-the-second-year-in-a-row
.
11.
“Eight Climate Change Records the World Smashed in 2021,” World Economic Forum, May 18, 2022.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/8-climate-change-records-world-2021/
.
12.
Margaret Osborne, “Earth Faces Hottest Day Ever Recorded – Three Days in a Row,”
Smithsonian.com
, July 6, 2023.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earth-faces-hottest-day-ever-recorded-three-days-in-a-row-180982493/
.
13.
“National Fire News,” National Interagency Fire Center, September 2023.
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/nfn
.
14.
Rebecca Falconer, “Canada’s Historic Wildfire Season Abates after 45.7 Million Acres Razed.”
Axios
, October 20, 2023.
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/20/canada-record-2023-wildfire-season-end
.
15.
“Wildfire Graphs,” CIFFC Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
https://ciffc.net/statistics
; “Giant Carbon Shield,” Boreal Conservation.
https://www.borealconservation.org/giant-carbon-shield
.
16.
“Ecological Threat Register 2020,” op. cit. p. 13.
17.
“Ecological Threat Report 2021: Understanding Ecological Threats, Resilience, and Peace,” Sydney: The Institute for Economics & Peace, October 2021: 4.
https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ETR-2021-web.pdf
.
18.
Aylin Woodward and Marianne Guenot,“The Earth Has Tilted on its Axis Differently over the Last Few Decades Due to Melting Ice Caps.”
Business Insider
, March 21, 2023.
https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-axis-shifted-melting-ice-climate-change-2021-4
.
19.
Laura Poppick, “The Ocean Is Running out of Breath, Scientists Warn,”
Scientific American,
March 20, 2019.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ocean-is-running-out-of-breath-scientists-warn/
.
20.
“New Study: U.S. Hydropower Threatened by Increasing Droughts Due to Climate Change,” WWF, February 24, 2022.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/new-study-us-hydropower-threatened-by-increasing-droughts-due-to-climate-change#:~:text=The%20study%20finds%20that%20by,from%201%20in%2025%20today
.
21.
“Learn about Our Great Lakes,” SOM – State of Michigan.
https://www.michigan.gov/egle/public/learn/great-lakes#:~:text=The%20combined%20lakes %20contain%20the,economy%2C%20society%2C%20and%20environment
.
22.
Antonio Zapata-Sierra, Mila Cascajares, Alfredo Alcayde, and Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro, “Worldwide Research Trends on Desalination,”
Desalination
. 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2021.115305
.
23.
Stephanie Rost, “Navigating the Ancient Tigris – Insights into Water Management in an Early State,”
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology,
54, 2019: 31–47, SSN 0278–4165; also “Water Management in Mesopotamia from the Sixth till the First Millennium BCE,” WIREs Water e1230, 2017. doi:10.10 02/wat2.1230; S. Mantellini, V. Picotti, A. Al-Hussainy, N. Marchett, F. Zaina, “Development of Water Management Strategies in Southern Mesopotamia during the Fourth and Third Millennium BCE,”
Geoarchaeology
, 2024: 1–32.
https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.21992
.
24.
Karl W. Butzer, “Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology.” University of Chicago, 1976.
https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/early_hydraulic.pdf
.
25.
Pushpendra Kumar Singh, Pankaj Dey, Sharad Kumar Jain, and Pradeep P. Mujumdar, “Hydrology and Water Resources Management in Ancient India,”
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
24, 2020: 4691–4707.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-4691-2020
.
26.
Bin Liu et al., “Earliest Hydraulic Enterprise in China, 5100 Years Ago,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
, 114 (52), 2017: 13637–13642.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710516114
.
27.
Andrew Wilson, “Water, Power and Culture in the Roman and Byzantine Worlds: An Introduction,”
Water History
4 (1), March 28, 2012: 1–9.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-012-0050-2
; Christer Bruun, “Roman Emperors and Legislation on Public Water Use in the Roman Empire: Clarifications and Problems,”
Water History
4 (1), March 28, 2012: 11–33.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-012-0051-1
; Edmund Thomas, “Water and the Display of Power in Augustan Rome: The So-Called ‘Villa Claudia’ at Anguillara Sabazia,”
Water History
4 (1), March 28, 2012: 57–78.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-012-0055-x
.
28.
Alessandro F. Rotta Loria, “The Silent Impact of Underground Climate Change on Civil Infrastructure,”
Communications Engineering
2 (44), 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44172-023-00092-1
.
29.
Adam Zewe, “From Seawater to Drinking Water, with the Push of a Button,”
MIT News
, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/portable-desalination-drinking-water-0428
.
PART IThe Imminent Collapse of Hydraulic Civilization
CHAPTER 1First There Was the Waters
The great mystery in the history of Earth is how did life come to be? The first tantalizing clue appears early in the opening lines of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Shlomo Yitzchaki, also known as Rashi, was a renowned French rabbi of the eleventh century, whose commentary on the Talmud remains an authoritative interpretation of biblical script. The biblical account of the Creation, notes Rashi, begins with the startling admission that first there were the waters, which preceded God’s creation of heaven and earth.1 Genesis leads off with a passage that suggests that in the beginning the Earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.2
God then parted the primordial waters, creating heaven and earth and day and night, separating land from the oceans, and populating the Earth with every living creature. His last and most prized creations were Adam and Eve, made in God’s image, and fashioned from the dust of the Earth. To be fair to historical accounts, the Genesis story of the waters existing before the Creation was not a lone rider. The earlier Babylonian civilization tells a similar story of creation. Other creation stories from around the world follow along the same lines. The ancient stories of primordial waters are recently gaining interest, as scientists begin to unwrap the secrets of the formation and evolution of the universe and our own solar system and planet and to look at the role water plays in the unfolding of the cosmos.
These narratives of the Earth’s beginnings, which place the waters before the Creation, have taken on existential importance because of the tumultuous changes taking place in the Earth’s hydrosphere. While global warming, resulting from the industrial emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide from the burning of fossil fuels, affects all four of the Earth’s primary spheres – the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere – its biggest impact is on the Earth’s hydrosphere. The Earth’s ecosystems, which have developed over a mild-weather regime during the Holocene era of the past 11,000 years, are collapsing in real time with the onslaught of climate change and the rewilding of the waters, taking the planet into the sixth extinction of life on Earth. (The last time the Earth experienced a mass extinction of life was 65 million years ago.)
It’s no wonder the scientific community is in a frantic search to understand the intimate workings of the Earth’s hydrosphere and its impact on the lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere, in order to better adapt to the changing ocean currents and the Gulf Stream; the effects of the melting of the last remnants of the previous Ice Age on land and sea; the disruption and shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates; the unleashing of earthquakes emanating from the Earth’s mantle; and the sharp increase in potential eruptions from thousands of previously dormant volcanoes.
If there were any doubt as to the overwhelming agency of the waters in directing the planet, consider the scientific findings that show that the way the waters are distributed alters the very axis of the Earth – its tilt.3 And that’s exactly what has been happening since the 1990s on our planet. The reason is that the warming of the planet from climate change is quickly melting the last remaining glaciers and ice sheets of the Pleistocene in the Arctic region. The massive volume of water released is spreading across the oceans and altering the way the weight of the planet is distributed, and changing the planet’s spin on its axis.4
New research has also found that the recent pumping of groundwater for agriculture to feed a growing population, which now tops eight billion people, is also contributing to the way the waters are distributed – “enough to make the planet’s axis shift.” In India in 2010 the population pumped 92 trillion gallons of water from underneath the ground. While the change in the tilt of the Earth occasioned by human-induced climate change is only likely to slightly “alter the length of the day by a millisecond or so over time,” it’s enough to be awed by the agency of the waters and their impact on the planet.5
The question that scientists are asking is where did the primordial waters come from and how are they constituted? Astronomers have long entertained the notion that water is ever present across the universe, and journeyed to a newly formed Earth 3.9 billion years ago by the heavy bombardment of comets composed mainly of ice. New studies, however, favor a second complementary source of the waters – leaching from molten rock deep under the surface of the Earth.6 Recent findings also suggest that the ancient Earth may have been a water world without continents, reinforcing the biblical description of the primordial waters that preceded God’s creation of land.7
Although the scientific community has yet to fully decipher the connection between the waters and the evolution of life on Earth, it’s a fact that every species is comprised primarily of water from the hydrosphere. All of this takes us back to Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was long thought to have been fashioned from the dust of the Earth. Actually, water makes up much of the composition of sperm, and the human body is gestated in water in the womb. In some organisms, upward of 90% of their body weight comes from water and, in humans, water makes up approximately 60% of an adult body.8 The heart is about 73% water, the lungs are 83% water, the skin is 64% water, the muscles and kidneys are each 79% water, and the bones are 31% water.9 Plasma, the pale-yellow concoction that transports blood cells, enzymes, nutrients, and hormones, is 90% water.10
Water plays an essential role in managing the intimate aspects of living systems. The list of particulars is impressive. Water is:
A vital nutrient in the life of every cell [and] acts first as a building material. It regulates our internal body temperature by sweating and respiration. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolized and transported by water in the bloodstream. [Water] assists in flushing waste mainly through urination. [Water] acts as a shock absorber for [the] brain, spinal cord, and fetus. [It] forms saliva [and] lubricates joints.11
Water is flowing in and out of our bodies every twenty-four hours. In this sense, our semi-permeable open systems bring fresh water from the Earth’s hydrosphere into our very being to perform life functions, after which it is returned to the hydrosphere. If there’s a case to be made that the human body – and all other living creatures – is more like a pattern of fluid activity than a fixed structure and operates as a dissipative system feeding off energy and excreting entropic waste, rather than a closed mechanism importing energy to secure its own autonomy, the cycling and recycling of H2O is an appropriate point of departure.
Every human being knows intuitively that water is life. We can go without food for up to three weeks, but we can only go without water for a week or so on average before the risk of perishing. But now, the hydrological cycle is convulsing in ways that we struggle to grasp, changing the dynamic of all of the other Earth spheres and the prospect of the survival of our species and fellow creatures. We’ve been there before.
Déjà Vu and the Second Deluge
The very beginning of human recollection in history, as told by peoples everywhere, is the story of the great flood that engulfed the Earth. While Western civilization tells of the great flood rained down by Yahweh that swallowed all of life, with the exception of Noah and his family and a male and female from each species taken aboard his ark, others recount their own tales of a great flood and survival of the Creation. In recent years, the scientific community has uncovered evidence of catastrophic floods in various regions of the world with the melting of the last Ice Age. In Eurasia, North America, and elsewhere, giant ice-dammed lakes melted, unleashing massive glacial floods, and once-frozen rivers spilled over their banks onto adjacent lands, taking creatures to their deaths. The devastation caused by the melting ice sheets burrowed into the collective psyche of our ancient ancestors and was the first shared historic memory passed on orally and later with the advent of script to present times.
Now, eleven millennia later, the hydrosphere is rebelling once again in the throes of global warming of the planet. Scientists are warning us that half of the species on Earth are threatened with extinction within the next eighty years.12 These are species, many of whom have inhabited the Earth for millions of years. Our scientists are engaged in a heated debate as to what has precipitated the current extinction event. Most place the blame on the fossil fuel-based Industrial Age and the spewing of massive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, leading to a warming of the climate – with ample evidence in the geological record to back up the claims. Others argue that the journey to extinction began as far back as the formation of the first great hydraulic civilizations in the Mediterranean, North Africa, India, China, and elsewhere starting around 4000 BCE.
For 95% of the history of Homo sapiens, our forebears lived as our fellow creatures, foraging and hunting, continually adapting to the changing seasons and nature’s ebbs and flows.13 The hominid species, culminating with Homo sapiens some 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, lived on a perilous planet punctuated by 100,000 years or so of glaciation and followed by 10,000 years or more of warming interludes. The last deglaciation of the Pleistocene some 11,000 years ago gave rise to the temperate climate we’ve known ever since. With the coming of the Holocene, our ancestors settled into a sedentary existence categorized by agriculture and the pastoralization of animals – the Neolithic Age. That period of history eventually morphed into the rise of urban/hydraulic civilization 6,000 years ago in the Mediterranean and, shortly thereafter, India and China. For the first time in the history of our species on Earth, we reversed course from always adapting to nature’s flows like all the other creatures, to an abrupt turn around, adapting nature to our species’ desires and designs. The rise of urban/ hydraulic civilization over six millennia of history culminated in the fossil fuel-based Industrial Age, the rise of capitalism, the warming of the planet’s climate, and a hydrosphere wreaking havoc on the Earth.
In the past decade the United States experienced 22 extreme climate-related weather events, all triggered by the radical reorientation of the hydrospheric cycle, each with more than a billion dollars in losses to the environment, economy, and society.14 In 2021 alone, climate disasters with damages exceeding $145 billion swept the country, including a frigid cold wave in the South and Texas, massive wildfires that spread across Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington State, a summer/fall drought and heatwave that engulfed the western U.S., monumental flood events in California and Louisiana, a series of scattered tornados, four tropical hurricanes, and seven other severe weather events. The total cost to society, the economy, and the environment by climate-change-related severe weather events between 2017 and 2021 – all related to a rapidly reorienting hydrological cycle – topped $742 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.15 To set the losses in perspective, the entire U.S. Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, signed into law in 2021 to reduce global-warming emissions and build out a smart resilient Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure for the country over the coming decade, totaled only $550 billion for climate-related programs in the legislation. To bring the crisis closer to home, four in ten Americans live in a county ravaged by “climate-related disasters in 2021.”16
Worse still, in the U.S., 43% of the population live in communities that rely on dams, abutments, reservoirs, and artificial reefs that are aged and in disrepair – the average dam in the U.S. is nearly sixty years old, and the average levee over fifty years old.17 These ancient hydraulic infrastructures were not engineered to withstand the floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and hurricanes of an increasingly unpredictable hydrological cycle. America is not alone. A 2022 study published in the journal Water reported that by 2050, 61% of all the hydro-powered dams on the planet would be in river basins at “very high or extreme risk of droughts, floods, or both.”18 Every country faces a similar dilemma – continuous repair and build-back of hydro infrastructure, which is a losing game, or free the waters to run their course and establish a new equilibrium. If taking the latter approach, the U.S. and governments everywhere will need to create massive buyout programs and relocation initiatives to allow for the resettlement in areas out of harm’s way, and let the waters rewild and spur new ecological thresholds for the flourishing of life.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. The great scientific minds who have raised the alarm over the past century include the renowned Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky who, in the early twentieth century, described the biosphere and argued that the hydrosphere is the critical agency that dictates the evolution of life on Earth. Around that same time, Harvard biologist, physiologist, chemist, and philosopher Lawrence Joseph Henderson suggested that water may be the missing link of animating life on Earth and the cosmos.19 More recently, the biologist Lynn Margulis, who, along with the chemist Sir James Lovelock, introduced the widely accepted hypothesis of the Earth as a self-organizing system – which they called Gaia – worried about the impact that human civilization is having on the planet’s hydrosphere.20 Vernadsky, Henderson, and Margulis were of the same mind, having come to the realization that the “waters” are the animating force of life on Earth and likely elsewhere in the universe. More recently, others from the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology have begun to unlock the previously unexplored qualities of water.
Our Aquatic Self: How Humans Emerged from the Deep
Planet Aqua tells a new story of how life emerged on our planet, with water as the “prime mover,” altering the very way our species perceives itself and its relationships on the blue marble. Although our human family has become partially at ease with the idea that we descended from our close relatives, the primates, more unsettling is the recent scientific finding that our roots lie far earlier in the history of evolution, in the great depths of the oceans. It’s a long-accepted dogma among paleontologists that our species’ evolutionary origins wind back to the first micro-organisms that inhabited the great oceans, but there was little evidence to bolster the theory in the way of tracing our lineage.
Over the past several decades, however, biologists have begun to fill in at least some of the missing links that trace our species’ evolution far back in the aquatic record. In 2006, Neil Shubin, a University of Chicago professor, reported in a pair of articles in the journal Nature that while chipping away at an ancient rock formation in the Bird Fjord on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, his team had discovered the fossil remains of a creature that grew to nine feet or more in length, and lived 375 million years ago, at the moment in geological history when fish were evolving into the first four-legged animals known as tetrapods. These strange animals had fish scales, fangs, and gills, but also anatomical features found only in animals that spend some time on land. Shubin and his colleagues named this creature “fishapod.”21 The fishapod has a broad skull, flexible neck, and, like the later crocodile, eyes high up on the head, allowing it to see across water and toward the horizon. The creature also sported a large interlocking ribcage, which suggested lungs and breathing. Researchers speculate that the creature’s trunk was strong enough to support it in the shallows or on land. The unexpected finding was when they dissected the creature’s pectoral fins they discovered the beginnings of a tetrapod hand and a primitive version of a wrist and five fingerlike bones, leading Shubin to exclaim that “this is our branch. You’re looking at your great-great-great-great cousin!”22
Then, in 2021, scientists broke 160 years of thinking about the evolution of life on Earth with findings published in the journal Cell.23 Using genome mapping of primitive fish conducted at the University of Copenhagen and other research laboratories, they dispelled the conventional wisdom that around 370 million years ago, primitive lizard-like animals – the tetrapods – began to migrate onto land, with their fins morphing to limbs and organs that allowed for air breathing. The new genomic findings suggest that fifty million years before tetrapods came onto land, the fish carried the genetic codes for limblike forms and primitive functioning lungs for air breathing. Humans and a type of ancient primitive fish that still swim in lakes and rivers, the bichir, even share an essential function in the cardio-respiratory system, the conus arteriosus, a structure in the right ventricle of every heart, which allows the organ to deliver blood to the body. These genetic codes in the human genome and a group of primitive fish are an extraordinary finding, showing that our species shares a genetic history with the fish that swam the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, connecting us to the ancient waters from which life has evolved over eons of history.24
Our species is “of the waters,” from the very first moment of life in the womb. While 60% of the adult human body is of water, the fetal body consists of 70 to 90% water but diminishes toward the time of birth.25 Rock paintings from 10,000 years ago show our ancient ancestors swimming in various poses familiar to us today – the breaststroke and doggy paddle. An Egyptian clay seal dated between 9000 and 4000 BCE shows Sumerians doing the crawl. References to swimming are found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the very first literary work of record written between 2100 and 1200 BCE during the Mesopotamian civilization.26
Our history is one of continuous immersion in the waters, for both the purposes of survival and recreation. We drink, swim, dive, float, luxuriate, bathe, engage in baptismal rituals and renewal, commune with the spirit world of the deep, and harness the waters to govern economic and social life – in other words, we live in a water milieu, both inside and outside, from conception to death. And all the water molecules that comprise our liquid being – in the cells, tissue, and organs – journey on to other pools and realities during our lifetime and thereafter, taking up new residence. How strange then to hear the biblical account of life interpreted as a cycle “from dust to dust,” when it’s more accurate to describe daily life on the blue marble as an evershifting and repositioning from liquid milieu to liquid milieu.
