Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically. Although it was carefully reviewed, it may still contain errors and may not correspond exactly to the recorded audio track. Time stamps are indicative and may not correspond to the edited audio-video recording provided.
Keri Facer (00:00)
So, hello everybody and welcome to this episode where we're focusing on the question of the relationship between time and water, more specifically time and rivers. Before we get going today, I'm just gonna read something from a wonderful book that I'm in the process of exploring. Simpson's book, Theory of Water: Nishinaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Really beautiful. And I just thought that reading this little paragraph at the beginning might be a good way to start this podcast. She writes, "The liminal space of water is a complex cycle spanning different scales of time, spending just days in the atmosphere and decades in snows and glaciers, and thousands of years in the ocean, and tens of thousands of years underground, and hundreds of thousands of years in the Antarctic ice shelf. A drop of water inside me appears on my skin as sweat in the summer. This evaporates into air, traveling as water vapor. Its travels expose it to conditions that cause it to undergo condensation and it falls to the earth as some kind of precipitation. It can fall and be collected in the ocean. It can fall into the collection of groundwater intercepted by soil, infiltration and percolation, learning to move sideways. It can run off into a lake or a river that moves it to the ocean. It can be transpired, perspired, expired by plants and animals. And still it is in motion. And still it is all the water in the world today. Every drop is all the water that has ever been on the planet. And all life shares this water." And I thought it'd be a lovely introduction to our discussions today. So, we have three fantastic guests all looking at this question of the relationship between time and rivers from three very different perspectives in different parts of the world. Joining us from New York is Professor Peter de Souza, now an independent scholar, but formerly director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, professor at Goa University, and professor at the Center for Studies of Developing Societies. Peter's a political scientist who I met years ago working on the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission. We had good fun on that project together. And Peter's a brilliant clear thinker who's leading a really fascinating project that brings together a huge range of scholars and activists, everyone from historians to cultural theorists to ecologists and lawyers, to help to imagine and create better futures for a river in Goa that's under pressure for water extraction. We'll more about that shortly. We also have from Denmark, Dr. Miriam Jensen from Aalborg University. Miriam has been both an activist and a community organizer working around rivers and climate change. And she's recently completed a really fascinating study that looks particularly at the question of how conflicts arise between stakeholders, like farmers and leisure users and environmentalists, around different time pressures around rivers. And finally, we have my wonderful colleague at Bristol University, Dr. Harriet Hand, who I've been working with for a while now. And Harriet is a designer and an educator and an artist. And she's worked around the world helping cities become more legible to their inhabitants, which is the subject for a whole other podcast. She's recently been working out how to help stakeholders working around river health to both see and tune into different temporalities that we have to take account of when we're thinking about the health and future of rivers and river systems. So, welcome all of you to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. So let's start off by just getting to know the rivers that the three of you are working with. So, Peter, maybe you could begin. What river are you concerned with and why?
Peter Ronald DeSouza (03:40)
The river we are studying is a small river which runs for about 125 kilometers. It's located on the west coast of India. It begins its life in a mountain range called the Western Ghats. And it's a river in dispute. It's a river which has been newly in dispute. I say that because many rivers in India are in dispute. Rivers are very important in India and have been the subject of large, epical traditions. Most rivers in India have the status of religious deities. They have names like that. So, everybody knows the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. These are the major religious rivers. And because of the increasing population in India, rivers have become central to disputes between the regions of how the water should be shared. The Indian Constitution, when it was being framed, when the makers of the Constitution imagined a new India, they assumed that such disputes would arise in new India. So, in the Constitution, there's a provision to set up an interstate water tribunal to adjudicate such disputes. So, there was already a legal mechanism to deal with disputes which were emerging, between stakeholders across the disputed region. And that's one of the areas we are looking at. I did not initially come to this river. I wanted to start with another river which is in dispute, but since this was a new dispute, I decided to look at this.
Keri Facer (05:04)
Can you tell us the name of the river that you're working
Peter Ronald DeSouza (05:07)
The river, where it begins, is called the Mhadei in the first 35 kilometers. And the first half of the river is fresh water and at a certain point it meets with the salt water, when the tidal backwash goes up about 35 kilometers. It's called the Mandovi. It's internationally known as the Mandovi. The name of the river is also very interesting. The Mhadei is the mother goddess and the Mandovi is a corruption of that, but it also refers to a certain customs nomenclature.
Keri Facer (05:39)
Thanks, Peter. So, we have the mother goddess, the Mhadei and the Mandovi in this conversation. Wonderful. Thank you. Miriam, maybe you could tell us about the river that you're working with.
Miriam Holst Jensen (05:48)
Yes, sure. So, the river that I've been concerned with is the river Gudunån in Denmark. So, it's the largest river system in Denmark. approximately, I think, 170 kilometers. And what happened in 2019 and 2020 was that extreme episodes of flood led to the first inter-municipal planning process for the river system. So, that's also when my PhD began. So, I've been involved in observing, intervening, participating in the participatory planning process, which brought a lot of different people together around the river. So, I think the river is very interesting because there's a lot of changes going on all at once. So, we have the changes in weather patterns. We have invasive species such as the zebra mussel changing the the species composition within the river system. Then there is a national agenda around sort of land reallocation going on as well at the low-lying areas close to the river system. So, it's just to say that there's a lot of changes going on at the river system all at once. And what was quite interesting in this participatory process, which brought both national actors such as the the Ministry of Environment together with the central Denmark region, together with local landowners and environmental advocates and archaeologists, was that it brought all of these different perspectives together, but also different temporal perspectives together. So, people are very passionate about this river system. So, it's not just people living there, it's also people going there for generations as recreational users, for example. So, there's a lot of generational stories in this river landscape as well, but also we see archaeological findings. We see different human interventions. We see different species such as the zebra mussel changing the rhythms within the river system. So, from a temporal point of view, there's so many interesting temporalities going on here all at once.
Keri Facer (07:30)
Thanks. Miriam. Harriet, Lovely to see you. Perhaps you could introduce the river and the river catchment area that you've been working with.
Harriet Hand (08:01)
Thanks Keri. Yeah, well, we've been working together and thinking about the Bristol Avon, which is the river that runs through the city we live in in the West of England. It's about 130 kilometres maybe long. the UK, the river areas are called catchments. So, it's not just the river, its tributaries and the water habitats that are around it regionally that we're looking at. And I can walk to it in about 20, 25 minutes, the Bristol Avon. It's in the news a lot because it's been... last year, I think, amongst the top five most polluted rivers in the UK. So, it suffers a lot of pollution from sewage, particularly. But its tributaries also suffer from being diverted and from kind of human interventions that have taken the rivers underground. So, if you look at the catchment area of the Bristol Avon, it's almost like a partly completed dot to dot drawing where there's lots of bits missing that are culverted or taken under tunnels. So, that also has an impact on the habitats and the ecology of the river. And like Miriam, we've been working with wide group of stakeholders. People that live near the river, work with the river, are interested in the natural habitat as well as the river in urban and rural environments. In terms of the multiple temporalities, also a very complex picture for the Bristol Avon.
Keri Facer (09:31)
Thanks Harriet. I mean, already as you've been introducing your rivers, you've been sharing with us all of the different things and people and processes and practices that make that river. To me, as soon as we started doing this work, it ended up raising these questions, you know, what is a river? And a river seems to be this multiplicity. And we'll come back to that later, because to some extent that's about looking at who's involved, but we're particularly interested, in this podcast, in the question of time and temporalities. And I know that all of you have been looking in different ways at the different times and temporalities of the rivers. And you've been developing different approaches to making these visible. So, could you talk us through those? Miriam, maybe let's start with you.
Miriam Holst Jensen (10:15)
So, just to give you a short background to why I did it was that I was concerned with the conflict. So, my research project was a collaboration between consultancy companies, utility companies and also the seven municipalities in charge of the municipal planning process. So, we were interested in creating a good participatory process where people could share their interests and then they could agree on a shared future. But that didn't happen. So, when I was sitting sort of coding my material, I could see that they were all taking a starting point in very different temporalities. So, this was both in terms of coordination. We could call it different temporal frames or perspectives, orientations. So, after the sort of official participatory process, I wanted to do some...
Keri Facer (10:59)
I'm just going to jump in there. Can you just explain what you mean by a temporal frame? Just so that we get a handle of the sorts of things you're talking about here?
Miriam Holst Jensen (11:07)
Yes, sure. So, for example, the archaeologists would take a starting point in the Stone Age and the un-excavated archaeological findings. And the farmers would talk a lot in sort of generational time perspective. So, when I was a child or when my father used to do this and this and this, grandfather... And then the environmental advocates, for example, might talk in like the different adaptations, the natural adaptations in the river or the human intervention. So, they had these different, we can call it starting points, baselines for approaching the river and for talking about the future as well.
Keri Facer (11:42)
Thanks.
Miriam Holst Jensen (11:43)
Yeah, so, I designed three workshops where I wanted to experiment with what happens if we open up the space for reflections around time and temporalities, because it wasn't really opened up in the participatory process. So, one of the tools that I developed was what I call the Rhythmical Calendar, which was a form of seasonal round, where I asked people to mark in a round calendar, sort of where do different seasons begin? Which actors or thing marks your season? Where do you feel temporal pressure points during the year? Yeah, so, sort of questions like that and also prompts. Try to think about not only deadlines in a Gregorian calendar frame, but also try to think about different species or weather patterns and so on. And then I put people in different groups, so, I mixed different stakeholders, so, farmers, environmental advocates, mostly because I wanted to try and see what happened if people with different temporal reference points were put together and sort of pushed to think with each other's temporalities in a way. So, first they would mark the calendar individually by looking at these different questions, and then they would share it afterwards. And I think, for me, it was quite surprising that a lot of the stuff that came out of these rounds were actually more than human temporalities. So, for example, I used to coordinate with this specific bird or at this specific time of the year I would see that the water would rise and fall in this manner. So, a lot of different more than human temporalities came up and it also made people reflect in the discussions around how could planning look like in the future? How could I coordinate better with the river system and other structures of time such as EU subsidy schemes' deadlines that a lot of farmers are navigating in as well. So, it's just to say that a lot of different temporal mismatches came up that made people reflect on how should we do planning in the future as well.
Peter Ronald DeSouza (13:43)
I also want to say two things. One is that the process we have initiated in Goa, in a sense, is prior to what Miriam is doing, because our public debate is very conflictual at the moment, and it's difficult to get stakeholders around the table. So, our own project, in a sense, speaks to that opening paragraph you read. We also have taken up time, but we brought in geologists and hydrographers. So, they begin with rainfall and the buildup of aquifers and how these aquifers then flow into the river. So, there's a hydrological, geological dimension to that. To that we've added what I call geological time. Indian Peninsula region where the rivers originate has, over millennia, developed a certain cycle of rainfall, condensation, precipitation, feeding the rivers which then flow back into the oceans. And this has been continuing for millennia. And that has produced the geology of the mountain range in terms of erosion and water flow. So, we begin with that and then we learnt. For us, at the moment, the dispute begins as just a body of water that needs to be harnessed. And as we studied it, conceptually it moved. It became from a body of water to an ecosystem. So, we began to see that around the body of water were forests and flora and fauna, which were very rich. From an ecosystem, it moved to a watershed because then human communities came in. And now, we're using the word commons because we want to bring in rights, not just of current generations, but of future generations as well. So, we see ourselves as trustees of the river. So, trustees for not just all species in the ecosystem, but also for generations still to come. So, we've looked at the river in terms of four timeframes that we have designed and which we hope to introduce into the public domain. One is the geological time, then ecological time, because that sort of follows the geological, then cultural time, because as the river has developed its history, communities have come up on its banks. And these communities have had relationships with the river in terms of ritual, in terms of practice, in terms of seasons. There is a calendar, a cultural calendar. And finally, political time, which in a sense has now come to superimpose itself on all the other times, because it's politics and the stakeholders of the present, I think they are the only rights bearers to the water of the river. The conflict comes because there's a conflict between people who want water for consumption, to people who want water for sugarcane production. It is a very water intensive crop. Then to ecologists and environmentalists and everybody else. So, our study, in a sense, is trying to expand the public debate because the public debate has only been about water management. It's so far dominated by irrigation engineers and lawyers who think that, okay, once we create an institution to handle the dispute, we've solved the problem. So phrases like, the water that flows, that comes from the rainfall, gets wasted because it washes into the sea. we have taken that up. The water, as you know, it carries nutrients. It feeds an entire ecosystem. It supports phytoplankton in the oceans, generates the whole life cycle. So, our study, in a sense, is to impact the public debate and to open it up to all these other temporal frames that so far are missing in the discussion.
Keri Facer (17:17)
Thanks, Peter. Yeah. I mean, it does sound like a lot of what both of your projects are doing is precisely, I think in Michel Callon's words, it's constituting a kind of much more diverse public where there wasn't one before. And so I, you know, I really enjoy those four frames. Harriet, perhaps you could talk us through as well the tools that you're using that we've been developing to help people see these different temporalities, because it's one thing sort of cognitively knowing them, but how do we make this visible? How do we, in Miriam's terms, tune ourselves in to these different ways of seeing and feeling the times of rivers? Over to you, Harriet.
Harriet Hand (17:56)
Thanks Keri. Yeah, I mean it's really interesting, particularly I think Miriam's work with calendars. We also have been using tools or exploring tools. So, a way in for us was to use the timeline as a structure to sort of provoke a kind of response from a broad range of stakeholders who already exist almost as a kind of group of people around the catchment because it does include scientists from universities as well as water companies, as well as local authorities. We also invited in artists working with the river, wild swimmers, community groups. And using the timeline as an existing kind of structure was a really interesting way in just to sort of reveal, like you've said, Miriam and also Peter, the different perspectives, the different starting points people have. One of the things the timeline showed us, perhaps unsurprisingly, was this sort of cause and effect story about the river, about something happening and then an effect happening and how that can provide one sort of story but maybe limits other more complex, richer kind of temporalities that are going on. We did a kind of sort of human scale wall timeline several meters long that people could go up to and plot on what was important to them. It was very much based on that sort of human relationship to the river. And, actually, what we saw was this gap in the future as well. So, that human relationship often meant that people... maybe they were just thinking one generation ahead, their own life span, for example, or their memory of the river within their own lifetime. And that would be limiting what was plotted onto this line. We saw this kind of what we called the missing middle, where there was a kind of gap on the wall beyond the next, say, 25 years, which was really interesting. And I think that sort of sense of time scale as well. When people were thinking longer term, they could see more possibility of slowing down, for example, and doing things more slowly. So, it definitely had an impact on how people felt they could work with time. Our sort of use of tools has really developed over the course of our work. So, from using the timeline as a structure, then introducing other tools, which maybe I'll go into more detail later, but using sort of images or most graphic images that might provoke people to talk about things which are nonlinear or experienced in a very different sense of speed when time slows down or gets quicker or different rhythms. So, using drawings that I made in response to what I was hearing in interviews with scientists and people project managing water interventions for drought mitigation, for example, would talk about slow leaching or overlapping peaks or sort of stop-start or intensities or pollution coming like a piston into a river. These images, for me, were very kind of pattern-based. They were very easy for me to translate into graphic visuals, which I found like a really interesting challenge and a really interesting opportunity then to give those back to people and see what kind of language was provoked by thinking differently, by kind of using images as a way of provoking a sort of conversation and enriching the language we're to talk about time.
Keri Facer (21:06)
Thanks Harriet. What gets interesting to me around this is this sort of multi-temporal constituency around any river that we can hear about. So, we've got this imagined future, whether it's a missing middle or a imagined future generation and these deep, deep time histories. I remember Harriet, when we started working on this, we interviewed the brilliant hydrologist, Professor Penny Johnes about the times of water in rivers. And I just recall being completely blown away by the idea that a river was always multiple temporalities, that it's always the raindrops that are landing on it just now. And it's also the sort of river that's a slow seeping from the land that could date back to the Romans. I hadn't thought about the Roman invasion being a critical part of the health of our river today because of the old Roman mines that were then impacting on the health of the river today. So, this, I mean, this raises really fascinating questions about the temporal politics around these rivers. And I don't know what thoughts you all have about this kind of multi-temporal constituency and... How does one involve that multi-temporal constituency in caring for a river today? Peter, you've talked about a commons approach as one approach to that. I wonder if you want to say more about that, but maybe others of you have thoughts on this.
Peter Ronald DeSouza (22:25)
I just want to sort of connect with the use of images because in India, the constituency we want to reach, some of them are not literate. So, we have actually spent time preparing a 20 plus minute documentary where many of these ideas are now going to be available on film and which are going to be put online so people anywhere in the world can see our river, and there'll be about six or seven talking heads to introduce some of these ideas. That's a tool that we've developed because we don't want the conversation of the river only to be among the literate, among the urban. So, we have used a sort of two-pronged strategy. There's going to be an edited book with scholarly articles. And there's going to be a documentary which carries some of these ideas. Plus, the visuals are very, very beautiful. So, you'll see the river and you'll see it from its, you know, from its origins to the sea. So, that's one way in which we're using the visual to introduce these ideas of temporalities. Now, in our river, we see our primary objective is to influence and expand and deepen the public discourse of the river, which meant that we had to sort of see what was missing in the public discourse. The public discourse is very presentist. You know, the diversion is going to impact us now and it will kill our river, but we've brought in a whole range of cultural dimensions. There are portions of the river which are protected by the idea of a sacred pool. There's a special species of fish called the Mahir, which is protected because a whole ritual has grown up. There's a temple over unless you get permission from the deity, you can't fish in the river. So, these are sacred pools. Now, that fish if it survives, it shows that the river is healthy. It's like, know, if a predator is there in a forest, it means the forest is healthy. You know, a tiger or a leopard. Here, if that fish is in the river, it means the river is healthy. That means the nutrients are all flowing and everything is fine. So, you know, we brought in the cultural connecting with the ecological. And hopefully through both our book and our film, we'll be able to bring these ideas, which are now only in small communities, available to larger audiences. One small point about memory. I want to just introduce this because it's such a fun story. When we were talking to some of the communities along the river, one gentleman who was being interviewed told us his memory of the river. He remembers being a small child when the river was in spate. And the women who wanted to venture out into the river in the canoes summoned him and said, you sit on the front of the river, because he was a chubby little child He was the ballast that stabilized the canoe as they ventured out. So, these are the memories have also been recorded in our project.
Keri Facer (25:10)
That's great. Thanks, Peter. It's really, it's wonderful to hear the work that you're doing. And I know it's a very big change from the kind of dominating political discourse in India about water supply and scarcity. So, to try to bring these different voices in... the image of a little child sitting at the front of a canoe as part of what it means to be thinking about the history and future of this river, to me, is a transformation that is fascinating and it'll be fascinating to see how this plays out politically with your project over the next few years. Miriam, how about you in terms of this sense of these kind of deep histories and deep futures that we're also dealing with every time? The temporality of rivers is amazing, isn't it? You've got the immediate flood or the immediate relationship with the kind of tiny insects that are there, but also these deep histories and deep futures. And, so, I mean, how did that come up in your work? Did you have to deal with that?
Miriam Holst Jensen (26:13)
Yeah, so, it came up all the time. I think what you said before about care really resonated with me as well, that I think that we need to start with how people care about these river systems and that, at least, in my own case, there are so many different emotions involved in not just when a place is disrupted, but also when the temporalities of a place is disrupted. So, for example, the farmer coordinating with the river's fluctuating rhythms and subsidy scheme deadlines, municipal deadlines, different species. So, that can lead to a sense of loss, grief, anxiety, stress. But it's also based on care, right? When I would walk with different people, with the river, I would always see a new layer. For example, the archaeologists would point to something completely different than the farmer, which would often be based on these different temporal reference points. So, for me, that came up all the time. And I think that that's a better place to start for me than the different conflicts, to see how people care and that this care for the rivers are often based on longing for specific temporalities or longing for a sense of stability. And I think that we really see that changing a lot with these different temporal mismatches between, you know, when that specific bird was supposed to arrive there, then I knew that I would do this specific activity.
Keri Facer (27:37)
Yeah. Harriet, does that resonate with you?
Harriet Hand (27:40)
Yeah, very much. I think it's really interesting, isn't it, like how people know the river differently comes out and how that changes conversations. I think what that's brought to mind is how we saw the conversation shift amongst different stakeholders when we were working with these different tools. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was a realisation of the small set of actors that people tend to think with when they're managing the river or working with the river, and how the systems being used are quite inflexible and often quite fast, which don't allow for all actors to be considered. So, that was one sort of interesting point. But what really fascinated me and I think speaks to what you've said, Miriam, is how suddenly wild swimmers were talking to the institution that manages the water. And those conversations were kind of changing how people know the river and seeing how that conversation went from one thing or organization or actor being pitched against another to the time actually being kind of talked about. So, going from farmer versus the condition of groundwater to actually the rhythm of cultivation versus the duration or the pace in which groundwater processes the pollutants that are running into it. And I think that became really interesting in the room for me, that there was a way through to not just knowing the river, but knowing the times of the river and the times of those different actors. And something happened, I think, with the tools.
Keri Facer (29:13)
I mean, to me, I think one of the things that resonates is this issue also of temporal mismatch. One of the things I recall was the mismatch around funding deadlines in relation to the kind of lived rhythms of the ecosystem.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (29:28)
There is one thing that was very important that was mentioned that relates to different interventions, this idea of how do people care for rivers as an entry point rather than entering right away through the conflicts or the tensions around the rivers. I think that point toward the divergence of values or interest that are mobilized by the different actors and somewhere it reveals also the different kind of principle of justice that are mobilized by the people who are concerned by river. What I mean by that is that if you care for the species or the animals or the vegetables that are living with the river, you are mobilizing a specific kind of principle of justice of what matters and what needs to be taken care of. If you pay attention to agriculture and what has been inherited from ancestors or family members who have been cultivating around the river, you valorize another form of justice. And not that they are necessarily in conflict with each other, but they are definitely valorizing different system of values and maybe hierarchies. So, I just find that very interesting to see how, in the different example that you mentioned, those diversity of principle of justice may be appearing.
Peter Ronald DeSouza (30:52)
We've actually tried to shift the discussion from a kind of anthropocentric frame to an eco-centric frame. Now, I say this because, you know, in these sort of human settlements that are fighting over water, they're all conflicting interests and farmers versus urban dwellers versus tourists or whatever. But in this process, they're causing huge damage to the ecology. So, we've got herpetologists, people who work with the smallest species in the forest, you know, the worms and the centipedes and the varieties of snakes and frogs. So, we asked the question, does a golden beetle have less rights to the river than a human being? So, we're introducing the idea of animal rights as well, as species rights into the discussion, because by trying to meet the interests of the various constituencies along human settlements along the river, we are causing huge damage to the ecosystem. And these are permanent. These are species that have evolved over millennia in the life of the river. Some of them are endemic to just that area. There's a species of bat, for example, that is endemic to just that area. And the bat serves a very important function of biodiversity. It takes the fruit from one tree and drops it somewhere else. All this is going to be damaged. So, our response to the issue of different demands on the river is to raise questions of rights and justice, not just between human constituencies. When Keri first asked me if I would join, there was an idea that had floated of the greater common good, of whose good is going to be the basis of the policies of the institutions we build. Is it present communities? Is it proximate communities versus distant communities? Now we've introduced the idea of non-human species as well. So, these are debates that we are placing on the table. We don't have answers, but this project allows us to speak to larger audiences so far.
Keri Facer (33:01)
What you're all talking about is troubling the notion of the river as a single entity. It's almost like one of those swallow murmurations, isn't it? You've got all of these different beings and creatures wrapping themselves around and through the river as a flow of many, many different beings and relationships. And what I can hear when you're talking, Peter, is also that temporal tragedy that may occur, the idea of the ending of the particular timeline, that the river is made up of all of these woven threads and, because of the actions of some, then some of those threads stop. Some of those threads won't continue into the future. So, to me, you know, it raises questions about what are the metaphors that we're using as we're thinking about the river, as we're thinking about its constituency, as we're thinking about its future? How do we negotiate that? How do we negotiate these different demands? Miriam, I know you've been talking about something that you're calling temporal deliberation. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. It sounds like a fascinating concept.
Miriam Holst Jensen (34:00)
Yes, sure, and I agree very much that there are temporal justice or hidden inequalities at play as well that we need to address in these different processes that we're involved in, and I think that it's not just rivers that are multiple. I think it also helps, and this sort of feeds into the the liberation approach, to make people aware that they are also multiple. They are also involved in making or embedded in different rhythms with the river. So, the temporal deliberation approach was an approach developed with Michelle Bastian from the University of Edinburgh. Based on observations of both our cases, we began seeing that there were these shifts in the conversations happening when we opened up the room for reflecting on these different temporalities. I think often these rooms are not even opened up because we just take time sort of for granted. That's just something in the background. We just need to do some kind of future scenario exercises and then we have a plan. When people began reflecting on there are these multiple temporalities at play, both that I am embedded in or making multiple rhythms, that's true for the other people here as well, that people would develop sort of temporal empathy for each other's different temporal reference point or temporal frames, which I think led to what we call temporal flexibility, that people began thinking with each other's temporalities in sort of imagining what could the future look like instead. So, that opened up for multiple possibilities for imagining the future otherwise in a way, right? And what we did is just sort of a small step in that direction. And I think it could be very interesting to work with more experiments around sort of what would it do if we opened up this room for reflecting on time and also in terms of the temporal justice component? Who are we excluding? What rhythms are we not talking to now, and where are the temporal mismatches that we need to address in our planning process? So, my case is obviously very much focused on planning. So, that's the temporal deliberation approach in a nutshell, I guess.
Keri Facer (36:01)
Mm-hmm. Thanks, Miriam. I mean, that ties into the work that Harriet and I have been doing precisely around what we've been calling the temporal imagination. So, how do we expand our capacity to imagine other temporal frames, other rhythms? How do we expand our capacity to negotiate and to address the injustices that arise when we don't see those different temporalities at play? Harriet, did you want to come in on this?
Harriet Hand (36:31)
Yeah, I was going to pick up on, well, the temporal empathy particularly, because I think we also sort of sense that and sense the possibility of using that as a way of creating a sort of common ground for conversation. And actually, we faced quite a lot of challenges finding that way in to allowing people to explore time in a more complex sense and to kind of start to surface maybe different dimensions of time and different sensations and experiences of time. And, so, we've actually sort of shifted one of our tools into a fairy tale story of Little Red Riding Hood to enable people to think about the different actors, human, non-human, the forest, the path, as well as the wolf or the grandmother in the story. And that empathy, I think, has really come through. And I think it's really interesting, Miriam, when you talk about that, because I think having some space for people to put themselves in the position or the shoes of other actors, other species, is a really powerful point for that shift in perspective. And once that shift has happened, it feels like there's a much easier step to be made to go back to a real world situation and to see the possibilities. And I think the thing that's been really powerful for us is to see how the human kind of assumptions you mentioned that are sometimes kind of invisible or we don't give time to, or aren't given space to. And Peter, what you were saying as well, once you realize that shift to a more eco-centric perspective, that you can change how things are done. There is a possibility of working with time differently. There is a possibility of choosing a different calendar or thinking about a different rhythm or a clock as the thing that's dominant, that maybe becomes the driver for how you think about a particular problem. And that's really interesting.
Keri Facer (38:24)
Well, thanks, Harriet. And we're going to move towards the close of our conversation now. Everything that you've been talking about suggests to me that we need a new sort of politics. One suggestion is that we give rivers personhood, but I think that you're all saying something slightly different. So, I want to wrap up by inviting you all to think about what sorts of politics would you want to see around rivers? What sorts of politics might be adequate to the deep time temporalities, both past and future, that are engaged when we're thinking about rivers? Let's start with Peter. How might you envisage a different sort of politics that takes the sort of temporalities and timings that you've found seriously?
Peter Ronald DeSouza (39:08)
You know, in India, as I said at the beginning, rivers are going to be sites of major political dispute. And the dispute gets fairly conflictual in the sense that people are not willing to negotiate and deliberate like in probably regions of Europe. We see our contribution. And in that sense, it's a novel contribution to the discussions on rivers in India, and that's what we've been told by people who've been in the area for much longer. We've seen our contribution as bringing into the discussion a range of issues which are so far absent, what Miriam calls the closed rooms that are not there in the public debate. So, we've brought in culture. We've brought in geology. We've brought in hydrology. Ecology has been there, but not enough. We've brought in law. We brought in ⁓ the pollution from urban settlements. And, so, we see our intervention as expanding the public discourse. Hopefully, through this process, the kind of myopia which today dominates policy and politics, will be challenged by placing it out there in these two forms through the film and through the book. We are giving civil society a lot of data which has so far not been available to then interrogate the political system. So, our strategy has been ⁓ to populate the public domain with lots of knowledge from multiple viewpoints, which will then make the politics much more engaged with scientific data and knowledge which is, at the moment, absent because the interests are very strong. Farmers are not going to compromise. They constitute an electoral constituency. Politicians are playing to that constituency. You know, large corporates are coming in because they just want the water for industry of a certain kind, steel making, for example. So, the ecosystem is being degraded. And through our effort, we are bringing in dimensions which have so far been absent and we hope will now be picked up by the policymakers, by the media, by civil society, by movements which they will have to respond to because we have not taken sides. We've allowed the data and the science to speak for itself through a fairly complex ⁓ epistemic frame because we brought in culture, we brought in law, we brought in ecology. So, hopefully, our kind of intervention will be replicated in other dispute areas and that may change the national politics. But, at the moment, this is just a small intervention.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (41:33)
Thank you, Peter. So, Miriam, maybe you want to step in.
Miriam Holst Jensen (41:38)
Yeah, I think first of all, it's a difficult question, but it's a nice one to sort of imagine how could it be otherwise. For me, it starts with sort of cultivating a temporal attunement to the multiple temporalities. In my case, the political level is often municipal politicians and also the planners involved. So, it starts with education, right? So, educating people on time and that time is something more than, you know, Gregorian calendars and clocks. That's also time. But what other temporalities are present in rivers and how can that lead to new ⁓ planning practices, new planning tools that can open up for this room where we can address temporal inequalities, the different temporalities that are not included in the different processes that we're involved in? So, I think, a different politics of time, for me, starts with sort of opening this room up for reflections.
Harriet Hand (42:33)
Yeah, I think I'd just build on that because I agree, you know, the longer term thinking that's needed, the need to take into account the complexity of the situation and not just the river, but all of the surrounding processes of farming, of planting, of building that go on that impact the river. But also just add to that a kind of disruption as well to the political constraints, particularly around funding. There's a lot of stuck thinking about the cycles of things based on politics and those processes of managing interventions and projects that needs to be disrupted. Groups and communities need to work together and to know and to be able to put into play a much more flexible, much more eco-centric approach that isn't based on these kind of fixed funding cycles and constraints from the political systems.
Peter Ronald DeSouza (43:29)
I want to introduce another small, perhaps as a sort of next stage to our work... We could also try and identify very interesting challenges that emerge. For example, the other day I was reading that many of our rivers, particularly in Europe and North America, are turning saline because of the salt that is used in winter on the roads. So, the salt that is used, which is supposed to be useful to ensure that there's no traffic accidents, is washing away into the rivers. And that's changing the river ecosystems. How do you negotiate these sort of dilemmas? So, that's something I think would be very useful, would be one way of contributing to the politics, to identify policy dilemmas of this kind in the regions we are working in, and then place them out there for funding agencies or research communities. The fact that we're talking from different regions of the world, and that gives us a special vantage point to identify dilemmas which we can then place before global communities that are thinking about futures, rivers and futures. So, I think that's something that we could take away.
Keri Facer (44:38)
Thanks all. ⁓ It's wonderful to hear your suggestions and your research and to learn more about what you're doing. There's clearly a lot more to be done particularly the work that you're doing to help us reframe the politics, looking through a temporal lens at rivers seems absolutely essential and very unusual in this area. So, thank you all for the work that you're doing and I look forward to us meeting again in a few years time to hear what sorts of progress that we're making. I think we'll wrap up at that point. Thank you everybody.
Peter Ronald DeSouza (45:07)
Thank you.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (45:07)
Thank you.
Miriam Holst Jensen (45:07)
Thank you.
Harriet Hand (45:08)
Thanks Keri. Thanks Michel.
