Water as a Commodity
In order to understand our current relationship with water, we have to understand the foundation upon which the vast majority of Americans build their perceptions of nature. These are complete with American notions of progress, ‘manifest destiny,’ and the ‘American Dream.’ By and large is it a story about human dominion of wildspaces and a separation of humans and nature into two different categories. Nature has long been viewed apart from humans, as the ‘other’, situated outside of the town, city, or bustling metropolis. We have idyllic notions of the great outdoors, a pristine space removed from society’s influence and pollutants. It was part of the reason local people were forced to abandon their lands in the establishment of national parks and continues to be the driving force of why such a model of ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation’ continued to eject generational communities from park lands around the world. Such narratives of culture and nature as two separate spheres have long been ingrained in western thought arising largely from colonial understandings of the outdoors.

For early European colonists, wilderness was precisely that—the wild, existing apart from human civilization. Back then, nature was to be feared and tamed as it was home to beasts, monsters, and other unknown threats. This was the case throughout the Americas, as some early settlers viewed the colonies to be hell on earth, as sights, sounds, and creatures overwhelmed those who were accustomed to European towns and cities.

As time progressed, a handful of outliers began to break such molds, establishing comfort in and a love for the great outdoors. Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, in addition to explorers like John Muir ushered in a romanticism for nature that influenced early conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt, helping the establishment of the national parks system. Nature became grand and majestic, but again it was apart from human culture.

Such sentiments found their way to Florida and took a toll on the land. A watery landscape, Florida’s nature was always different from the American West. The grandeur of cathedral like mountains was absent and in its place, unruly swamplands that proved harder to tame. With enough engineering, Florida straightened its rivers, confined its lakes, and extended its coastline through dredging and construction of finger canals. Like many wild lands, Florida struggled with nature, trying to domesticate its waters to meet human needs. Along the way, Florida would succumb to nature’s forces as a hurricane would barrel through, showing Floridians that even the strongest engineering was no match for the forces of nature.

Still, the state would rebuild and expand. Experiencing housing boom after housing boom, Florida was crowned the state with the third largest population in 2014, surpassing New York. If you may recall our state welcome sign from just a few years ago proclaimed Florida as ‘open for business.’ Such mentalities led to deeply tumultuous relationships between Floridians and the natural areas of Florida—most notably its waters.

Years after efforts to tame wetlands, the actions of industry reinforced that water was still understood as a resource— a commodity and a tool that helped extend development and growth. In 2018, Environment Florida ranked our state as 10th in the nation for industries violating the Clean Water Act—citing fewer inspections of major industrial facilities and lax penalties.(1)  These are companies like Tropicana, Mosaic Fertilizer, Coca Cola, Pilgrims Pride, and a range of power companies throughout the state.(2)

Co-existence with Water
Even with the bleak findings from Environment Florida, there has been a growing glimmer of hope from Florida’s environmental community extending back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Marjories Harris Carr. More recently there seems to be the spark of a collective effort to re-imagine our relationship with water. As a scholar of religion, my research focuses on the spiritual motivations of environmentalists who love and advocate for these water bodies, thereby helping us to rethink our interactions with water. Such conversations are happening all over the U.S.

In August 2020, the TED Radio Hour dove into these conversations with an episode called ‘Our Relationship With Water.’ The show highlighted three women of color whose work is shifting the way we see water. Kelsey Leonard, Tribal Co-lead on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Planning Body of the U.S. National Ocean Council; Colette Pichon Battle, founder and executive of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy; and visual artist and professor LaToya Ruby Frazier as they each uncovered local understandings of water.(3) From Flint, Michigan’s continued water crisis and Hurricane Katrina lasting scars to indigenous perspectives, Leonard, Pichon Battle, and Frazier demonstrate the importance of underlying relationships with water as such sentiments dictate current interactions.

Born and raised in southern Louisiana, Colette Pichon Battle recounts the devastation that came with Hurricane Katrina and the frustration that came when she realized FEMA plans that left out the most vulnerable populations. Such environmental injustices led her to take a more spiritual approach with water, embarking on spiritual journeys down the Mississippi with Black and Native women to heal the relationships of humanity and water. Rather than pursuing legislation or technology, she is starting with the most basic foundation: human-nature interactions.

Similarly LaToya Ruby Frazier is also rethinking water within the context of Flint, Michigan. Again, she pursues the most basic element: engagement. Highlighting daily interactions with water, as expressed through drinking, bathing, and cooking, Frazier shows how different life can be when you don’t trust the water coming out of your faucet. Also up against environmental injustice, Frazier follows the day-to-day routine of a mother and daughter in Flint to show that comfortable access to water is something many Americans take for granted. Such access can make all the difference when it is not present.

The TED Radio Hour culminates with perspectives from Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Nation about the rights of water. By asking how we connect to water, Leonard starts with similar understandings to Pichon Battle and Frazier—that water is life. But she takes the relationship to water a step further, more specifically asking ‘who is water’. Such orientation alters how we understand water, moving it from a realm of commodity to co-existence.

Florida’s Emerging Narrative
Such viewpoints are important to acknowledge, as the notion of moving beyond the commodification of water is not limited to the Leonard, Frazier, and Pichon Battle. Dozens of environmentalists around the state have also started to rethink how we view our relationship with water. While such re-examinations of water may seem new, they take us back to early traditional ecological understandings prevalent in indigenous communities, many of which continue today in a variety of forms. In November 2018, dozens of people joined a handful of spiritual leaders at the edge of Lake Okeechobee for the ‘Healing Our Relationships with Water’ gathering at John Stretch Memorial Park. (4) Organized by Miccosukee grandmother Betty Osceola and local cofounder of SWFL Pachamama Alliance, Holley Rauen, the event, which culminated at the peak of an extensive toxic algae bloom, was an opportunity to collectively pray for Florida’s waters.

Since 2016, South Floridians recognized the growing destruction this harmful algae bloom had on both human and marine life, killing an overwhelming amount of sea creatures and devastating local livelihoods that relied heavily on the water. The cyanobacteria outbreak caused the water to turn slime green accompanied by an overbearing stench. It led state officials to declare a state of emergency in the summer of 20165 and another in July 2018.(6) Agitated by high nutrients, people both caused the problem (through industry, agriculture, and storm run off as well as septic tanks and rampant development) and were severely impacted by the issue as tourists and visitors kept their distance, causing businesses to feel the brunt of the impact. The sludge that brutally damaged local economies and presented a slew of respiratory problems for those living near the water caused Floridians to realize just how interconnected they are with the natural world.

The most striking part of this event is that the narrative of environmental destruction was expanded to the water. Water was not viewed as a conduit through which such environmental harm was carried out, but, similar to the marine and human lives impacted by the cyanobacteria, water was itself a victim that needed healing.

The power that comes with healing water strikes a chord that is much deeper than cleaning water. Such sentiments give water a power that goes beyond a daily resource. In many ways, it reminds us of the past when Florida’s waters were revered as places of healing as noted in Rick Kilby’s Florida’s Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas (2020), which explores a historic time when Florida’s water promoted health and well-being. In less than 100 years, we have flipped this narrative, moving from healing waters to water in need of healing. Talking about water in terms of health and life gives it a stronger meaning. These explanations hold water up as something that is special, necessary, and most of all, sacred through the beliefs of those who come to the water in prayer. This is because such narratives—those of Leonard and the ‘Healing Our Relationships with Water’ gathering gives water its own agency. These ways of viewing human-nature interactions give water a role rather than allowing it solely to encompass a setting or object. Water’s importance taps into long standing cultural notions that water is life and in return water is something to be cherished.

To a large degree, aspects of this perspective is also prevalent in Florida’s Rights of Nature movement, which seeks to grant legal standing for nature through the establishment of intrinsic rights recognized by current laws that allow water the ability to exist, flourish and evolve.(7) Separate from the prayer ceremony, this secular movement, which grew from the need to protect Florida’s springs, exists largely within a legal framework. The notion of providing rights to nature, and more specifically natural systems like lakes, rivers, and springs, allows us to re-visit former ways of characterizing the natural world. Most of these characterizations led to the injustices that continue to exist with water, like inability to access clean water in Flint or FEMA plans that do not secure safety from the water during natural disasters as noted by Pichon Battle in south Louisiana.

Though the Rights of Nature movement is not necessarily spiritually or religiously driven, such initiatives align with water prayer ceremonies as they reinforce a different narrative about human-nature interactions, one that upholds holistic views in which water is a building block of life and in return a sacred element. In both cases, the human-nature narratives act as a way of furthering environmental conversations beyond the physical towards a deeper level—towards how people view themselves in relation to the world.

How to Move Forward
Such alternative views of water help us to re-imagine our relationships with water, recognizing both human and water to have central roles to play in our larger understandings of ourselves and our place in the world. As Kilby notes, “If Florida’s healing waters are to be healed, a paradigm shift needs to occur in the very way water is perceived” (2020, 205). In a lot of respects we have already made such changes to our perspective, viewing water as more than just a resource paved the way forward for travel and recreation in addition to inspiration. Perhaps it is time to take another step in our examination of water—one that considers environmental injustice in addition to the values we profess when we say water is both essential to life and water is life. The moral of this story is that we have to think beyond ourselves. We have to think collectively about what water means to us—you, me, and the millions of others who call Florida home.

This is most important for our springs, the very gems of North Florida. Whether it is saltwater intrusion, drought, cyanobacteria, nutrient loading, or over development, we continue to experience a strain on our water resources. Considering such stories can provide a fresh outlook and may help the state and us as a collective to further grapple with such climatic pressures. In this sense, the role of narratives and how we view our relationship with the water not only expresses spiritual dimensions, but it gives us a more holistic outlook for solving future problems concerning the intersection of humans and the natural world.

Citations

1…https://environmentflorida.org/reports/fle/troubled-waters-2018
2…https://environmentfloridacenter.org/sites/environment/files/resources/Troubled%20Waters%20Florida%20data.pdf
3…https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/899822853/our-relationship-with-water
4…https://wildhunt.org/2019/01/indigenous-and-pagan-leaders-heal-the-water.html
5…See: Kramer BJ, Davis TW, Meyer KA, Rosen BH, Goleski JA, Dick GJ, et al. (2018) Nitrogen limitation, toxin synthesis potential, and toxicity of cyanobacterial populations in Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie River Estuary, Florida, during the 2016 state of emergency event. PLoS ONE 13(5): e0196278. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196278
6…See: State of Florida Office of the Governor Executive Order Number 18-191 (Emergency Management—Lake Okeechobee Discharge/Algae Blooms) issued July 9, 2018. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjHjs614LjqAhUDP6wKHZQPAGsQFjACegQIBRAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flgov.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F07%2FEO-18-191.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1Q3BgS9ixoTtxa5hzU_tG-
7…https://therightsofnature.org/the-rights-of-nature-movement-has-arrived-to-florida/