Moving With Water: Environmental Healing Through Somatic Political Ecology

Abstract 

This research explores water’s relational intelligence through both somatic and scientific frameworks, drawing on anthropological inquiry and contemporary dance practice to illuminate how water's movement patterns reflect forms of agency deeply entangled with human experience. By examining water’s explained and unexplained properties alongside embodied ecological knowledge, this work proposes new ways of understanding environmental consciousness and interconnection. Ultimately, it suggests that reciprocal, movement-based relationships with water offer powerful tools for addressing climate change, fostering ecological healing, and reimagining environmental justice through somatic and interdisciplinary approaches.

Keywords

Water consciousness, somatic ecology, dance activism, environmental justice, multispecies ethnography, political ecology, hydrofeminism, environmental healing, climate change, water rights, ecotones, embodied knowledge, collective healing

Introduction

Water, from drop to ocean, and every ‘body’ in between, is crucial to life on Earth. As a sentient, agent, and loving being, water is precious and enduring, creative and destructive. As Earth’s creatures, we live in relationship to water. Water cleanses and currents us into flow. Water nourishes and expands, providing homes, food, and transport – breathing life into the world around it, as landscapes, ecosystems, and civilizations rise and fall (Solomon 2010, p.14). Life began in Earth’s vast oceans, and our scientific searches for life beyond Earth often begin in water (Knoll 2015, p.73). Our closest neighbor Venus likely had warm oceans in its early life, under a fainter Sun (Way et al. 2016). Water is Earth’s skin in some ways, covering 71% of the Earth’s surface (Ball 2015). Water is also humanity, with our bodies composed of 60% water on average (Sissons 2020).

We live in spirit-to-spirit intersubjective relations. Diverse frameworks to engage with consciousness and its facets, of perception and reciprocity, weave together to articulate life. Called ‘the universal solvent,’ water dissolves and carries in it many of Earth’s minerals and chemical compounds (Franks 2000, p.3). In its connectedness, water takes many shapes: glacier, creek, cloud, plant, and animal. As we are made of water, waterways are human ways – landscape, ecosystem, and civilization share unmissable epistemologies.

This essay argues that water can guide us toward epistemologies rooted in movement, healing, and reciprocity, when related to as dynamically alive. Approaching water as a sentient mover rather than a passive substance invites us to develop more reciprocal, respectful, and sustainable ways of living with the natural world. Confluences of political ecology and somatic healing foreground this interdisciplinary discussion on the somatic ethics of environmental consciousness, as exemplified by dance with water. 

When witnessed as a dancer – as an embodied, moving sentience, instead of an inanimate object or resource to exploit – water may be keener to share its time-transcending wisdom with modern humanity. Its infinitely intricate, unpredictable, and diverse movements – rogue waves and flowing rivers alike – are reflective and fractally cyclical. Water’s dance is primordial, yet its contemporary struggles are largely unprecedented in Earth’s history. If we return to our essence, we may find that water’s dance – manifest in bodies from oceanic to microcosmic and everything in between – offers a plunge into consciousness itself, with lessons that can catalyze harmony with the more-than-human world.

Methods

Here, we swim in the tidelectics of water, to understand not only water’s vitality but also to wade into its mysteries and learn its lessons. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s tidelectics provides an approach to organizing knowledge that opposes the traditional ‘dialectic’ of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and instead prioritizes “...the back-and-forths of watery flux, pasts, and futures, stirring into one another” (Helmreich 2023, p.9). Tidelectics informs both the subject matter and structure of this work: interwoven disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies refract each other like light in water, illuminating fluid, entangled patterns across tradition, science, and art. We ripple through trickling creeks and massive deltas of anthropology, political ecology, somatics, and climate science. The biosemiotic fluttering rivulets and widespread deltas of this text manifest as the interweaving pulse between branches of stories.

This project brings scientific research on the chemical and physical properties of water – ranging from polymorphous nanostructures to Ekman spirals – into conversation with somatic and political ecologies. It draws upon works such as A Book of Waves by Stefen Helmreich, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology by Astrida Neimanis to examine human-water relationships through political ecology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and hydrofeminist theory – evidencing the deep connections between watery and human bodies. These frameworks allow for an interdisciplinary analysis of water not only as substance but also as relation – bringing artistic activism into dialogue with scientific and environmental research on the climate crisis, including systemic contamination and infrastructural failings as detailed in Seth Siegel’s Troubled Water: What’s Wrong With What We Drink. 

Investigating somatic work with water and community, this work connects body and place as in Andrea Olsen’s books, to emphasize the power of interpersonal, embodied ecological healing modalities. Drawing on research from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, neuroscience on meditation and wellness, this work articulates that both water and dance are fundamental in trauma healing and social welfare. Dance frameworks like the Laban Institute’s Movement Analysis, specifically Movement Choirs (flash mobs) and the interdependent frameworks of ‘body, effort, space, and shape’ characteristic of Labanotation, a written dance notation system, are also referenced. 

The diverse array of theoretical frameworks in this work flow through subjects that magnify multiplicitous aspects of our relationship to water. Movement is integral to the vital energies of, and relationships between, all life. Focus on waves, rivers, severe weather, and oil spills integrate embodied thinking into crucial conversations about climate change. Further, placehood, here, is a multiscalar tool to examine human relationships to water. Global climate change and US nationwide water contamination ground these specific regional analyses within the Midwestern United States, where the Great Lakes hold 20% of the world’s freshwater. We examine anthropogenic manipulations of the Chicago River, the Indigenous Water Spirits of Wisconsin, as well as the Water Protectors of the Dakota access pipeline protests, and the immense water contamination challenges in Flint, Michigan. 

Devastating environmental destruction, from local damages to global warming, necessitate international collaboration. This research culminates in a deep dive into Global Water Dances, a community engagement and environmental sustainability movement. Focusing on the power of dance to connect with water and heal communities as exemplified by the 2017 Flint, Michigan Global Water Dance Event, organized and choreographed by Adesola Akinleye – this examination builds to reveal how choreography and place-making empower our relationship with water and each other. 

This work, in its water-like dance through disciplines and topics, proposes a somatic ethics for engaging with water science and politics. Environmental consciousness is strengthened through somatic political ecology – an approach that centers embodied connection and sensory perception as vital to ecological awareness. Interdisciplinary inquiry allows new insights to surface between scientific research on water and philosophical explorations of sentience, revealing both as inseparable from embodied relationality and creative healing practices. The reader is invited into a deeper connection with water in everyday life – from the tap and the shower to rivers, oceans, and the shared waters within our own bodies.

Ecotones: Atomic Water and Somatic Healing

On every scale, ‘boundaries between’ create generative zones from natural uncertainty – processes from cellular respiration, and chlorophyll leaves meeting carbon dioxide, to weather circulation patterns, are reliant on the creative potential of ecotones. Writer and dancer Andrea Olsen outlines a concept called ecotones that describes the creative potential inherent to places where two different ‘habitats’ overlap (Olsen 2014, p.228). For example, the shore of a sandy beach meets a vast ocean – the ‘edge zone’ is dynamic and rich, offering more than the sum of its parts. Olsen’s ecotone appears in how water’s intramolecular geometry makes its unique, life-giving properties possible. More largely, liquid water is “...organized around that wriggling, horizontally oriented boundary that divides the realm above from the world below” (Helmreich 2023, p. 5).

The human body has an ecotone, the skin, wherein inner and outer ‘place’ come together through our semi-permeable membrane, engaged in reciprocal perception, just like converging ecosystems. Formless air gives form to bodies, where “...thirty pounds of air pressure per square inch of skin literally informs the contours of bodies – keeping them from exploding” (Olsen 2014, p.114-115). The laws of physics we take for granted on Earth not only keep us alive, but also inform our very structures and movements: the nature of living beings is one with the physical and spiritual foundations of the planet on which we live. Ecotone is manifest in the creative process, wherein there is a “place of heightened possibility” in “the edge between what is known and what is not known” (Olsen 2014, p.228). Landscapes, through the potentiated in-betweenness articulated by Olsen’s term ecotone, are similarly imbued with creative agency. Water shapes the world around it through these creative forces – carving canyons and falling as rain. Water is essential for all known life: all life on Earth emerged from water and depends on water to live and grow. Water’s remarkable ecotone properties make it one of the few substances commonly existing in all three states (solid, liquid, and gas) within Earth's temperature and pressure ranges. Unlike most substances, water expands when it freezes due to molecular structure and hydrogen bonding patterns. Even more, water has exceptionally high surface tension amongst liquids and top-tier solvent properties, making it crucial for biological processes (Franks 2000).

Water has both solvent and polar qualities that manifest as water’s creative force. On larger scales, water interacts with other elements like Earth and Air to create climate and seasons. Water is the universal solvent, having the ability to dissolve a wide variety of Earth’s minerals and chemical compounds within itself, binding with other molecules in a process called adhesion (FuseSchool 2014). On a microscopic scale, we find water already embodies its movement properties that generate life on planetary and cosmic scales. Water’s nature as both a solvent and a polarized molecule, mirrors the relationship between interconnectedness and uniqueness that permeates sentient experience. As a polarized molecule, the differences between its atomic components create a magnetizing dance of covalently electrifying charges. As a solvent, water brings (us) together – imagine an ocean without salt. Water is never found in a completely pure form, without dissolved substances, anywhere on Earth (Letzter 2017). Water intakes ions too readily from the surrounding environment, and even water void of any non-H20 elements will still continue to morph the very structural essence of itself through environmental interaction, Water’s molecular shape means it frequently exchanges electrons with other H20 molecules, to create H30+ and H0- ions. “Absolutely pure water doesn’t exist” (Letzer 2017). These subatomic solvent and polar qualities shape water’s structure and flow, allowing us to learn about vast oceans through just one drop. 

The solvent quality of water is echoed in religious and spiritual practices as well. Beyond pollutants, water also holds memories: In many animist praxes, water feels and heals our traumas, and water grants sacred deliverance (Singh 2011; Dunwich 2019). Artistic applications of ‘living, dancing’ relations with water are also abound. Water’s benefits to human welfare increasingly emerges in ecotherapeutic contexts, in water’s healing effects on our nervous systems (Tang, Hölzel, and Posner 2015). 

One example where religion and its architecture relates to water as though it holds memory is in Sikhism, the world’s fifth largest religion, which originated in the Punjab region of India in the late 15th century (Singh 2011). In Sikhism, sarovars, or sacred waters, are placed near gurdwaras (Sikh temples). The waters in some sarovars are thought to have curing powers because prayers are continually recited in their vicinity. Further, Sikh Gurus advise that as one recites their Sikh prayers early in the morning before dawn, one should keep a glass of water within earshot of their prayers, and at the conclusion, drink that water and sprinkle it around your home and business (Singh 2011). Similar practices emerge in many pagan traditions – for example, ‘charging’ water in sunlight or moonlight or manifesting a new reality with water by speaking intention into it and then drinking it (Pike 2017, p.102), offering epistemological insights into how humans channel intentions and memories through water.

Artistic and ritual practices help us relate to water’s presence—whether through movement, intention, or mindfulness. Artistically, one can study its form by painting water from life or a still photo, one can dance like water itself, or the motions we perform that relate to water like drinking and bathing. One can exchange energy with water in the shower, or in a river. One can practice mindful thinking while drinking, and food that tastes better made with love is a strong testament to the crucial role of human embodiment when in relationship to organic materials. Folk and pagan traditions and knowledge such as scrying, reading tea leaves, and egg cleansing also exemplify the spiritual ability of natural materials (Dunwich 2019, p. 128, 50, 79). Many Indigenous traditions emphasize reciprocal relationships with the natural world, where spiritual connections can be developed through practiced gratitude and mindful engagement with living beings, including water, plants, and landscapes (Kimmerer 2013).

This embodied reciprocity is increasingly seen in neuroscience as well, where research shows that practices like gratitude and mindfulness reshape brain function. Richard Davidson at UW-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds research found that long-term Buddhist practitioners could achieve sustained gamma-wave states during meditation, particularly when focused on compassion and gratitude. This is significant because gamma waves typically only appear in brief flickers in most people's brains, but these monks could maintain this high-amplitude state, suggesting their training created lasting changes in brain function and emotional regulation, through loving relationships with the world around them (Davidson 2004).

Meditative states, dancing in large groups, and spending time near bodies of water, are all proven ways to effectively reduce stress, increase focus, facilitate emotional regulation, and foster connection. All of these methods work due to the cultivation of relational harmony with oneself, others, and the environment (Tang, Hölzel, and Posner 2015). The ‘embodiment’ of different characteristics – in this case, those of water – have shown therapeutic effects, particularly in nervous system regulation and neuroplasticity in healing trauma symptoms (van der Kolk 2014). Movements and the states of consciousness/relationship to our environments associated with specific movements – such as the scooping and drinking of water – help us reimagine who we are, and how we relate to the world around us. 

Coastal areas are found to be the happiest, and being near water is ‘psychologically restorative,’ reducing stress. Areas near water are less polluted, receive more sunlight, and encourage physical activity. The meditative quality of water movement, whether one is observing it or submersed in it,’ is capable of recalibrating our nervous systems (Elle Hunt 2019). Ecotherapy is “healing and growth nurtured by healthy interaction with the earth” that acknowledges the vital role of the human-nature relationship in human health (Buzzell & Chalquist, 2010). Some examples of ecotherapy include horticulture, forest bathing, conservation programs, adventure, green exercise, nature arts and crafts, and animal-assisted therapy (W, 2021).

Contemporary researchers such as Martin Chaplin and Rustum Roy have made great strides in understanding the structural complexity of water, proposing various evidence-based thermodynamic models. Chaplin’s research dives into hydrogen bonds, and how water can arrange itself into complex structures that garner unexpected physical properties, throughout its three states. He found, for example, that water makes icosahedrons (a 20-sided polyhedron). He also discussed water’s characteristic of at once being extremely sticky and slippery; water is recognized for its ‘stick/slip behavior’ in our biological sense of touch (Chaplin 2023). Chaplin’s extensive work on water research maintains scientific rigor without writing off water’s complexity by prioritizing solutions, innovations, open exploration, and more, at the frontiers of water knowledge.

Roy’s research similarly revealed that contrary to the previous belief that water maintained a relatively homogenous, crystalline molecular structure between its three states, that water actually has a heterogenous nano-structure with distinct regions and Gibbsian phases (Roy 2005, p.98-103). Essentially, this means that no matter water’s perceived uniformity, it is always fluctuating in structure – polymorphous, rather than crystalline (long-form atomic patterns). Ever-changing structures of water evident in groundbreaking molecular science are also recognizable in everyday scenarios where water changes states, for example ice melting or water boiling. The triple point is a specific temperature and pressure that allows water to simultaneously exist as a solid, liquid, and gas at the same time – in ‘thermodynamic equilibrium’ (UCSC Physics 2018). Both the polymorphous structures and the triple point are forefronts on the wider inquiry on water’s complex movement abilities. 

As the body of research regarding water’s physics and role in sentience continues to emerge, the extent to which water has been damaged by humanity’s harmful ways will be revealed as well. Not only are the violent treatment facilities, movements through pipes with unnatural 90-degree turns, and deeply contaminated natural waterways that we subject water to nonconsensual, but they are also ethical violations to ourselves and water ecosystems (Coats 2001). From engineered waterways to treatment facilities to contaminated watersheds, our relationship with water reflects both technological influence and environmental concern. While scientific questions about water's behavior continue to emerge, humans maintain profound physical and cultural connections to water, experienced through our bodies and communities (Chen 2013; Strang 2010). 

Wisconsin Water Spirits: Indigenous Knowledge and Artistic Landscapes

This section brings Ho-Chunk, Anishinaabeg, and Menominee Indigenous cosmology, ecology, and history into conversation with the works of two Wisconsin artists and professors: Ho-Chunk sculptor Truman Lowe, and dancer Margaret H’Doubler. While Water Spirits are globally and historically ubiquitous (Strang 2023), those in Wisconsin are uniquely embodied through effigy mounds—ecotonal forms that echo Lowe’s relationship between water and wood, and H’Doubler’s exploration of internal-external dynamics in movement. Submerging Wisconsin’s history in water’s vitality also reveals how colonialism, academic institutions, and environmental degradation are hegemonically entangled.

Effigy mounds are ‘living prayers stones,’ where sacred Earth is in ecotone with Air (Birmingham and Rosebrough 2017). These mounds exemplify the profound spiritual life of the physical world, including the Water Spirits of each body of water, in present day Wisconsin. Wisconsin is known as the epicenter of effigy mounds, which are Indigenous earthen sculptures that serve spiritual, ceremonial, and practical purposes (“Observatory Hill” 2015). Often effigy mounds are built in the shapes of animals or animal spirits, sometimes serving as burial mounds as well (“Effigy Mounds Culture” 2012). Wisconsin has the highest concentration of them in the world: with around 20,000 mounds built by Indigenous people in various parts of the state, of which only 4,000 remain (Gard 2021). Panther and Water Spirit mounds are more common in Eastern Wisconsin than in Western Wisconsin, where Bird Spirit mounds are more frequently found. It has been proposed that these regional differences are due to Wisconsin’s landscape: to the East, it is filled with high bluffs, and to the West, it is filled with wetlands. Thus the lower realms (of Earth and Water) are more accessible in the West, and the higher realms (of air and fire) are accessible in the East – aligning with Ho-Chunk paradigms of the harmonious relationships between realms and directions (“Native Americans and the Preserve,” n.d.).

The Ho-Chunk creation story begins with the Earthmaker’s tears, shed in sadness as he becomes conscious of the empty space around him. Water is grief, absence flows into presence – his tears became our oceans, lakes, and streams. The creator made the four directions, four winds, and four underground snake beings, to steady the watery Earth. He made the Thunder Clan, four people who arrived on Earth at a place called Red Banks in Green Bay, WI. They were later joined by the War, Deer, Snake, Elk, Bear, Fish, and Water Spirit clans (Radin 1990).

Internationally acclaimed Ho-Chunk sculpture and installation artist, professor of Fine Arts at UW-Madison, and curator Truman Lowe was most known for his large, site-specific works that used natural materials. His art was informed by his parents’ work, making split-ash baskets, beadwork, and other traditional Ho-Chunk art. Many of his sculptures feature canoes and other structures, often articulating themes of trees as vessels for making water solid (“Movement: Water into Wood” 2025). Canoes are quintessential as Indigenous means of transport around the Great Lakes and the many smaller waterways of the Midwest. Journeys, from birth to death for example, are embodied by canoes, making them a powerful symbol. Lowe conceptualized canoes both as shelter and as the vehicle – a womb-like design coupled with transportive characteristics imbue canoes with both masculine and feminine essence. His work Water Spirits reflects on the importance of the flow of water, as both a natural and spiritual force, by creating contemplative sculptures from natural objects (“Truman Lowe - Infogalactic: The Planetary Knowledge Core” 2016).His art also reflects on the relationship between nature and culture, intertwining natural objects like willow branches and feathers to evoke the waters of Wisconsin woodlands. Lowe says, “The audience, whoever enters the museum, I want them to be comfortable with the fact that those objects, that are contemporary, that are new, more recent, they’re equally as alive as the historic objects. Alive meaning they’re full of information” (“Vantage Point” 2011). His work embraces the aliveness of the objects he assembles, imbueing nature with his own memories and feelings, woven into materiality through sculpture. 

Lowe’s art delves within the relationships between material and spirit, between himself and nature. This blending of internal and external focus in creative and spiritual practices fosters a profound fluidity and interconnectedness with one’s environment. Compassionate reciprocity, animism, and communication with beings of the more-than-human world are central to Ojibwe, Anishinabeg, and Menominee teachings and ways of life. From each body of water being inhabited with unique Water Spirits, to effigy mounds described in Ho-Chunk oral history as “living prayer stones” requiring tobacco offerings to maintain spiritual balance (Birmingham and Rosebrough 2017), all my relations acknowledges the healing that comes from listening to the aliveness of plants, rocks, and animals (Benton-Banai 2010). Singing to rice during harvesting builds harmonious relationships and ensures mutual growth, and trees are asked for permission before being cut down (Vennum 1988, p.150-152; Grignon and Kimmerer 2017). Hunters apologize to animals and, rather than killing the first game they see, they wait for one who offers his life (Loew 2013, p.88; Kimmerer 2013). Cultivating harmonious relationships to one’s environment through compassion and telepathic connection, living with landscapes and ecosystems, from mountains to creeks, as living entities requiring respect, is crucial to healthy, abundant, happy, and connected living. 

The co-embodiment of natural, spiritual, internal, and external forces was pivotal to the works of another Wisconsin-born artist and professor, Margaret H’Doubler, who founded the first ‘dance major’ curricula at UW-Madison in 1926, and whose approaches – which she called the ‘Wisconsin Dance Idea’ – have become the foundation for standard education methods in universities (“Margaret H’Doubler and the Wisconsin Dance Idea”). Her pedagogies emphasized the importance of environment in the relationship to physical vessel, similar to artist Truman Lowe’s work with wood and canoes. H’Doubler’s journey began as a physical education professor at UW-Madison, until she left to pursue graduate work at Columbia University. She sought a dance pedagogy, finding one in the educational techniques of musician Alley Bentley, who began her lessons with somatic awareness exercises, done lying on the floor to change one’s relationship with gravity. H’Doubler’s methods that she proceeded to form from this seed idea while teaching at UW-Madison centered on self-expression, exploration, and discovery through movement and sensing. 

Her method has overlap with the Feldenkrais method – beginning eyes closed, laying on the floor, re-examining everyday and gestural movements. H’Doubler argues that this somatic practice is an exploration of the self through movement, a gaining of self knowledge. With her method, one finds their pathways in this floorwork before ever dancing upright: a vertical relationship to gravity is a confounding variable, easier to integrate after floorwork. She also frequently using props, such as balloons to lift limbs from the ground. Her innovative pedagogical approaches included ‘teaching how to teach’ as a vital part of a dancer’s curriculum – which is why her students populated early university dance program staff around the US. She also taught that every movement has a “time-space-force,” similar paradigm to the body, effort, shape, and space tenants of Laban Movement Analysis. Internal and external focus are fundamental to a wide variety of dance techniques worldwide, to creatively explore how self expression mixes with relationship to environment. She argued that dance is ‘arrived at,’ in authenticity, via her method. H’Doubler was also known for often holding her courses outdoors, on the shorelines of Madison’s magnificent lakes. Lathrop Hall, which houses the dance department, is located along Lake Mendota. Her classes and performances populated the coastline, fostering an embodied relationship with the lake in the campus community (UW Archives and Records Management | UW-Madison Libraries” 2019).

While H’Doubler taught on its shores, Lake Mendota became known as the “most studied lake in the world.” At UW-Madison, limnology (the study of inland aquatic ecosystems) began in the US – with research primarily in Lake Mendota (“History of Limnology” 2013). Throughout this timespan and more, UW-Madison destroyed countless effigy mounds, which remain un-apologized for and without any repatriation or reparation efforts. From 1890’s onward archeologists excavated mounds without tribal consent, and mounds were flattened to build colleges, dorms, and expand roads to campus. By the 1920s, all of the mounds on UW-Madison's land were destroyed. The colonial agenda to deliberately destroy Indigenous placehood relations through nonconsensually excavating and flattening effigy mounds is intertwined with the origination of universities, and settler territorialism more broadly, in Wisconsin.

Madison, Wisconsin, known as Teejob by the Ho-Chunk people, is sandwiched between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, an isthmus formed by prehistoric glaciers. The wider city of Madison originally had 1,500 effigy mounds, now with only 200 remaining (Gard 2021). They were/are clustered into 11 groups, all of which directly surround Lake Mendota or Lake Wingra – eight clusters are located on ridges while the other three are along shorelines. The cluster on Observatory Hill features the two remaining effigy mounds of the original four: a Bird Spirit, and a Water Spirit. The unique body of the Water Spirit is depicted with a round head, four limbs, and two tails, symmetrical (“Observatory Hill” 2015). Lake Mendota in Hocąk, the Ho-Chunk tribe’s language, is Waaksikhomik, meaning ‘where the man lies.’ “This name derives from a Ho-Chunk legend of a young man who fell in love with a Water Spirit that lived in the lake. He transformed himself into a fish to be able to live in the water, in order to be with his love” (Flora Junhua Deng 2018).

Each lake in Wisconsin has unique Water Spirits that live within them, having unique personalities and stories. Another compelling Water Spirit lives in Green Lake, Wisconsin – home to a Water Spirit visited, worshiped, and celebrated for thousands of years by Indigenous people throughout the present-day Wisconsin area. Some say that one must bring gifts to the Water Spirit, who lives under the lake, to enter. The Water Spirit of Green Lake is known to swirl her arms up to drown enemies (Heiple and Heiple 1990). Named Daycholah in Winnebago, the language of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Green Lake is the deepest natural inland lake in Wisconsin, water 237 feet deep with 27 miles of shoreline (Heiple and Heiple 1990; “City of Green Lake, Wisconsin – Home of the Deepest Lake in Wisconsin,” n.d.). Green Lake’s primary outflow is the Puchyan River – whose name is derived from Winnebago pai-ja, ‘heron.’ (Vogel 150). Both the lake and river are filled with some of the most diverse ecosystems in the US – life-rich marshy wetlands and a large variety of animals in seasonal migration.

In Water Spirits: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis, Anthropologist Veronica Strang undertakes an in-depth international comparative analysis of Water Spirits throughout the world. She traces, for example, that Water Spirits are often depicted as being reptilian, water-serpent beings that also often have a diverse array of other attributes, from antlers and horns to feathers and hooves. Her work also deep dives in the historical shifts between non-humanized representations of Water Spirits, to Christian-colonial expansion and the demonizing of Water Spirits through paganization, and the contemporary fundamentality of Water Spirits in solutions to the environmental crisis (Strang 2023). Strang’s extensive research on Water Spirits innovates at the forefront of multispecies ethnography, and evidences the relevance of these Wisconsin waters to climate justice pursuits worldwide. In sum, effigy mounds and Water Spirits are crucial to Indigenous relations to the natural world in Wisconsin, these sacred entities pulse the value of life itself. These spirits heal and enliven surrounding ecosystems through mutually caring relations. Effigy mounds and Water Spirits are expressions of ecotones; so are the creative endeavors of artists like Truman Lowe and Margaret H’Doubler. Their work innovates relationships to physical laws and structures such as wood and gravity, imbuing material with meaning that creatively contributes to its inherent aliveness – and thus adds to our own aliveness as well.

Somatic Logics of Waves

The wave is a meeting point between motion and metaphor – a rhythm of nature, at the breaking edge of many fields, such as quantum physics, mathematics, and climatology. The wave ripples, affecting both the future and past – from the colonial origins of science, to the ‘waves’ of feminism, and even the necessity of interdisciplinary, nature-oriented collaborative knowledge-building (Helmreich 2023, Neimanis 2012). These dualistic and stirred embodiments of the wave are ecotonal: water laps at the sky in duets with air, similar to the Earthen stratigraphic variation of effigy mounds. Waves can be generative, a place where kinetic force makes music, as wave peaks coalesce and crash, and destructive, as in natural disasters like floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Fundamental to water’s movement language, waves are at once solvent and dualistically divisive.

Water’s dance, the wave, is an embodiment of fluidity, in-betweenness, and cyclicality. On a molecular level, for example, water particles travel in a circular motion in waves: even though waves appear to move forward, they are really composed of many circular movements (Webb 2023). Constructed by both up and down movement, and circular movements, waves navigate between sea and sky, and between land and sea. Waves lap in continual lull, washing away the day’s memories etched into sand, and dragging new mysteries ashore. 

Tidal waves are planetary-scale waves, gravity’s long hug onto Earth. Tides are gravitational expressions of the Earth-Moon system, embodying cyclical, rhythmic connections between celestial bodies and Earth's oceans, oscillating 1-2x each day from high to low tides. Cycles of the moon’s orbit are the cosmic calendar of watery and temporal movements. The lunar day, the length of the Moon’s orbit around Earth, trails just longer than the Earth’s orbit around the sun with a lunar day of 24.5 hours. 

Waves can be destructive as well: water is known as an unstoppable force. Water will erode all in its path, and always flow back to itself. Sea foam, for example, is made by breaking waves in the surf zone causing dissolved organic matter (breakdowns of offshore algal blooms) to trap air. Seafoam is a powerful wave of transformation—where decomposition becomes a foundation for life. (Hönisch 2023; Mopper et al 2009). 

Physics shows that forces like light, sound, and gravity structure the world at every scale – forces that water engages through wave dynamics and pressure differentials. Both water and living bodies respond to gravitational and atmospheric forces, with wavelike temporal and structural patterns that echo through everything from oceanic tides to cellular oscillations (Kruse and Kruse and Jülicher 2005). At the quantum level, particles such as electrons exhibit wave-like behaviors (De Broglie 1929), though these differ in scale and mechanism from classical waves in water. Still, waveforms represent an ecotonal space: a fluid threshold where motion, form, and force meet. From subatomic ecotones between particle and wave, to the crest and troughs of water – these dynamics do not merely occur in the world, but shape it.

While waves embody nature’s freedom and rhythm, colonial powers have long sought to measure and control water in their motion for conquest. In 1835, Cambridge natural philosopher William Whewell led a “great tide experiment” where global tidal measurements enabled the British colonial expansion via sea travel – Whewell is also the person who coined the term “scientist.” We have come to see “waves as disorderly entities to be tamed, as belonging fully to the order of nature. Today, the body of waves “carries the historical, material freight of anthropogenic ocean harm.” The movements of rogue waves are ignored, and instead waves are “amenable to abstractions that can be scale modeled and time stepped in the lab” (Helmreich 2023, p.8). Attempts to deduce the physical laws of nature that construct water’s movement as though its a matter of mathematical certainty completely ignore the unpredictable free will of water itself. Hegemonic knowledge forms manifest in science and its colonial origins and continuations, blind humans to the complex agency, sentience, and co-creativity found in the natural world. 

There is a blossoming of groundbreaking research in regards to the nonphysical energies of organic materials, concretizing the relational benefits of ‘dancing with water.’ In the same breath, mathematical studies of water often have fallacies at the foundations of their approaches. Writing equations that depict and predict future water movement is currently an impossible task, despite the vast number of model wave simulators built towards this goal (Helmreich 2023, p.10). If we could, maritime workers would be much safer, and global displacement due to anthropogenic climate change could be better planned for – crucial reasons to invest in water movement research from the most holistic and accurate angle. 

Water Scientist Martin Chaplin writes “Water is the most studied material on Earth. However, it is remarkable to find that the science behind its behavior and function are so poorly understood (or even ignored), not only by people in general but also by scientists working with it every day.” Similarly, Jason A. Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of Human Sciences, argues that attempts to suppress magic through a disenchanted narrative of modernity have failed more than they have succeeded. ‘Enchantment’ validates gnostic epistemologies, where belief interplays with reality through esoteric means. He establishes that magic and secularism build contemporary life intertwining (Josephson-Storm 2017). 

Anthropologist Anna Tsing proposes that “To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history. But we have a problem with scale. A rush of stories cannot be neatly summed up… they draw attention to interrupting geographies and tempos… Yet it is just these interruptions that step out of the bounds of most modern science, which demands the possibility for infinite expansion without changing the research framework…The ability to make one’s research framework apply to greater scales, without changing the research questions, has become a hallmark of modern knowledge…” (Tsing 2015, p.57-58). It is agreed across disciplines, from science to history and anthropology, that the modern scientific method is not apt to address the complex intelligence and vital agency of the world around us. Rather, the entanglement of the human and more-than-human parallels the entanglement of arts and sciences – examples of the creative potential of Olsen’s ecotones in epistemological approaches: “Eco: home. Tone: tension. We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in-between. No other home is available. In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything… (Neimanis 2012, p. 93-94).

Water’s movement is so dynamic and variable that it resists full capture by current quantitative methods. Rather, these qualities of water become most apparent and studyable through the process of building a spiritual connection with water. If water were merely a product of physics, rather than a living being choosing its movements, fields like meteorology, thermodynamics, and physical oceanography would be capable of much more precise predictions of water’s movements. The connection between the scientific method and cultural significance (meaning making) is deep-running, and marine science penetrates cultural conceptions of time, nature, and culture in many ways. One crux of water physics, known as ‘sea level,’ is a poignant example of epistemic uncertainty in marine science. In A Book of Waves, author Steven Helmreich discusses the scientific creation of a land-like fixed baseline, an abstraction known as ‘sea level.’ The concept harbors its own ‘epistemic uncertainty,’ affecting wave calculations, since every value is relative to a nonexistent baseline. This epistemic uncertainty is separate from ‘physical uncertainty,’ ie, the physical randomness of waves (Helmreich 2023, p.11). Coincidingly, the popular notion of ‘sea level rise’ as an effect of climate change is (mis)understood as monolithic, linear, homogeneously impending, and precisely predictable due to these oceanographic principles.

Politics of Flow: Control and Scarcity in Rivers

Essential connective arteries, flowing rivers shape surrounding life – they erode rock, deposit sediment, and kiss the ocean in brackish estuaries. Salmon swim upstream, from the sea, returning to their places of origin to continue life’s cycle (Russell 2022). Freshwater is vital for many of Earth’s beings – through the co-creation of landscapes and ecosystems, dances of creation and destruction, with change as the only constant. Remarkably potent, freshwater is only a minuscule fraction of all the water on the planet – only about 2% (Zaman 2017). Further, almost all (70%) of freshwater is frozen in glaciers, which cover nearly 10% of Earth’s landmass (Hönisch 2023). Healthy seawater demands healthy rivers: everything we put in rivers eventually makes its way to the sea (“Lewis Pugh’s Rivers Are Life Campaign” n.d.).

Modern rivers carry connotations of linear time-space, unidirectionality, unstoppability, and transportation. Yet, humans have attempted to alter river movement for thousands of years. For example, in 1900, the Chicago River’s direction was reversed by the construction of the Chicago Drainage Canal. Untreated waste had been flowing into Lake Michigan from the this river, affecting not only Chicago’s drinking water but also communities downstream throughout the Illinois River Valley. The original outlet was Lake Michigan on the East, and it’s now the Mississippi River on the West. The canal was deeper than both Lake Michigan and the Desplaines River, which ran westwards towards the Mississippi, across a subcontinental divide (a high point where on one side, water flows westward, and eastward on the other). The river’s direction remains reversed to this day (Baer 2017). 

Adding to the river’s artificiality, the City of Chicago adds green dye to its river every year on St. Patrick's Day – a tradition that stems from the dye that plumbers would add to water systems to spot leaks, which would stain their white coveralls. In 1962, members of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local Union dyed the Chicago River green for an entire week. That year, it became an annual tradition. Shortly thereafter, in 1966, environmentalists convinced the city to change the formula from a damaging chemical dye to a harmless vegetable dye. Though the city keeps its recipe a secret, other cities throughout the US have taken to dyeing their waterways in festivity as well (Savannah, Georgia; and San Antonio, Texas) (Andrew 2022).

Alongside directional and color changes to rivers, anthropogenic climate impacts are causing an alarming global increase of floods and droughts: the Colorado, Loire, Danube, Rhine, and Yangtze rivers all dealt with severe droughts from 2021 to 2023. A notable case is Italy’s Po River. The country's longest river suffered its worst drought in 70 years during 2022. The Po outflows into the Adriatic Sea through Venice, and majorly impacted drinking water and energy supplies throughout the country (Rosenthal 2022). One-fifth of Italy’s power comes from hydroelectric plants, and over half of the hydropower generated in Italy comes from the Po and its tributaries. The drought rendered hydroelectric plants inoperable, increasing reliance on fossil fuel gasses, and exponentiating carbon dioxide emissions, causing temperatures to rise and more unprecedented weather events to occur, perpetuating feedback loops of environmental destruction. This cycle leads us ever-farther from adopting wide scale sustainable energy. The Po River’s lower water levels have also uncovered archaeological artifacts, like bones and a World War 2-era barge (Building the World 2022). These historical materials serve as testament to the creative and destructive, and obscuring and revealing, powers of water. The Po is just one example of the onslaught of butterfly effects of drought increases around the world; each waterway faces unique and often unprecedented challenges for communities to navigate.

Lewis Pugh, swimmer and environmental activist, raises awareness and calls upon world leaders to act towards clean water by swimming in polluted bodies of water around the globe. At times, this leaves him violently ill, for example, when he swam the entire length of the river Thames in 2006 and got sick due to sewage pollution in the water. In the UK, 75% of the rivers pose a serious risk to human health. From August to September 2023, Pugh took to swimming the Hudson – a 315-mile journey completed in one month with around 10 miles of swimming every day. He chose the Hudson both to encourage world leaders to ratify the High Seas Treaty, which aims to protect biodiversity in international waters, ⅔ of the world’s oceans, and to commemorate the Hudson’s complex history and future of pollution. “General Electric dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the [Hudson] River between 1947 and 1977, [which] still remains despite clean-up measures…” and will remain for generations to come (Swimmer 2023). The long term effects of PCBs in the Hudson illuminates the cyclical and longform temporal scale of rivers, opposing modern notions of unidirectionality and linear time.

Pugh’s activism makes it strikingly clear that the attention and resources humanity allocates controlling and artificializing rivers – as in the green Chicago River – does not extend into addressing the serious health concerns faced by rivers worldwide. Further, the illnesses manifested in Pugh’s body reveal our deep interconnectedness with water. Our perceived safety from the effects of anthropogenic environmental poison through avoidance (by not swimming in polluted waters, for example) is merely a protective illusion. Physical avoidance does not translate into minimizing the effects of climate change such as severe weather and pollution, to promote necessary healing in waterways. 

Severe Weather: Atmospheric Spirals and Ecological Reckoning

Water’s dance with air becomes violent under a climate in flux: from gentle currents to catastrophic storms. River transformations are just one interrelated onslaught of severe weather, manifest in water’s movements, exponentiated by anthropogenic climate change. Hurricanes can cause a temporary reversal of a river’s direction: For example, since 2000, the Mississippi River’s direction has been temporarily reversed by storm surges from three hurricanes – Katrina, Isaac, and Ida (Borneman 2014). Storm surges are large masses of water pushed forth by strong winds. Due to the lack of friction between the wind and the rotating Earth, the wind shifts rightward in the Northern Hemisphere, and leftward in the Southern Hemisphere – resulting in a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect. Further, the friction between wind and the surface ocean water, causes ‘Eckman spirals’ to form in the ocean. These spirals are also formed by the friction between the surface and deep water (which becomes stronger as the ocean grows deeper due to increased water pressure). Overall, when strong winds blow, the ocean’s net direction will be perpendicular to the wind’s direction (90 degrees rightwards in the Northern Hemisphere and 90 degrees leftwards in the Southern). 

While in the realm of severe weather, the Coriolis effect and Ekman spirals are responsible for storm surges; they are also responsible for the regulation of our atmosphere and the continuation of marine life. The movement of both wind (Hadley cells) and water (surface and deep ocean circulation), circulates equatorial heat to the poles and distributes icy air and cold, salty water from the poles throughout the Earth. ‘Upwelling’ carries nutrient-dense water from the deep ocean to the surface, where light shines and autotrophs can photosynthesize and digest these inorganic materials, such as Nitrogen and Phosphate. Water has a higher heat capacity than air, meaning that in the Winter months, water tends to be warmer than land/air, and during Summers, water tends to be cooler than land/air, as the convection currents switch direction seasonally (Hönisch 2023).

Ocean acidification wreaks chaos unto marine life and carbon cycles: As atmospheric CO2 dissolves into seawater, there are less available of carbonate ions, which are crucial in shell formation for organisms like corals, mollusks, and phytoplankton (Doney et al. 2020). Their malformed shell bodies struggle to survive, affecting the entire marine ecosystem from the food chain's bottom (Doney et al. 2020). Upwelling ecosystems rely on these organisms to process nutrients. Acidification also amplifies the feedback loop where phytoplankton can’t photosynthesize because of corrosive waters. Thus, the ocean loses oxygen, and more CO2 stays in the air, speeding up climate change (Bailey‑Charteris 2024, p. 16). The Coriolis effect, Eckman spirals, Hadley cells, and ocean acidification are just some of the ways that water dances, independently and in duets with pollution, in cycles – components of a complex, intelligent, and fluid Earth system.

As severe weather events increase in frequency and intensity across the globe due to anthropogenic climate change, fewer and fewer places will be inhabitable for Earth’s creatures. For example, a 2016 study predicted that the worst effects of rising sea levels in the US would be due to a six-foot sea level rise by the end of the century. As of 2023, new predictions show that the new highest high will be 10 feet in the US (IPCC 2022). Many areas are exposed to fire, drought, floods, and tropical storms. Safe places to live are rapidly rarer and less accessible. Further, climate change exacerbates pre-existing inequalities and endangers vulnerable populations, who shoulder a disproportionate burden of anthropogenic climate change’s destructive effects (Denchak 2022). Vulnerable populations are disproportionately impacted, lacking political, geographic, and economic support to ensure safe living places – meaning groups such as poor families, old and disabled people, and small island nations – are especially at risk. Around 60 percent of humanity lives in debilitating poverty, on less than $5 per day (Hickel 2018). Seeking refuge from anthropogenically influenced severe weather is a predominant effect of global warming. 

Strikingly, 71% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 originate from just 100 fossil fuel producers – and seven investor-owned corporations account for nearly one-third of this total (Carbon Majors Database 2023; Baan et al. 2023). Modern capitalism enables a predatory private monopolization that exploits both human and ecological systems – from child labor to factory farming, monocropping, and tech developments – while masking harm under rhetoric of ‘growth.’ Instead of prioritizing crucial protection and allocation of basic resources, emerging industries are built with unsustainable foundations. Regarding water, some examples include Bitcoin farms in drought zones, and almond farms that drain California aquifers (Hickel 2018). Global displacement and critical resource allocation are urgent issues that require innovation. From equitable protections and care, to international collaborations, it is humanity’s urgent obligation to create solutions that upheave corporate-political systems perpetuating global displacement through climate change. 

While some solutions are offered to modern environmental crises, these issues largely prevail and continue to expand due to global abuses of power by oligarchal entities. The endless cascade of environmental destruction, and its onslaught of effects of pollution and global displacement, often feels insurmountable as the doomsday clock ticks away. Disconnected human relationships to water reflect deeper systemic harms rooted in capitalist and colonial worldviews that frame water as a commodity rather than a living entity. Many contemporary humans may struggle to fully remember or imagine a world without pollution. The people of New York City who must avoid touching the Hudson River for many decades cannot reap the full benefits of living waterside – benefits of mutual growth between themselves and the river. Across the globe, people cannot swim in or drink from the bodies of water their communities live amongst. Human-caused environmental degradation, in the forms of car-first urban design, pollution, severe weather, detrimental to our safety, and our relationships with water, weather, and nature. Especially in urban areas, waterways are often only viewable from a distance, and endless parking lots crush crucial ecosystems. The element of touch, crucial to the movement of life itself, is critically missing from our relationships to nature. Touch is one of the most primordial senses, the first to develop in gestation. Groundbreaking neuroscience researcher Lauren Orefice reveals that we could be entering a touch renaissance: “We often think about development from a brain-centric perspective, but our brains develop as we experience the internal and external world, and a huge part of that is the sense of touch… We have an incredible symphony of sensory neurons that are very diverse and heterogeneous and can pick up different qualities of touch” Orefice said (Caruso 2024). The generative power of ecotones emerges from both tactile proximity and relational dynamics shaped by mutual awareness.

By 2050, it is projected that two-thirds of the global population will live in cities, and rapid urban growth causes large changes in both the environment and our bodies. Urban areas are characterized by “higher population densities, increased housing and building infrastructure, reduced green spaces, and more stressful social conditions” (Li et al 2023). Sensory deprivations, and deviations from natural forms in urbanization, have profoundly troubling effects on human health. Youth who grow up in cities have much higher rates of near-sightedness, or myopia, as viewing faraway horizons is crucial to optical health (Xiotong et al 2023). Noise pollution from industrial and transport systems is the ubiquitous landmarker of modernity, disrupting ecological symphonic harmonies, and causing “high blood pressure, sleeplessness, nausea, heart attack, depression, dizziness, headache, and induced hearing loss” (Farooqi et al 2019). 

Humans, like each species, are unique manifestations of biomimicry: we are emulations of various essences of the natural world, perhaps products of the earth’s ecotones. Our own creativeness and destructiveness is part and parcel with nature’s. Our physical ecotones, the heterogeneous nanostructures of the water in our bodies, and even our tumultuous emotions in many ways carry the same propensity as a rogue wave or hurricane. Likewise, humanity’s influence can both hurt nature, and be healed by nature, and water specifically (Kahn & Hasbach 2012). Differences in species are in degree rather than kind, evolutionarily and spiritually – conscious experience of humans is no more or less valid than the consciousness of any body of water, landscape feature, animal, or plant, in both cosmology and morality (Goodenough 2023). Interconnected collaboration with the natural world is foundational to restore relational harmony on this planet – to mitigate severe weather, global displacement, and the extinction crisis. In the dance of Earth, each plays an inextricable part. The oceans and winds regulate climate through ecotones of the Coriolis effect and Eckman spirals, where frictions of deep ocean, surface water, air, and the Earth’s rotation itself collaborate to sustain global seasons. On top of the global epidemic of impoverishment and exploitation, poverty and weather issues, crises disproportionately affecting vulnerable human populations worldwide – the natural world is also ravaged. The 2007 UN Convention on Biological Diversity found that 150 species go extinct each day, which is as much as 10% each decade, due to human activities (Djoghlaf 2007). 

Life on Earth cannot simply relocate, whether to another ecosystem, continent, or planet, to avoid pollution and habitat loss. Human activity has impacted ecosystems once pristine, underscoring the paradox of ‘global displacement’ within the planetary scale of the environmental crisis. Microplastics have been found in the Mariana trench, the deepest part of the ocean (Peng et al 2018). Roadkill, gas, and political profit from car lobbyists are normalized instead of prioritizing sustainable transport (Kimmerer 2013). Light pollution causes insomnia and disrupts the reproductive cycles of many animals, such as urban birds, or baby sea turtles who must follow the moon to safely reach the ocean (Eklöf 2022). 

Even our atmosphere is polluted by shrapnels of colliding satellites in orbit. In 1978, astronomer Donald Kessler warned that man-made objects in space cumulatively collide and make debris that will ultimately make our atmosphere impassible, thereby destroying telecommunications and preventing space launches (Kessler and Cour-Palais 1978). Today, there are millions of pieces of debris too small to be tracked in our atmosphere, travelling up to 17,500mph, alongside half a million pieces marble sized or larger, 20,000 pieces larger than a softball (Welti 2012, p.14). Another example of atmospheric violations is artificial weathering efforts, such as cloud seeding, by humans. For decades, artificial weathering has taken place via many methods, some of the main ones being the dumping of dry ice (nitrous oxide) into the air to create clouds and rain, and airplane cloud-seeding chem-trails. Artificial weathering is a shady approach to combating the effects of climate change, and does not at all address the root issues of global warming, or consider the vast potential consequences of such interferences. Weather control can also be a direct act of human violence: artificial weathering was used as a weapon in the Vietnam War (Project Popeye) to escalate monsoons, in attempts to advantage US troops (Fleming 2012).

Due to the interconnectedness of all life, it is our somatic duty to tune into creative and compassionate ways of relating to the more-than-human world. Ecopsychological research confirms that reciprocal, embodied relationships with the more-than-human world regulate nervous system function (Kahn & Hasbach 2012), and Indigenous frameworks position this connectivity as an ethical foundation (Kimmerer 2013).Embodying harmonious relations to the living creatures heals and cultivates abundance, allowing us to tap into the innately regenerative and healing capacities of our bodies, such as when we recover better from sickness by eating unprocessed foods (Colbin 1986). Relating to nature as a living being by offering gratitude and compassion also opens portals of creativity, wisdom, trust, presentness, and embodiment that we could experience in no other way, besides caring for the vitality of nature. The spirals of Coriolis effects and Eckman spirals are poignant mirrors of the feedback loops perpetuating tremendous climatological damages. These natural climate systems conspire toward health, or destruction, depending on anthropogenic input. Everything from ocean acidification, to urbanization, artificial weathering, space pollution, and oil spills, is subject to spiral reckoning: cyclical, continually evolving patterns of damages and resistance.

Oil Spills and Pipelines: Materialist Agency and Activist Resistance

The unique challenges of the global present call for creative and innovative approaches to dismantling unsustainable systems. Respecting the agency and vitality of natural landscapes means listening to the messages, energies, and desires of non-human. Multispecies justice is paramount. The principle relationship is the same with vastly different materials, or entities: whether its the ocean, our house plants, a tree on the sidewalk, the gas in our cars or litter in roadside ditches, its within our grasp to listen, empathize, and extend our compassion to the spiritual entities of these materials. The political theories of Jane Bennett, whose materialist philosophy lends itself toward innovating sustainability efforts in waste management, industrialization, plastics, and the oil industry. Bennett, to this end, “...calls for a re-examination of the ‘vital agencies’ inherent in materials such as trash, metal, and oil.” The physical and spiritual essences of all things, including our waste, are intertwined in what she calls “materiality as a protean flow of matter-energy.” (Helmreich 2023, p.26). Bennett’s philosophy urges us to see even waste as vital and agential, not inert. Waste management and reliance on unsustainable materials should be critically examined through inter-relational frameworks Whether its toilet paper cardboard tubes or the gas in our automobiles, there is immense knowledge to glean from listening to the materials themselves about their own aliveness, rights, and desires. Also, more simply, this materialist philosophy suggests the importance of meeting biological challenges with similarly biological solutions, such as hair being used to clean up oil spills, and implementing more sustainable fuel alternatives altogether, such as hydrogen fuel.

The first US commercial oil well was drilled in 1859 and could extract 850 gallons, which is 20 barrels, of oil each day (Craig 2020). Presently, oil is the lifeblood of modern economies, with a staggering daily 90 million barrels extracted and transported around the world. The US alone uses over 7 billion barrels of petroleum each year, or recently, around 20 million barrels daily. “Nearly 11 million barrels of oil are released into the oceans annually. While tanker explosions or oil drilling accidents receive the most attention in the media – about 86% of spilled oil comes from human activities such as urban and agricultural runoff or improper disposal of petroleum products. Yet, extremely large spills close to coastlines often do the most harm” (Cohen 2024). Hundreds of millions of oil barrels have contaminated U.S. waters (Rapier n.d.). The Deepwater Horizon (BP Oil Spill) disaster of 2010 was the largest oil spill in history, at 4.9 million barrels, or 200 million gallons – accounting for under half of the total spill volume since 1969 in the US (Upton 2011). 

The Water Protectors of the #WaterisLife movement, Indigenous peoples and allies, fought for water’s freedom to dance and live unpoisoned by protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, which travels for thousands of miles underneath many natural and sacred waters. The Water Protectors of the NoDAPL protests, Indigenous peoples, and allies faced and continue to face extreme police violence. Pollution and environmental destruction creates both disease (illness in the body) and dis-ease, where the inherent flow of ease, peace, and abundance through all living beings is disrupted. Whether due to past trauma or present environmental or societal factors, a dysregulated nervous system is in dis-ease, is stuck in sympathetic states like flight, fight, freeze, and fawn. Chronic stress and relational disharmonies can manifest as physical illness in the body as well (Van der Kolk 2014).

Indigenous groups throughout the US often attribute the violent infection of natural land with dis-ease through the oil industry to the ancient prophecy of the black snake. Water Protector in the NoDAPL protests Dallas Goldtooth explains the black snake as the manifestation of the sickness of capitalism – greed that oppresses our spiritual and physical connections to the land that sustains us. The black snake prophecy manifests in many ways, from oil pipelines destroying natural waterways to cement roads paved over gardens of life. Goldtooth posits that we must unite and utilize the spiritual essences of fire and water to fuel our movements (Bioneers 2017).

When oil spills in water, it usually remains on the surface due to its lower density and spreads out across the water in what is called an ‘oil slick,’ which continues to spread, even thinner, into an ‘oil sheen.’ Oil pollution has a profound effect on marine life: sea otters can lose the ability to insulate themselves, and birds can lose the water-repellency of their feathers and insulation. Animals can then die from hypothermia or be poisoned from trying to clean themselves. When oil gets mixed into a water column, fish can experience fin erosion, reduced growth rates, enlarged livers, and problems with reproduction (Hönisch 2023).

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is one of the most damaging in history: An oil rig exploded, continuing to leak for 87 days, spewing 210 million gallons of oil, thousands of barrels a day, into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spread from the deep ocean to surface waters and nearshore environments, affecting regions from Texas to Florida – with some reports that the oil well site continued to leak as late as 2012. BP pled guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter, 2 misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to the US Congress, and as of 2018, BP has incurred more than $65 million in costs related to clean-up, charges, and penalties. The damage affected marine and wildlife, as well as vital fishing and tourism sectors. In 2013, research showed that as a result of the spill, young dolphins have a death rate six times higher than normal. As of 2012, the direct death toll was 6,104 birds, 609 sea turtles, and 100 mammals (Neimanis p.94). There are also lethal and lifespan-reducing malformations in vital organs of big fish like tuna and amberjack, and cardiotoxicity (heart dysfunction) is common in animal species exposed to the spill. In 2015, 2-6% of the oil was still found on the ocean floor. Over a decade later and after countless cleanup efforts have been made, environmental damage from this oil spill is still ongoing (Fortuna 2022).

In the aftermath of this oil spill, there have been both ineffective and harmful methods, as well as promising solutions. The US Government turned to relatively harmful cleanup methods (Viglione 2020). Dispersants, or chemical emulsifiers, work by having hydrophilic (water-liking) and one oleophilic (oil-liking) ends of their molecules, which allows oil to mix into water and disperse before it accrues and destroys fragile shorelines. However, dispersants are toxic to coral reefs, other marine wildlife, and humans. Other less directly harmful but still overall inefficient clean-up methods include temporary floating barriers called booms that corral the oil, with a skirt of material extending a few feet below the surface. Once booms gather the oil, it can be collected with skimmers. Another method involves both bioaugmentation, where enzymes are added to the water to break down the oil, and biostimulation, where nutrients are fed to already-present oil-breaking enzymes in the water. 

There are much more promising solutions in the realm of absorbent physical materials. Absorbents, like clay and straw, are effective at soaking up oil but also soak up water. This inspired scientists around the world to create various synthetic sponges inspired by natural adsorbents. One of which is a modified wood made by Swedish scientists, called nanofibrillated cellulose, that leaves water behind and can hold 50x its weight in oil. Another alternative by Ohio State University scientists uses multiple layers of stainless steel, surfactants, and hydrophobic material to absorb oil, with a design inspired by lotus leaves (Tsang 2020). 

However, there is one natural adsorbent (which collects oil on its outside) that provides an optimal, natural, accessible, and renewable solution: human hair. In 1989, Phil McCrory, a hairstylist in Alabama, noticed the way sea otters’ fur absorbed oil during oil spills and realized that human hair could be used instead of the harmful synthetic materials placed in booms. Hair repels water and collects contaminants: absorbing 3-9x its weight in oil, and it can be re-used without a deterioration of its absorption capacity (Ifelebuegu 2020). In 2001, Phil and Lisa Craig Gautier teamed up on the Clean Wave program to collect hair and other fiber donations to make recycled felted mats and booms to clean up oil spills. The question remains as to why this known solution wasn’t implemented as a main cleanup strategy for the 2010 BP spill.

Introducing a mainstream, renewable, clean alternative to oil will be vital to prevent future spills – there are currently up to 5,000 spills per year in the US (Haar 2023). Perhaps hydrogen gas (H2), a fuel form which must be made/derived, and which can be derived from water (H20), is the answer. Hydrogen fuel can be created in many ways: hydrogen fusion is the energy of stars, forming the ascending elements of the periodic table. There’s grey and blue hydrogen, created with low-cost but high carbon output means (Hamedani et al 2024). More promisingly, there’s Green hydrogen, also known as renewable hydrogen, which is made through renewable energy sources, involving almost no CO2 emissions, but with high production costs (Ullah et al 2025). Renewable hydrogen fuel is made by splitting water via solar and wind-powered electrolysis, offering a zero-emission solution (Hamedani et al 2024). 

Hydrogen gas already functions as a fuel source, and is a leading option for its ability to power heavy industries like steel manufacturing, and long distance transportation (Vetter 2021). Renewable hydrogen plays an important role in many countries meeting decarbonisation goals. However, the transition will necessitate infrastructural changes for storage, transport, and refueling (Wu 2022; Hamedani et al 2024). Fossil fuel corporations have monopolized many scales of checks and balances to further private interests, upholding damaging status quos on infrastructural, institutional, policy, and even research levels. Pseudoscientific, corporate backed, and climate-change denying research and policies are enacted into protective legislation through governmental systems, like low taxes and regulations for oil corporations. Findings often underreport environmental damages, and international contracts to mitigate carbon output remain unfulfilled (Simon et al 2023; Vetter 2021).

We are riding on lost time to move away from fossil fuel and toward renewable energy. To make these transitions, the oppressive grip of the colonialist, capitalist regime responsible for anthropogenic climate change must first loosen. Grassroots innovations like hair-based oil cleanup and Indigenous-led pipeline resistance are leading the way for sustainable alternatives. These steps align with Bennett’s ‘protaen-matter-energy’ flow, honoring the vitality of ecosystems while rejecting the ‘black snake’ of extractivism. Specific policies that would help weaken the grip of exploitative monopolies include the banning of oil pipelines, which spill oil more often than barges, contributing significantly to the 5,000 gallons of annual oil spillages in the US. Other helpful policies would be more substantial reparations for oil spills, for example BP is done with payouts for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in 2031, even though tragic health effects for marine and coastal life will continue well beyond then (Fortuna 2022).

Current solutions must combine the relational and the material in unexpected ways. How do we sit with a landfills’ reckoning of its own existence? How to clean up the Pacific garbage patch, an island of plastic the size of Texas? Every day, exciting innovations conspire toward solutions, in the realms of science, art, and more. Some examples include discovering plastic-eating worms and bacteria (Cost 2024; Dahal 2023). Bennet’s acknowledgement of the vital agencies of all materials embodies the same essential values carried forth by the Water Protectors of NoDAPL protests and Indigenous lifeways, whose care for the spiritual essence of water heals and protects the physical essence of waterways. Sustainable futures depend on care-based approaches that uphold ecological advocacy as activism, and as an ethical imperative obliged by our watery and Earthly existences.

Dismantling systems of power is tough work necessitating international collaboration. Equitable care for those who are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis is key – as is adopting sustainable energy sources and waste management practices efforts, to restore relational harmony with the material world.The blame for anthropogenic destruction falls on the shoulders of giant corporations. Grassroots, policy, and institutional bodies must each do their part, working together to stand up to this tyranny. Countries with the largest carbon outputs, and strongest tendencies to not meet decarbonisation and sustainability benchmarks (such as the US examples discussed here) must be pressured from all sides. The efficacy of international efforts like human rights and the IPCC Paris Agreement hinges on the governments of powerful countries to have transparent and functional systems that support human and ecological wellness. As the following sections will explore, governing bodies’ oppression of water and human ways, (via poisonous corporate-political substances like oil fuel and plastics) flows into our bodies, with alarming effects. 

Drinking Water: Contamination, Capital, and the Vulnerable Body

In 2010, the United Nations established safe water and sanitation as a standalone human right – obliging governments to provide for their citizens and protect people from third parties who infringe upon these rights. Proving invaluable, the United Nations passed a resolution recognizing a healthy and safe environment as a universal human right in 2021 (United Nations 2021). These rights contrast the current reality for many people alive right now: one in four people lack access to safe water (WaterAid 2012). In response, individuals and organizations around the world fight for these rights (“Why Water | Global Water Dances” n.d.).

Many institutions work towards clean water access, including government institutions like Environmental Protection Agencies (EPAs) and Water Resource Management Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like WaterAid and Charity: Water, as well as International Organizations, Research Institutes, Community-Based Organizations, and many more (WaterAid 2012; Charity: Water 2017). However, the onslaught of environmental and health risks due to water pollution is extreme. Coupled with endlessly complex water regulations and infrastructures that differ by country and region, there is a crisis of clean drinking water – both tap and bottled – across the globe. Further, water contamination violates the right of the land “...to be whole and healthy” as well. As written by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, “We seek justice, not just for ourselves, but for the whole of Creation” (Kimmerer 2013, p.44)

The US makes a poignant example for a deep dive into water policies. While there are many countries with either much better or worse water qualities than the US, The US plays a big hand in global trade industries, affecting worldwide treatment of biological and material goods (Seigel 2019). International activist-swimmer Pugh chose to swim the Hudson River in New York to call attention to global issues (Swimmer 2023). Due to regulatory differences, and normalization of ultra-processed foods in the US, many global chain restaurants offer vastly lower quality versions of the same food items to American consumers. Critical examination of the Environmental Protection Agency and other US organizations illuminates a continuous historical correlation between regulatory loopholes and sacrifices to human health. Preventable poisonous materials are being left in, or added to, water (Seigel 2019). From microplastics to lead, toxic contaminants persist in drinking water systems due to regulation and infrastructure failures – as in Flint, Michigan, where the US government weaponizes inaction to instead profit from the dis-ease and destruction. 

In the book Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink, written in 2019, author Seth Seigel dives deep into the substances and regulations in US drinking water systems. He outlines the issue as a combination of culprits and bystanders: the EPA and FDA, water treatment centers, the plastic, mass-meat agriculture, and pharmaceutical industries. “With over 120,000 chemical compounds, pharmaceutical products, and plastics now in commerce, the EPA has only designated about ninety of them as problematic enough to be called ‘regulated.’” Further, they haven’t regulated any new item as a drinking water contaminant in over 20 years. Wastewater treatment centers in the US are sporadic and have outdated infrastructure. Worst of all, we have the technology to recognize contaminants and clean wastewater before unleashing it back into natural waterways, yet our organizations are not dedicated to implementing these for public safety, instead preferring to keep expenses down (Seigel 2019). 

All freshwater should be drinkable, swimmable, and fishable, as said in the 1972 United States Clean Water Act (Pelton 2022). The act promised that by 1982, all of America’s freshwater would adhere to those standards. However, this promise went unfulfilled: As of 2022, 50% of the US’s river and stream miles, alongside 55% of lake acres, and 25% of assessed bays and estuaries are impaired — meaning they cannot be used safely for one or more of these public uses (drinking, swimming, fishing) (Pelton 2022). Even waterways declared safe are tremendously under-regulated, tested, and cleaned. 

Likewise, the industries responsible for contaminating wastewater have a vested interest in maintaining this chemical freedom, and have many strategies to do so. One such realm is that of medications. Unfortunately, medications largely overshoot the medicine quantity per dose, to counteract the human body’s natural filtration systems (and due to neglect for patient health). From there, the medicinal remnants end up in wastewater, which isn’t adequately treated or tested, and then released back into natural waterways, affecting the environment. It later becomes our drinking water, both tap and bottled. The extent of this issue is severe — with 60% of Americans taking at least one prescription pill each day, with 16% taking five or more. Further, enough antibiotics are prescribed annually for five of six Americans. One-third of US women avoiding pregnancy take a daily birth control pill, adding 10 million daily doses of estrogen to the wastewater. Millions of livestock are dosed with estrogen and similar hormones to promote growth. They excrete it, and whether the waste is treated or absorbed into the soil and percolated as groundwater, it ends up back in our waterways and drinking water. The wastewater of all of the hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes with pathogenic, radiative, and chemotherapeutic daily waste also contributes to these loads. Cocktails of untracked, unregulated, and untested chemical remnants in our waterways have profound potential for negative impacts on personal and environmental health (Seigel 2019). 

Another barrier to testing the short and long-term negative impacts of contaminated drinking water is due to the ability of corporations to ‘product hop:’ if the drug they produce were ever to get tested and regulated, it is easy to make slight modifications to the original product’s chemical composition and release it as an entirely new substance, that must undergo those same procedures. Within both the realms discussed above of pills and plastics, as well as countless other industries, humanity’s excessive waste travels through water, beyond the imaginary confines of our landfills, directly into our bodies. Researchers around the US study the effects of these chemicals on freshwater fish, which can serve as a proxy for the potential effects on humans, who continue to go largely unresearched. Researchers in New England studied fish in the National Wildlife Refuge System and found that 20% of the male fish downriver of a municipal wastewater treatment displayed intersex characteristics, whereas none did upriver. They also speculated that the intersexuality and reproductive failure they found were due to multigenerational, epigenetic effects of contaminant exposure (Seigel 2019).

The FDA, like the EPA, fails to recognize more than 90 contaminants, and although bottled water has been the most purchased beverage in America since 2016, there are only two employees dedicated to its oversight in the FDA – and both also perform non-drinking water-related jobs. Even worse, if water is bottled and sold within the same US state, it is subjected to zero federal regulations (this accounts for 70% of bottled water in the US). So while bottled water is perceived as safer, with 60% of it drank in the home (within reach of tap water), and 99% of consumers reporting they buy bottled water for “quality,” and 92% for “safety,” the problem persists and is worsened by the slew of BPAs (endocrine disruptors), Vinyl chloride, a confirmed carcinogen, Phthalates (androgen blockers), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used to make the bottles (with unregulated raw ingredients). PETs allow phthalates to migrate from the bottle to the water when stored for long periods or kept in hot places. The warehouses that hold bottled water before it reaches consumers are also unregulated, with no way to know what temperature or duration your bottle was stored in. The plastic industry is also filled with bureaucratic loopholes. Some plastics contain molecules that function like estrogen in the endocrine system. Many times, plastics are manufactured or broken down into microplastics, which permeate the natural, publicly used waterways (Seigel 2019).

Pills and plastics are only two of the countless other ways that water is contaminated. Outside the scope of Seigel’s book, countries around the world have both better and many severely worse conditions of contamination. Water’s unique ability to dissolve substances necessitates that we relate to water with respect and care. Our impact on waterways has direct effects on the health of all creatures, and water contamination is just one aspect of the many direct ties between water rights and human rights (Seigel 2019). Fault lies in corporate-political desire for profit: private monopolies’ reduction of their own bottom lines within an infinite growth model relies on abusing power to perpetuate dis-ease. Corporations rely on the existence of the issues they sell solutions for. Prescription pills in urine collude with plastics in clothing and food packaging into waterways that remain untreated. This ubiquitous water poison is a structural body of power itself, in some ways unique to global late stage capitalism. The influence runs between our bodies, pipes, and ecosystems. An entire spoons’ worth of plastic is in each human brain on average in the US, making 0.5% of the brain plastic. Dementiated brains hold up to 3-5x that amount. We consume up to a credit card’s worth of plastic per week, which can lead to heart attacks, stroke, and death. Disposable water bottles contain a quarter-million nano-pieces of plastic on average (LaMotte 2025). Bennett’s call to assess the life force energies of pollutants themselves is increasingly relevant in the pursuit of new ways to not only reckon with the plastic around us, but within us as well. 

Hydrofeminism and Dance: Subversive Fluid Healing

Hydrofeminism posits that “planetary thinking is feminist thinking” (Ortíz 2021). Our own bodies of water are direct currents of water’s trans-corporeal trauma and oceanic healing (Bordorff 2018). “Water flows through bodies, species and materialities, connecting them for better or worse… You share the water you drink with someone on the other side of the world” (Bordorff 2018). “Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being” (Neimanis 2012, p.87). Hydrofeminism is a theoretical framework that merges feminist phenomenology with water-based relationality, proposing that we are not only connected through water but composed by it (Neimanis 2012). This section explores how dance, as a somatic method, embodies hydrofeminist politics by fostering interdependence, vulnerability, and collective healing. Water is not merely a connective metaphor, but a medium through which political and ecological solidarity ‘takes place.’

Ecofeminism integrates feminism and political ecology to draw on the concept of gender to analyze relationships between humans and the natural world. Ecological and feminist concerns both result from patriarchal and capitalist systems. Multispecies inclusive approaches to social justice and collective healing are emphasized in ecofeminism (Buckingham 2015). “Community-based work, such as experimental and scholar-activist research work, in which researchers “work alongside the communities in which they study, allows community needs to inform research and generate equitable forms of environmental knowledge (Harris 2017). 

Both women and water are seen as too complex, too variable, and too costly to be studied (Greenhalgh 2022; Helmreich 2023). Women’s writing and storytelling on water is prominent, and gendered associations of bodies of water are feminine, for example hurricanes and boats are often given feminine names. Notions of water as beautiful, deep, nurturing, and tumultuous are correlated to conventions of feminine energies (Swan 2006). Connection between women and water illuminates the ways both are foundational to life while progressing fields of women’s equity and climate protection. Attempts to understand ‘irrational’ knowledge forms (such as the vitality, intuition, and receptivity) of the ‘natural’ world through ‘manmade’ empirical definition and containment are patriarchal weapons aimed at both women and water (Helmreich 2023, Neimanis 2012). Trauma and resilience are uniquely embodied affects, for both women and water. Embodiment is the key of hydrofeminism, which evidences why dance is a highly conducive form of knowledge in this subject. Intergenerational trauma passes to us through our parents and grandparents (Yehuda 2022; Yehuda and Lehrner 2018). From trauma, to plastic and prescription pollutants, and even the underrepresentation of women in medical research, the water in women’s bodies holds memories, substances, and healing powers. 

Beyond associations of women with water, queerness also flows through our bodies, with movement qualities relating to water and within water itself, from gender fluidity and intersex bodies to endocrine disruptors and therapies. “Sex/gender/water eddies as the travel of chemical estrogens through oceans and bodies.” Lindsay Kelley coined the term tranimals to describe species-, sexuality, and semiosis-crossing creatures, like water (2014). In Has the Queer Ever Been Human? Queerness expands beyond its anthropocentric definitions when notions of sex and gender integrate the holistic, transcorporeal nature of the water, which all species embody (Luciano 2015; Neimanis 2017; Helmreich 2023, p.70-78).

Regarding bodily autonomy and representation, women and water are both deprived. Bennett’s theory of critically examining the vital energies of what we regard as ‘trash’ is a two-way street. There is a paradox where poison is forced into bodies of women and water via overarching bodies of power. Yet, the healing potential inherent to both women and water is made out to be ‘poison’ by these very same systems. Only time will reveal the leaps and bounds of medical progression lurking within the bodies of women and water that will become visible when properly valued. Sacred fluids, from menstrual blood to drinking water and even Water Spirits, are ‘demonized’ by the patriarchal systems, such as christian colonialism and capitalism-induced global warming (Neimanis 2012; Strang 2023). 

Menstruation and tidal cycles, through their movement with the moon, are fundamental to hydrofeminism: there is no more body of water more intimate and planetary than our own (Neimanis 2012). The same mechanisms which label menstrual blood as unstudiable: ‘dirty’ and relegated to unsubsidized, overpriced pads and tampons loaded with toxic heavy-metals, also compel the average consumer to assume that bottled water is safer to drink than tap or well water (Khedkar 2024; Helmreich 2023). Recent research shows that menstrual blood contains differentiated stem cells, in equal or larger quantities than bone marrow contains stem cells. Bone marrow is usually surgically removed from the hip, and is invasive to obtain, yet bone marrow stem cells remain the most studied form of stem cells (Kazemnejad et al 2016). As of 2020, she found, menstrual stem cell research accounted for only 0.25 percent of all mesenchymal cell research, while bone marrow stem cells represented 47.7 percent. Researchers cannot get funding due to misogynistic stigmatization of uteruses, posing significant barriers to health worldwide (Khedkar 2024). 

Women’s exclusion from medical research perpetuates patriarchal misconceptions about women’s health, and hinders cures and solutions while causing more dis-ease. From 1977-1993, women were banned from all medical research in the US, due to unfairly applied ‘attempts to protect future unborn children’ and that ‘menstrual cycles would skew test results.’ (National Institutes of Health 2017; Lerner 2020). “A large proportion of studies still underrepresented women—and the trials that do include them often don’t analyze the data for sex differences, or even publish that data so that others can. In addition, thousands of drugs remain on the market that were approved before the 1993 ruling” (Lerner 2020). Even early testing is done on male cells, and male lab mice. The effects have been devastating and ongoing: 96% of the time, women have significantly higher rates of adverse side effects than men women on all medications (Lerner 2020).

Women’s exclusion from medical research and care was based on the false, misogynistic premise that women are more than 50% responsible for pregnancy health (Greenhalgh 2022). Women have been historically blamed for miscarriages (which are common and natural, with 15%-25% of pregnancies resulting as such) (Mitchell 2021). Pregnancy issues such as morning sickness, pains, miscarriages, and birth defects are shown to be more and more strongly correlated to sperm health than any other factors, caused by epigenetic and lifestyle factors like trauma, pollutants, and unhealthy choices (Jones 2018; Shaart 2021). In 2023, the World Health Organization found that one in six people are infertile, and following current projections, by 2045 the median sperm count will be zero, due overwhelmingly to endocrine disruptors in microplastics. “That means half of all men would have zero viable sperm and the rest would have very close to zero…If these trajectories continue, in vitro fertilization and other artificial reproductive technologies may become widely needed for conceiving children.” Even in small doses, microplastics interfere with hormonal function, and are particularly dangerous to unborn babies. Testosterone levels have been declining at a rate of 1% per year since the 1980’s and miscarriage percentages have risen at the same rate since 2000 (Shaart 2021).

These same issues deeply plague the marine wildlife exposed to our water pollutants, with damages to reproductive and cardiac systems, critical resources, and more (Seigel 2019). In Hydrofeminism, Astrida Neimanis writes that “Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water is to unjust the ghosts of bodies that haunt the water. When ‘nature calls’ some time later, we return to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, or chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace excretions, but also the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable culture, medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect” (2012, p.87).

Our food system also benefits from this hydrofeminist approaches, as equitable resources for women farmers is a leading solution to climate change. Sustainable agricultural is fundamental to minimizing global warming induced severe weather and subsequent damages such as famines (Chen 2012). As of 2018, women produced about 60% of crops, but on average, have 20-30% less yield than men due to under-resourcing. Furthermore, women with access to education wait longer to have children and have fewer overall. Closing the gaps in farming, education, and family planning for women around the world could result in a decrease in 120 billion tons of C02 and 1 billion fewer people being born than anticipated in the next 100 years, according to projections from 2018 (Wilkinson). Women’s accessibility of education, bodily autonomy, and resources are crucial to bring about the gender equity required to secure safety for Earth and humanity.

When addressing hydrofeminist domains, from farming to water rights and medical knowledge, it's also important to incorporate hydrofeminist methods. The two main ones discussed here are storytelling and dance (Neimanis 2012, p. 95). Storytelling is crucial: Important nuance, including emotion and affect, supplement and complicate scientific data. Theorists Cleo Wölfle Hazard, Anna Tsing, and Dylan Harris to emphasize narrative collection as a research method (Druschke et al 2022). Hazard suggests, “Data are imbued with feeling, and that feeling can change data’s meaning and how it is taken up in river management” (2022, p. 85).” Tsing, whose work speaks of feminist approaches to the anthropocene, writes of the methodological possibilities of story: “To listen to and tell a rush of stories is a method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter.” Dylan Harris illuminates how stories impact climate change policy. As he argues, “Storytelling makes the symbolic visceral… stories connect the ‘out there’ to the here and now, while also inspiring the critical capacity necessary to imagine a then and there, a task critical to policymakers.” Climate science against climate stories fold into each other, storytelling enlivens the geologic imagination, and dissects how the human dimensions of climate change are deeply enmeshed in global climate feedback systems (Harris, 2017, p. 179). 

Stories from the Flood is a “a largely women-created, women-led, and women-sustained” collection 100 interviews: A community-driven oral history effort in southwestern Wisconsin that details “ways that informal infrastructure supported community members as they moved through the 2018 flood and towards longer-term recovery, came together through feminist (i.e., sometimes women-driven, but, especially non-hierarchical, extemporaneous, grassroots, experimental) approaches towards what is typically framed as ‘women’s work’: cleaning, feeding, clothing, tending, gathering, supporting, storytelling, and also organizing others to respond flexibly and collaboratively.” This work inspired development of participatory flood models in Driftless watersheds, bringing feminist approaches to build equitable flood futures. More broadly, Stories from the Flood emphasizes the potency of “feminist interventions in flooding, which we insist must embrace flexibility, place-appropriateness, and narrative” (Druschke et al 2022). 

Adding to the established connection between hydrofeminism and storytelling, dance is a fundamental approach to hydrofeminism due to its acknowledgment of embodiment in healing. Dancing with water is crucial to fully understand trans-corporeal traumas, creative placemaking, multispecies advocacy, and storytelling of lived experiences, imaginations the future, and co-creations. Hydrofeminist dance is the key to unlocking the knowledge of the water in our bodies, in the confluences of art, culture, scholarship, and healing. The only thing standing in the way is the dam of modernist patriarchal control: Moving from an ‘ethics of control’ where dams remain an inefficient yet prevalent approach to flood mitigation, toward nonstructural protections like agroforestry and community-specific approaches, is paramount to feminist flood protections that honor water’s freedom to move (Harris 2017). 

Author Bailey‑Charteris discusses the Hydrocene as an artistic epoch of disruptive, conceptual and embodied art, a confluence of water’s centrality in both the climate crises and within the field of eco-aesthetics (2024, p. 15). Dance is a powerful medium for ecological activism, especially in the realm of water protection. Water is a dancer, and we are water. Dance is an avenue for expression and liberation for women, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized peoples, making the medium potent for addressing the intersectional issues that are entangled with the broad current realities of the climate crisis (Olsen 2020; Kimmerer 2013). Dance is a potent tool to foster gender equity, especially by connecting with water through hydrofeminist creativity, in the art epoch of hydrocene. The term movement used to describe protests and activism towards positive change – such as the #MeToo, #WaterIsLife, and #FridaysForFuture movements nods toward fundamental ‘kinectivity.’ Our movement connects us to each other, to our environments, and to social change. “Dance can catalyze a sensory awareness of our own movement making” (LaMothe). Movement remains a form of art and expression that exists beyond oppressive, unsustainable frameworks that dominate hegemonic life. Kimmerer argues that the widespread awakening of our ecological consciousness requires an “acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.” Water dances in a place-hood beyond settler colonial notions of territoriality. 

Barriers put on art in global capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the attention economy have perpetuated arts culture and economy where art is an investment asset, to store or gain value, predominantly owned by the extremely wealthy, causing a disappearance in small-medium sized galleries and creating immense barriers to career stability and community impact for artists. Capitalism dictates that art be commodified, and valued for its collectability and entertainment rather than its aesthetic (Solimano 2019, p.2). Patriarchal and racial inequality is also perpetuated in contemporary art, “A 2019 study of 18 major US museums revealed that 87 percent of the artists in collections were male and 85 percent were white” (Caridio 2025). In a survey of 1,200 primarily US-based women artists, startling results were revealed. Nearly half of women artists living in cities make less than a living wage, and more than 60% say that lack of museum, gallery, and institutional backing hinders their careers. With an average of $20,000 coming from art sales, which is 17% of household income, 35% comes from artists’ non-art jobs. 70% say that gender discrimination has had a negative to strongly negative impact on their experience, and one fifth have experienced sexual harassment (Villa 2025). The dance industry is influenced as well, as a female-majority field with upward career mobility much more often granted to men. Physical damages occur in where entertainment through flashy tricks and hypermobility is expected, at the expense of dancers' physical health. As an aesthetic sport, patriarchal influence perpetuates violence, eating disorders, and poverty, obstacles directly impacting the health and artistic/technical vitality of the dancer’s instrument of their own body (Doria and Numer 2022). Women artists of all media face unique barriers to fair career opportunities.

Governmental-institutional oppression also poses significant obstacles to sustainable art work. Dance requires physical space, and heals community – fundamental for creative placemaking. “At its worst, disciplinary silence around infrastructural issues renders the project of critical dance studies complicit with the isolationist discourses of modernist autonomy (of art) or of capitalist alienation (of artists), or both” (Manning et al 2020, p. 341). In Who Makes a Dance? Studying Infrastructure through a Dance Lens, Sarah Wilbur theorizes infrastructure is a collectively embodied practice. Dancer labor operates both for and against capital gains. The ‘extraordinary labor of theater-making’ is in part marked by the sweat on the brow of performance artists, an ecotone of labor. Kinesthetic indebtedness “describe the weighted sense of shared belonging that compels people to labor on behalf of dance despite any promise of economic gain,” at once reciprocal and collective. ‘Corporeal debts,’ held in the bodies of local dance organizers, productively complicate understandings of debt as negative freight – a strictly isolationist burden – such that prevails in political economic discourse (Lazzarato 2012, 2015). “Weighing economic and embodied debts together reveals how dance’s many makers depend on and make demands upon the forces that surround them, even the forces that hold them down” (Wilbur 2020, p. 360-380). 

The embodied productive subversions of the dance industry to transactional arts is powerfully mirrored in water itself. Water has immense self-cleansing processes, through climatological dances like evaporation and groundwater filtration. Water participates in ‘kinesthetic indebtedness’ with us as well, by providing for us in innumerable ways like drinking, bathing, and living waterside. Justice for communities in the face of natural disasters is inseparable from the work of environmental protection. Global Water Dances and NoDAPL protest Water Protectors exemplify these relationships. Ecotones come into play as well, where Indigenous land-caring such as controlled burn practices are crucial to environmental protections. “In many cases governments are responsible to a certain extent for disaster impacts and recovery experiences, yet the full extent of this responsibility is rarely accepted.” Scope of review, uptake of landcaring recommendations by Indigenous and environmental organizations, and public acceptance of responsibility by governments are key as to “not undermine recovery support they may be funding and delivering” (Quinn et al 2022, p. 9). Water also protests and embodies acts of subversion against the industrial pollutants humanity subjects it to. Weights of pollution and environmental degradation are perhaps protested by orcas bumping and sinking yachts and cargo ships (Padilla 2023), and by the extreme escalation of severe storms after artificial weathering (Fleming 2012), as examples. Water also participates in art and activism directly with communities, such as with Indigenous Water Protectors, and through Global Water Dances.

“So if projects that move us to think about animal ethics, or environmental degradation, or neocolonialist capitalist incursions are still ‘feminist,’ it is not because such questions are analogous to sexual oppression; it is rather because a feminist exploration of the inextricable materiality-semiocity that circulates through all of these bodies pushes at the borders of feminism, and expands it, venturing into feminism’s ecotones (Neimanis 2012, p.96).” Hydrofeminism brings feminist principles to all bodies of water – applying posthumanist and multispecies strategies to global suffering. “We find ourselves tangled in intricate choreographies of bodies and flows of all kinds–not only human bodies, but also other animal, vegetable, geophysical, meteorological, and technological ones; not only watery flows, but also flows of power, culture, politics, and economics” (Neimanis 2012 p. 96). The connections between water and women, queerness, stories, and embodied knowledge through dance, are foundational to hydrofeminism, and to subverting the tumultuous stream of planetary destruction.

Global Water Dances: Performance and Place-Based Healing

Dance offers a way to embrace interconnectedness by embodying the reciprocity of perception. We connect with each other in duets, and small and large groups, while also connecting with and expressing the many pluralistic aspects of ourselves. Dance is also a potent avenue to somatically connect to one’s environment through eco-somatics. Sensing our bodies through our relationship with nature is healing. The movement of water, both in and outside of our bodies, is the essence of our reciprocal connection to the life around us. From the molecular structures of water and the telepathy of plants to tides and seasons: to truly embody our consciousness is to be in a dance with life. Eco-somatics and reciprocal relations are liberatory and transmutative – existing before and beyond the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist regimes that have contaminated our bodies – of people, water, knowledge, landscape, and life.

Global Water Dances (GWD) is a multinational performance arts initiative founded and maintained by dance professionals affiliated with the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS). Though administratively independent, GWD draws on LIMS’ theoretical frameworks—particularly Laban Movement Analysis—to train choreographers and unify its global artistic vision (Brodie & Lobel 2014; GWD 2021). Global Water Dances seeks to raise awareness and action for water-related issues around the world. More specifically, their mission is “...to inspire action and international collaboration for water issues through the universal language of dance” (“Funding Opportunities | Global Water Dances” n.d.). The movement has participants in hundreds of countries spanning five continents. Each year, communities across the globe gather in sites near bodies of water to perform their work. Participating choreographers register site-specific works, often partnering with local environmental groups to address regional water crises, and submit video documentation for GWD’s global archive. GWD supports these efforts through grants, activist networking, and educational resources like its ten online modules (e.g., "We Are Water" and "Think Globally, Dance Locally"), which scaffold artists in linking movement to ecological advocacy (GWD 2023).

Choreographers can register groups for these performances and submit video documentation to be shared annually by Global Water Dances. The organization provides many resources to help choreographers plan their events, including funding opportunities and help finding local water activist organizations to collaborate with. They also have ten online lessons, with topics such as ‘We are Water,’ and ‘Think Globally, Dance Locally.’ In all, GWD encourages choreographers to decide on a specific local water issue, an environmental group to partner with, and an environmental action to achieve (“Suggested Timeline | Global Water Dances” n.d.). 

For a full experience, the organization outlines four sections to include in each local event – though choreographers can choose to do only one section, they recommend doing all four. These sections include a ritual, local dance, global dance, and participatory dance. The opening ritual is site-specific, followed by a movement sequence that uses locally based music and/or uses a local water issue as a theme. Then, the global dance entails performing choreography done by all performers worldwide to the same music, towards connecting participants and audience on a larger scale. The final section is a participatory dance, wherein the audience participates in a very simple movement sequence, taught during the event or before it, with music optional (“For Choreographers | Global Water Dances” n.d.). These components are designed to unite consciousness and action through dance. By embodying water – moving as one mind/body and becoming water, river, stream, ocean, puddle – communities can unite in expression, motivation, and hope. Marylee Hardenburgh, co-founder of Global Water Dances, says that “if everyone speaks at once, it is chaos. If everyone moves together at once, that can create a sense of closeness and community, people can have a sense of shared purpose and empowered action” (Global Water Dances 2021).

As GWD is within the Laban Institute, the organization also recommends pulling from dance theorist Rudolf Von Laban’s concept of ‘Movement Choirs’ to develop site-specific performance. Some parameters they outline include ‘the movement capacity to be shared with large groups of people,’ pedestrian movements, powerful costumes/props/music/documentation, and relationships between groups/soloists. They outline specific binaries in Laban Analysis for creating legible movement for large groups, which include ‘complexity-simplicity, gestural-postural, pathways, and degrees of spatial clarity during performance’ (Laban Institute 2017). These guidelines naturally manifest in many ways in each local GWD performance. The choreographers’ choices cater to how each local show has its ways of connecting community, performance, water embodiment, and environmental action according to their needs.

The wide array of examples of Global Water Dance local performances available to view online makes it abundantly clear that ‘the universal language of dance’ embodies the relational performance models proposed by Kimmerer and Olsen, and the productive economic and infrastructural subversions. The primordial aspects of water, such as the wave and river, empower us to find new solutions to pollutants in our communities and bodies. Global Water Dances offers potent avenues to bridge relational harmony with water locally and globally, through ‘movement-making,’ community engagement, and advocacy goals. The imperative to dance nearby a body of water speaks to subversions of spatial ownership in international dance creative-placemaking.

The language of Laban Analysis, alongside its other available resources, guides each Global Water Dances to be its most expressive, effective, and uniting. Accessible, legible, embodied, and meaningful movements, alongside ideas of ritual and political action, come together to create effective ceremonies. Local and global consciousness unite through GWD's four universal movements: in 2023, the hands of thousands of trickling rainfalls scoop imaginary streams up to sip, awash in the shower, and roll like waves. The choreography is accessible and easy to learn – uniting all ages and abilities. Our timeless, universal, everyday relationship with water is evoked in public performances. We recognize water as life, and our relationship to water as dance. We become conscious of our reciprocal relationship to water and the importance of our literal actions – making meaning of movement. The conscious experience (of awareness, intentionality, and togetherness) associated with performing these everyday movements in a ceremonial context enlivens our feeling of ‘embodiment.’ Performed at water-related sites, the dance is for the water – the water witnesses this healing dance – feels, and remembers the promise embodied in our movements. 

Kimmerer discusses the importance of creating unique ceremonies within communities, arguing that performance should be relational rather than transactional. Performance is transactional when done in (economic) exchange for money, goods, or certain outcomes such as exposure, status, or favorable outcomes, as examples. Kimmerer states that more often than not, community-building events are commercialized, and educational events “...lack an active, reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world” (Kimmerer 2013, p.346). Relational performance, on the other hand, enacts a different set of values wherein cultivating harmonious relationships between performers with each other, the audience, and the environment, is a principle function of the work itself. Kimmerer writes that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember” (Kimmerer 2013, p.17). She also outlines the common issues that ceremonies in today’s world encounter: “To have agency in the world, ceremonies should be reciprocal co-creations, organic in nature, in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates communities. They should not be cultural appropriations from Native peoples. But generating new ceremonies in today’s world is hard to do.” 

Olsen also discusses the difference between consumerist, transactional performance, and inter-relational arts. Relational art strives for harmony, emotional expression, creativity, and optimizing health and physical wellness. Olsen writes that “...we don’t create movement; we participate in a dynamic, moving universe.” Bringing a multispecies outlook to artistic and activist practices, she offers that both our social justice movements and our everyday lives are movement systems that were ‘co-created with the Earth’s land and city-scapes.’ She calls for a return to the underlying intersubjective essence that connects us to our watery environments, unmissable and unrelenting. The combined specificity and breadth of Global Water Dances’ suggested performance components facilitate the qualities of agentful ceremonies in global modernity that Kimmerer and Olsen describe here.

This relational performance model, alongside intersections of water contamination, water/human rights, and dance are remarkably evident in the first Global Water Dance in Flint, Michigan, which occurred in 2017 (Lent n.d.). Flint has a long history of water contamination, with treated and untreated water pouring into the Flint River. Over time, the city’s population size halved, and one in six homes were abandoned. In 2011, due to a $25 million deficit in the town, the state-level government gained jurisdiction, and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to cut costs. In 2013, Flint ended their “...five-decade practice of piping treated water for its residents from Detroit in favor of a cheaper alternative: temporarily pumping water from the Flint River until a new water pipeline from Lake Huron was built. Although the river water was highly corrosive, Flint officials failed to treat it, and lead leached out from aging pipes into thousands of homes” (Denchak 2018). Despite protests from Flint residents, alarming lead levels, sickness, and deaths, the Flint government insisted that there was nothing wrong with the murky river water. Flint residents then turned to the federal government, partnering with NRDC and other groups to petition the US EPA to launch an immediate emergency response. When the EPA didn’t take action, the coalition sued the city, and in 2016, the needs of residents were finally addressed. While replacing lead pipes was part of this deal, this need remains largely unfulfilled, despite the fact that ‘no amount of lead is a safe amount of lead’ (Denchak 2018).

Flint hosted its first Global Water Dances event in 2017, as a “...celebration of togetherness and de-victimization through dance in several sites throughout the city.” The event focused on collaboration, knowledge, and activation. The project description posits that “peace is an embodied practice,” and collaboration builds empathy and resilience. The ‘activation’ component of the event sought to cultivate ‘time together, outdoors, as families and neighbors, moving’ – reinvigorating the under-utlized public spaces wrought in American cities (Global Water Dances 2017). These approaches to creative placemaking, through storytelling and breathing life into public spaces, are distinctly hydrofeminist.

To achieve these goals, the Flint 2017 event utilized the four components offered by Global Water Dances to make an individualized and effective ceremony: a unique ritual, a shared global dance, a free concert local dance, and a participatory dance/group improvisation near the Flint River. Their opening ritual was particularly striking. Adesola Akinleye spearheaded the project, leading five movement workshops/conversations for Flint mothers living at Odyssey House, a place designed to help treat substance use disorders, centered on the connection between women and water. They specifically focused on the role of mothers in both “protecting children from harmful water and providing healthy water.” Akinleye’s work is a creative embodiment of hydrofeminist principles, wherein healing occurs by representing women’s stories choreographically, while using dance as a way to connect to the healing potential of water. The nurturing qualities of water embody the protector and provider roles of mothers. 

Then, her team collaborated with the Flint Institute of Music (FIM) and the Flint School of Performing Arts-Flint Youth Ballet to create a dance piece inspired by the women’s stories – which were performed both indoors and outdoors as free shows for the community (Global Water Dances 2017). The choreographers include Adesola Akinleye, Emma Davis, Beth Freiman, Alisyn & Jared Hurd (Vertical Ambition Dance Company), Karen Mills Jennings, and students from University of Michigan-Flint (“Global Water Dances 2017 – Flint”). The sections of the Flint local dance piece include “Undercurrents, Stand Firm, Ablution: A Washing Away, and With the Tides of Life.” The titles paint a picture of which aspects of water most deeply resonate with the stories from Odyssey House mothers, having to do with momentum (Undercurrents), resilience (Stand Firm), cleansing (Ablution), and cycles (Tides of Life). Throughout the dances, the large cast wears blue, adding to the embodiment of water facilitated by the choreography. 

The first section, Undercurrents, includes twinkling xylophone music, with twinkling hands to match, as the dancers roll their bodies like waves. As the music coalesces into a hopeful, explorational rhythm, with percussion, flute, and xylophone melodies, the dancers extend the waves from their bodies into their arms – expanding, contracting, jumping, reaching. The waving arm motif builds as the spatial compositions of the performers also come into current-like forms – from idle puddles to trickling creeks. Their upward reach is matched by a hopeful gaze into the horizon as if the dancers are beckoning a better future for Flint’s water. Subtle movements beneath the surface, indicative in the title of Undercurrents, represents both water itself, and the undercurrent of hope for community water healing, weaving itself into dance and community engagement. Polymorphous water moves from puddles, to creek, to wave, all while building a momentum of hope. The piece ends as thunder strikes, and the group resolves.

The second section, titled Stand Firm, is a breakdancing piece featuring five dancers – where they face each other in two lines, performing symmetrical movements, changing levels from high to low while also traveling back and forth along the horizontal plane, like a shoreline wave increasing in momentum as the tide changes. As per this section’s title, their wavelike movement and focus on each other ‘Stands Firm’ amidst the complicated breakdance choreography. They lock eyes but do not face the audience. They are positioned as if they were playing tug of war for the audience, but in reality, they work together in a wavelike motion, more similar to the teamwork required to saw wood or row a boat. Their spatial composition also represents a river that bends and curves through time and space as they traverse the stage as a collective unit. Self-reflective introspection through relations with others is symbolized to the audience by a profile view of mirrored movements. This piece signals the importance of resilience, pointing to that firmly enacting boundaries to protect family and water health is also about working together. Stand Firm is a testament to the systemic oppression that mothers face, exacerbated by the water contamination in Flint – where lead ingestion can have lifelong severe negative effects for children. The piece is more widely a testament to the town’s resiliency in the troubled waters of Flint, pumped through lead pipes and into homes by the state and federal government. 

The third section, Ablution: A Washing Away, is “...a simple exploration of the universal ritual of bathing often taken for granted.” Here, we see a group of female dancers take turns giving and receiving imaginary water from one another. They meet eyes in a meaningful exchange, embodying the ritual dance with water fundamental to the human experience. The all female cast pays homage to the Odyssey House mothers, and the emphasis on eye contact and exchange builds a kinesthetic indebtedness characteristic of reciprocal gift-giving and subversive responses to hegemony through dance. Through the movements of sharing, solidarity is emphasized, and community relationships are nourished by water. These movements return to a timeless relationship with water that is distinctly feminine. Maternal movements, such as offering water to the other dancers, evokes sentiments expressed by the mothers living at Odyssey House. The sensual element of touch with water is paramount, of sacredly washing oneself with one’s own hands. A soft, and connective, relationship between the dancers to evoke a kinesthetic empathy for both the dancers and the implied, but absent, dance partner: the water. The absence of physical water poignantly portrays the sheer contamination and inaccessibility issues plaguing Flint residents, illustrating also that actions toward healing fall short without proper resources, ie, without clean water access. 

In both Ablution: A Washing Away and Stand Firm, the quality of eye contact and connection to other dancers predominates over the ‘embodiment’ of the choreography itself. Even while deep in breakdance, they sacrifice their internal movement immersion to maintain a focus on one another. These subtle qualities could be read as an embodiment of the mother’s role in raising a child, especially in Flint – resilient care, ‘watchful eyes’ never wavering. Flint mothers must not only worry about figuratively and literally ‘pouring from an empty cup,’ but also pouring from a contaminated one. The nourishment garnered from everyday rituals with water, like cleaning oneself, are portrayed in these ways to highlight the unique struggles in Flint, placing the dancers and audiences in the shoes of the mothers whose stories are the backbones of this work.

The fourth and final section, called With the Tides of Life, involves the largest cast by far, repeating many of the wavelike arm movements from the first Undercurrents section – giving the entire performance a cyclical feeling – reminiscent of the circular path that water molecules take with the continual lulls and breaks of waves. The dancers stand in a circle, facing inward, holding hands. Their facing each other recalls the power of collective space, without facing the audience, exemplified in Stand Firm. The dancers swim through the currents of each other while performing the tidal choreography, their polyamorphous spatial composition embodying water’s complexity from the first piece, Undercurrents. This piece brings together both the casts, and the themes and advocacy goals, behind each dance. The dancers’ togetherness validates the unity and healing culminated in the pieces leading up to this finale. The title With the Tides of Life signals an impermanence of the Flint Water Crisis, despite its ongoing nature, calling for a close to this contamination and public health crisis (Curry 2025). Going with the flow of healing, both in the Odyssey House workshops and Interviews, and in these free indoor and outdoor performances, are fundamental aspects of environmental protection and community healing. The moon’s crucial role in both the tides of water itself and women's hormonal cycles reinforces hydrofeminist approaches throughout the pieces, connecting deeply to the motherhood experiences of the women of the Odyssey House and their stories. 

These four pieces: Undercurrents, Stand Firm, Ablution: A Washing Away, and With the Tides of Life, come together towards the goal of empowering Flint’s residents amidst the long overdue turnaround of the water crisis. The dances use the continual upward and outward motion of the wave as it travels through one’s arm as a movement of hope – sometimes to the audience and other times to the other dancers or oneself. This watery embodiment is key in the first and last sections of the piece. The first and fourth sections, Undercurrents and With the Tides of Life, like the GWD global and participatory dances, emulate many of the qualities outlined for Laban’s Movement Choirs – such as ‘complexity-simplicity, gestural-postural, pathways, and degrees of spatial clarity during the performance.’ Large group dances tend towards more simple and gestural movements that embody water itself more so than our relationship with it. Spatial pathways allow the performers to connect with both the audience and the other dancers, in oscillating and winding pathways that are legible as distinctly liquidus. These powerful collective currents and cohesive gestures allow the healing dance of water to expand past its relegated boundaries. Under-utilized public waterfront parks are transformed by the community’s movements, as water makes its way through us onto the lawns, sidewalks, streets, and stages, to spread its messages of momentum, resilience, cleansing, and cycles, that had originally bubbled to the surface through interviews with Flint mothers. 

Global Water Dances offers an embodied hydrofeminist storytelling framework to bring political ecology and somatic healing into practice, as exemplified by 2017 Flint Michigan choreographies, inspired by workshops with Odyssey House mothers. Akin to Stories from the Flood in Wisconsin, women’s storytelling is an epistemological and climate resolution method (Druschke et al 2022; Tsing 2015). GWD’s language is choreographic, and watery – a ubiquitous biosemiotics of embodiment. Connection with water, whether sharing it, rowing together, or flowing together as a mighty wave, holds the lessons garnered in the mothers’ healing explorations. Days and weeks spent returning to the water brought direct revitalization not only to the mothers and their families, but also to the wider community of Flint. Choreography is cumulative storytelling. The temporal scale of labor to conceive, practice, and perform dance is in many ways extraordinary. Reciprocal dance labor and performance in public spaces subvert the limiting frameworks of the dance industry (Wilbur 2020, p. 360-380). Connecting with environmental organizations, as Akinleye did with Odyssey House, brings intentional, long-term, process-focused healing to community members via creative ecological methods. Merging the relational harmony of eco-somatic practice with Tsing’s ‘rush of stories’ (2015, p.57-58) reveals dance to be fundamental to both ecological and feminist knowledge. Hydrofeminism weaves bodily and planetary thinking through the harmonics of water (Neimanis 2012). In GWD, as with NoDAPL Water Protectors, care for the community is an obligation to environmental justice (Bioneers 2017). Reminiscent of swimmer-activist Lewis Pugh, Global Water Dances confronts water directly – many performances incorporate physical contact with water, shorelines, and submersion whenever safe to do so. (“Global Water Dances” 2021). 

Hundreds of annual examples of Global Water Dances Events, each with their own site leaders, community and environmental goals, and unique approaches, make way for the agentful, relational ceremonies described by Kimmerer and Olsen. Yet, accessibility barriers such as funding and space procurement for dancers are not miraculously thwarted, and neither are obstacles to anti-pollution initiatives in policy, management, administrative, and grassroots change-making for eco-activists. Exploitation of Earth by private monopolies must be urgently ceased: Accountability and advocacy promoted worldwide by eco-activist dance is just one manifestation of many embodied approaches available to any living creature to deepen their activism and wellness. Given the enormous scale of global health, displacement, and extinction, Global Water Dances may seem like merely a drop in the bucket to address the climate crisis. However, the power of combining local and global focuses, via Global Water Dances for example, can’t be undermined. Out of 1000 surveys of GWD participants, “75% of the respondents reported that the performance increased their interest in water issues and 78% answered positively that the dance event inspired them to take action regarding water issues” (“Support Dance Activism in Flint, MI: Global Water Dances 2017” 2017). Transcorporeal healing, global consciousness, and multiscalar support agendas of Global Water Dances make it incredibly effective at generating political action. The GWD components of ritual, global, local, and participatory dances make way to embody not just water but also the relationships communities have with water and each other. Accessible, meaningful, legible, and embodied movements, particularly in large groups and blurring audience/participant divides, have an unbelievable ability to foster awareness and empowerment in both community-building and water advocacy. In some ways Global Water Dances itself is a representation of the ecotones between political and somatic ecological healing – the generative rifts between unsustainable power systems, and connective embodiment – bringing hydrofeminist, subversive flow to relational harmony.

In all, Flint’s 2017 Global Water Dances is just one potent example of how dance can unite communities through storytelling, creative placemaking, and collective movement. Outcomes such as “being part of something larger, mutual trust, corrective emotional experiences, empowerment, mutual support, probing social roles, and enactive interpersonal learning” are all therapeutic effects of group movement (Koch et al. 2019). Dance powerfully embodies healings, rememberings, and (re)imaginations of our relationship to environment and community. Unprecedentedly important amidst the severe human rights violation of water contamination manifest around the globe, each community’s struggles, responses, and solutions are complexly unique, yet ubiquitously face the same globalist power entities wreaking havoc. From BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, to the Hudson River’s PCBs, and culminating in this example of Flint, Michigan’s drinking water contamination – it is clear that extreme water pollution is corporate-governmental exploitation for profits. Institutions put in place to serve people and the environment, such as the FDA and EPA, are not just failures but weapons pointed at people and ecosystems (Seigel 2019). In response to these grave injustices, dance is a potent tool to build political awareness, inspiring and facilitating activism. Listening to the water and contamination in our bodies and environments, hydrofeminist dance becomes an embodied call to justice – a collective healing in motion, and a fluid resistance to the systems that seek to sever us from each other and the Earth.

Conclusion: Toward a Somatic Ethics of Water

To embody consciousness is to be in a dance with life. To live in harmonious relation with water, we must wade through its mysteries, understood as a dancer. Water’s movement is the essence of our being, the reciprocity of perception flows through water. The covalent and polar qualities of water on the atomic level, and the creative uncertainty in Olsen’s ecotones, mirror the creative relationship between self and others experienced by Earth’s creatures. For many artists, from Andrea Olsen, to Truman Lowe and Margaret H’Doubler, and Adesola Akinleye, their relationship with water nourishes and informs their practice. Many religious and spiritual praxes are also built upon these watery relations (Kimmerer 2013; Strang 2023; Helmreich 2023; Singh 2011). Ecological activism is embodied: from Pugh’s swimming as protest, to NoDAPL Water Protectors, and Global Water Dances. Multispecies approaches to social justice movements, especially through the embodied mode of dance with one’s community and environment, create meaningful, agentful ceremonies – hydrofeminist interdisciplinary storytelling at the ecotones of art, scholarship, and activism. 

In an era defined by ecological precarity and widespread disconnection from the natural world, the need to reimagine our relationships with water is not only poetic – it is political, scientific, and ethical. This work has argued that somatic, interdisciplinary, and relational models can help us perceive water not merely as a resource, but as a co-creator of life, knowledge, and healing: Learning to dance with water is a profound act of care. We first waded into water’s molecular structure, somatic healing, and ecotones. Then, we swam amidst waves, rivers, and severe weather, and found ourselves polluted by global crises like oil spills and drinking water contamination. Our case studies kicked up whirlpools and treaded water in deep solidarity with perpetual colonial oppression, critically examining weaponization of US governmental power pertaining to Wisconsin Indigenous cosmologies, national water infrastructure, and Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. Hydrofeminist analysis focused on the inseparability of planetary and feminist healing methods, alongside storytelling and subversive dance. In all, this work posits that dance with water, in its many forms, is a crucial embodied practice of resistance and ecological repair. Each section contributes to the core proposition that water, when approached with respect, creativity, and reciprocity, offers significantly healing guidance. Applications of this research are as pluralistic and ubiquitous as water itself – offering refractive angles of contemplation for scholars, artists, and activists. 

Embodying water can help us connect with the watery qualities in ourselves and the world around us. We can then submerge in the creative, transformative, and fluid capabilities of water, advancing our pursuits to heal Earth. Through eco-somatic practices like compassion, listening, and co-movement, we can cultivate harmonious relations with the more-than-human world. The next time you find yourself in a dance with water, whether in your cup, running from your sink, your shower head, or outdoors in water’s world, take a moment to dance with it – to feel it on your skin and in your body, the offer your love and gratitude for all it gives you. Feel the generative ecotones of worlds collide on your landscapes, feel the vital essences that flow through life. Meet water spirit to spirit, dancer to dancer – and listen with your own body of water for a response. 

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