The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and Practice
© 2019
Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behaviour.
The Wonder of Water explores how human experience – including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases – impacts decisions around water. In many ways, the volume expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology. And yet this book is not simply for philosophers. On the contrary, a specific aim is to explore how more informed philosophical dialogue will lead to more insightful public policies and practices.
Case studies describe specific architectural and planning decisions, fisheries policies, urban ecological restorations, and more. The overarching phenomenological perspective, however, means that these discussions emerge within a sensibility that recognizes the foundational significance of human embodiment, culture, language, worldviews, and, ultimately, moral attunement to place.
Product Details
- World Rights
- Page Count: 280 pages
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 0.6in x 9.0in
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Reviews
"It is no accident that The Wonder of Water starts and ends with poetry. While it is an academic and rigorous compilation, most of its contributors infuse their prose with expressive admiration of water’s foundational and life-affirming properties in a way that’s wonder inducing indeed."
Rachel Jagareski
Foreword Reviews, January/February 2020"The Wonder of Water deploys an explicitly phenomenological approach to water, making links between environmental case studies, policy, and personal experience."
Michael Smith, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University"Contributors demonstrate how a more comprehensive, engaged knowledge of and responsibility for water can guide water restoration and propel sustainable environmental and landscape design and policy."
David Seamon, Department of Architecture, Kansas State University"Using water as a lens for explicating the complexity of environmental experience, The Wonder of Water goes further than any other book in demonstrating how phenomenological methods might inform environmental management."
Ted Relph, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto -
Author Information
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic is Dean of the Faculty of Environment and professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University. She is also a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. -
Table of contents
List of Figures
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
Ingrid Leman StefanovicPart One: The Lived Experience of Water
Rain Queen
Kirby Manià , Simon Fraser University1. Water Gaia: Toward a Scientific Phenomenology of Water
Stephan Harding, Schumacher College2. Flow Motions and Kinethic Responsiveness
Stephen J. Smith, Simon Fraser University3. Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet
David Abram, Author and Cultural Ecologist4. When Salmon Are Deemed Superfluous: Reflecting on a Struggle of Stories
Martin Lee Mueller, Rudolf Steiner University College, OsloPart Two: Water and Place
5. The Place of Water
Janet Donohoe, University of West Georgia6. Engaging the Water Monster of Amsterdam: Meandering Toward a Fair Urban Riversphere
Irene Klaver, University of North Texas7. Water and the City: Towards an Ethos of Fluid Urbanism
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Simon Fraser University8. What We’re Talking about When We’re Talking about Water: Race, Imperial Politics, and Ruination in Flint, Michigan
Sarah King, Grand Rapids UniversityPart Three: Rethinking Water Policy, Practice, and Ethics
9. The Bonding Properties of Water: Community, Urban River Restoration, and Non-human Agency
Bryan Bannon, Merrimack College10. Standing Rock: Water Protectors in a Time of Failed Policy
Trish Glazebrook, Washington State University and Jeff Gessas, University of North Texas11. Phenomenology, Water Policy, and the Conception of the Polis
Henry Dicks, Université Jean Moulin, France12. Towards a Complexity Ethics: Understanding and Action on Behalf of Life-World Well-Being
Robert Mugerauer, University of WashingtonPart Four: Closing Reflections
Conclusion: Looking Forward: From Poetics to Praxis
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Simon Fraser UniversityThe Lure of Water: Four Poems
Dilys Leman, TorontoList of Contributors
Index
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Subjects and Courses