Reconnecting Visible and Invisible Water Infrastructures with Water Bodies

Thinking with water has traditionally been the domain of hydro-engineering, which has effectively engineered water into a self-evident background so that it is easily available for everyday consumption. Without this accomplishment modern civilization could not exist. Safe drinking water comes out of the tap, flushed toilet water disappears into a sewage system. A crucial aspect of this system is its invisibility. An underground network of pipes connects each home to large treatment plants. Only when there are problems--burst or clogged pipes, etc—are the arteries unearthed. At another level contemporary water infrastructure is highly visible: major dams block the flow of mighty rivers, and thousands of miles of irrigation ditches square the landscape. Visibility and invisibility both function on various levels. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one in ten of the world’s major rivers no longer reach the sea for part of the year because of upstream use of their waters. Charismatic rivers as the Nile, the Yellow, the Indus, the Rio Grande, and the Colorado rivers, along with many others, end in sand, sometimes hundreds of kilometers before their mouths. The absent river (invisible water) makes visible how the river is over-exploited. Thinking with water would entail thinking through this dynamic of visibility and invisibility.

Klaver unpacks this dynamic at different epistemological, ontological, aesthetic and experiential levels. In a main current of thought, she engages the effects of the invisibility of our everyday water infrastructure on our capacity to think and live with water. In order to understand and appreciate water, Klaver argues that we need to cultivate daily relations to the hydrological networks and ecosystems of water in the larger landscape. She also suggests various ways to accomplish a renewed connection to water, through events such as River Festivals, but also low key experiences of walking one’s dog along a detention pond that is often called a “lake.” The experiential boundaries between hydrological infrastructure and water landscapes becomes blurred in such everyday activities. As Klaver concludes, in such cases thinking with water becomes a question of how one can thoughtfully translate these quotidian experiences into a shared public understanding of the importance of healthy watersheds in order to keep water running from one’s tap. Thinking with water flows into a sense of public imagination that is profoundly infused by a watershed mentality.