Paper short abstract:

This paper troubles the motivations of swimming for human wellness alongside accounts of ill-health at Windermere, England’s largest lake. It explores conflicting senses of ambivalence, adaptation, avoidance, and anthropocentrism within the outdoor swimming communities and wet ethnographic inquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Windermere, England’s largest lake in the Lake District National Park, attracts regular outdoor swimming practice across all four seasons, often motivated by exercise, competition, socialisation, restorative well-being, and joy. However, Windermere faces more-than-human health pressures from climate change, extreme weather, untreated sewage overflows and wastewater, agricultural and urban runoff, plastic pollution, algal blooms, and biosecurity concerns. Swimmer’s environmental health concerns at Windermere, significantly of wastewater pollution and algal blooms, are further conflicted and overwhelmed by corporate, institutional, activist, national press, social media, community, and individualised representations of human well-being and ill-health. Simultaneously, these human-centred accounts can significantly cloud other non-human species under pressure within these shared waters. This paper contributes to transdisciplinary understandings of outdoor swimming and environmental health within lacustrine environments by reflecting on my twelve-month wet ethnographic inquiry, including ‘lake hangouts’ and in-situ ‘swim-along interviews’ with swimmers at Windermere. The paper includes: (1) highlighting the oxymoronic motivations of swimming 'for' human wellness alongside accounts of ill-health at Windermere, attending to senses of ambivalence, adaptation, and avoidance; and (2) how notions of ‘taking care’ within Windermere’s troubled waters can generate empathetic consideration and practice, alongside further ambivalence and anthropocentric barriers within the swimming communities and my wet ethnographic research.