Paper short abstract:

This paper relates vernacular interpretations of ‘watersheds’ in Belize to water/land practices, focusing on negotiations of water quality, biodiversity, wellbeing and contamination in community conservation projects, and related claims about expertise, responsibility, and environmental health.

Paper long abstract:

What values, politics and interdependencies come into view and/or into being alongside diverse forms of watershed thinking in rural Belize? Drawing on ethnographic research in and of 3 Belizean watersheds (encompassing Maya, Mestizo and Creole rural communities, municipalities, farmlands, protected forests, and national planning initiatives), this paper considers different ways of knowing, sensing, and living near water. Watersheds can be variously interpreted as modelled/mapped hydrogeographical areas; resource management units; riparian buffer zones or more extensive landscapes; mosaics/nested areas; veins or infrastructures circulating life forces, resources, and toxic contaminants; ways to connect biodiversity conservation efforts from ‘ridge to reef’; seats of tzuul’taq’a – Maya lords of valleys and mountains. What do these diverse understandings mean and entail for human-environment relationships, and questions of social justice? At a time when governments and international agencies are promoting water governance at catchment level, watershed ideas can precipitate, support or constrain different kinds of claims. In this paper I focus on how they refract causes relating to environmental health, as community groups wrangle biodiversity conservation/tourism initiatives towards consideration of potable water provision, contamination, and toxicity. What relationships do they forge or cut across (non)contiguous territories? How might the notion of a ‘body hydrologic’ help bring together considerations of environmental and human health that accounts for plural ways of knowing and living in and with waterscapes forged through such interacting elements and forces as gravity, rock, plastic, love, capitalism, respect and science; and their mutual implications with reckonings of expertise, public goods and responsibility?