Fluid Relations: Water and Ecological Citizenship

Placing water at the core of a materialist theory of citizenship, Gwendolyn Blue aims to produce a “dislocation” in capitalist-driven and anthropocentric imaginaries, enabling recognition that non-market and more-than-human oriented visions of citizenship and consumption are not only possible but are arguably necessary. Her paper opens questions of citizenship to a consideration of the multiple species that belong to a particular region, where belonging is not predicated on political or cultural identity but on material, embodied attachments and dependencies. Citizenship, in other words, is approached as a site of struggle for imagining political and ethical possibilities.

Although a great deal of scholarship on citizenship assumes an a priori boundary between consumption and citizenship, several efforts have been made to interrogate, destabilize and reconceptualize the consumer-citizen divide. Sites of consumption are increasingly “good for thinking” about questions proper to citizenship—where we belong, what rights we hold, who represents our interests. These renditions, however, are predicated on definitions of consumption as a market-based practice and of citizenship as a solely human-based endeavour.

Blue elaborates on these tensions and potentials within the concept of citizenship by situating them in relation to the case of the oil sands ducks. In April 2008, five hundred ducks were reported dead in a tailing pond in Alberta’s mega-industrial oil sands project. Later counts numbered upwards of 1600 deaths. Images and stories of the dying waterfowl circulated in national and international media, sparking broad-scale public concern. In cases like these, imagining citizenship as encompassing more-than-human bodies can help to reframe questions of responsibility and accountability in ways that highlight rather than erase our mutual ecological dependencies. Moreover, as global struggles ensue over the right to water, theoretical redefinition can serve as a political ally by opening discursive spaces in which the linkages among water, citizenship and rights are positioned as legitimate and viable.