Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on long-term water justice work in Appalachia, considers water as a collective of droplets passing through, evading capture or ownership, conveying death by toxins or inundation as readily as sustaining human bodies and spirits, with equal disregard: dancing humans toward justice.

Paper long abstract:

Water is equitable in that it equally sustains and infects and carves and flows and freezes and disappears through sinkholes and appears in torrents. As a commons without containment, water molecules connect us by constituting a Himalayan stream, a salamander in the Qualla Boundary, a great white shark in the Coral Sea, and toxic sludge. It has no use at all for status. Water justice is what we learn from water – its lessons are the opposite of and the antidote to capitalist logic. Thirst and toxins are concentrated most in the bodies of those humans most politically, socially and economically marginalized (usually quite intentionally by those who are richer, whiter, and further away). Humans are responsible for taking from upriver without care for the well-being of those downriver; for rerouting and privatizing and polluting water without care for current and future generations of all the beings water constitutes and connects. Instead of reversing and restricting the courses of rivers, we need to reverse logics – seeing mountain communities as the vital tenders of headwaters, whose well-being matters for all, instead of as peripheries, backwaters and sacrifice zones. Examples will be given in this presentation of learning from water's dance in Appalachia in transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations. Poetry and art, for example, are powerful conveyers of the imperviousness of water to being hoarded and withheld and choked with microplastics. And anthropology brings close listening - to the plurality of waters and to what humans learn from water's powerful collectivity.