Paper Short Abstract:

The author intends to use his four-year environmental journalist perspectives and eight years world water source summit organizer experience as a comparative ontological/cognitive materials to make sense of water crisis commons conundrum: crisis by the people, for the people and of the people.

Paper Abstract:

When the author explores the water issues from 2005 onward first as Xinhua News Agency environmental beat writer and convenor/organizer sponsored by many international organizations such as. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, he witnessed a gradually worsening water ambience both in China and beyond, due to damming, water transfer, mining, water footprint flaws of burgeoning new economy and ensued lifestyle change; he will first connect the ecological water issues to the prototypical narratives of regime transition and social upheavals through ethnographical evidences and essential socio-cultural scripts (Water Margins Novel and its resonance as art of being ungoverned – floods mutually being used in Chinese history to refer rebels and malgovernance). Based on this water like society delineation, the author attempts to use a water conservation initiative starting from 2014 to 2023 to describe the necessity and difficulty of motivating/ mobilizing in ecological conservation campaigns and preliminarily answer why intersubjective belonging matters in innovating commons as cultural crisis/inter-species conflicts taking tolls here and beyond. Beginning with an empty basket of water drawing, this paper discusses another “multimodal/soteriological object” also related with bamboo basket: Sound Observing (Guanyin, Bodhisattva鱼篮观音) Avalokitesvara deity who always carries a bamboo basket with fish in it, in this “porous bamboo basket scenario”, another trans-species regime appeared -- the fish resides simultaneously in the air, out of water and temporarily in artificially woven “bamboo infrastructure build for salvation/co-existence.”