Paper long abstract:

Much of the research on the phenomenology of water and landscape inspired by Ingold and Heidegger tends to focus on the large diversity of cultural landscapes, currently losing their ties with the land and water use systems that formed them. Reports indicate that this decreasing diversity is often characterised and accompanied by a strong sense of loss and grief. If we are right about this sense of loss and grief, then, there can be no confidence or consistency in moving forward, until this grief is recognised and what is lost at named. This reflexive transpersonal ecology is an attempt to deep map a river catchment through themes of connection and estrangement that emerged in different places along the river. Even in its most basic topography, the most skeletal and reductive representation of its ecology, the river catchment is a profoundly suggestive way of looking at the world and caring for it.