Abstracts

The labor of rivers:  work and urban rivers in the shaping of 19th century Rio de Janeiro
Bruno Capilé (The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Lise Sedrez (The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

In physics, work is the transfer of energy for the displacement of bodies. Rivers flow, move bodies, carry vital energy to cities and societies. They thus carry out work, and like us, they take advantage of external and internal elements, such as: the solar energy needed to transform liquid waters into steam, or the winds to transport them to fall as rain the mountains of Rio. In the 19th century Rio de Janeiro, the work of the rivers was intertwined with human work and helped shaping the spaces of exchange and production of the city. To understand how this intermingling took place contributes to our understanding of urban river systems, both as critical components of urban nature and as dynamic agents of city formation.

The rivers’ waters went down the valleys, and in their path, they moved rocks, sandbanks, sediments, and also anthropogenic objects, such as garbage, bodies, boats, mills. Their work was not uniform along the way.  Fluvial work generated diverse environments in the river basins, which we will categorize in upper, middle and lower course. In the upper course, the dense rainforests were first perceived as suppliers of wood and fuel – but they were also perceived as part of a complex water system of rivers and rains. In the middle course, the forests were mostly gone by the 19th century, replaced by for sugarcane plantations, cattle ranching, and subsistence agriculture – all extremely dependent on river’s labors.  With the growth of the urban center and the difficulties of transportation, the old rural area became suburbs with opulent houses and huge manors. Finally, at the lower course, the fine sediments favored the mangrove forests over the tree species of the hills. By landfilling the mangrove swamps and harnessing the rivers and their labor to enlarge the Brazilian Imperial capital, humans connected the rivers to the fate of the city, ironically called Rio (River) of Janeiro. Our paper analyses how the river’s work was appropriated in different but interconnected ways in the three dimensions of Rio de Janeiro’s rivers. we use the rivers’ trajectory to deliberately blur the urban limits of the city. We conclude by discussing the concepts of human and non-human labor in urban environmental history.

Instead of searching for new adjustments to a more effective water consumption and distribution, the presumption in taming river’s work led to severe alterations on its environment. The misuse of local river environments resulted in droughts and floods after decades of intensification of sedimentation and erosion processes. In the context of the Anthropocene, our paper also indicates how the search for solving water insecurity in a city with an exponential growth was the main motivation for the diversion of rivers distant from the urban center.

Slippery Ontologies of Tidal flats in the Anthropocene
Young Rae Choi (Florida International University)

Tidal flats are a slippery object. Unless you take careful and balanced steps, the silty surfaces of tidal flats would make you fall or trapped. Tidal flats are also slippery in terms that they evade given definitions, and, hence, control and governance. Drawing upon the works of Franz Krause’s amphibious anthropology (2017) and Philip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters’ wet ontologies (2015), this paper lays out a theoretical foundation for understanding and analyzing tidal flats: coastal wetlands that are flooded at high tides and exposed at low tides; an entity that is neither land nor sea—or both.

This paper takes South Korea’s tidal flats, getbol, as a geographically and politico-economically situated object of study. I first examine the materialities of tidal flats—matter, movements, rhythms, and the list goes on—that lead to slippery ontologies of tidal flats that resist falling into fixed categories. Second, I attend to ‘multiple ontologies’ of tidal flats (Yates, Harris, and Wilson, 2017). I trace the modern history of tidal flats in South Korea, identifying three main ways of discursive and material production of tidal flats. Subject to state-led large-scale land reclamation projects, tidal flats had been an integral part of state-building since the nation’s independence from Japan’s colonial rule. Then, fueled by anti-reclamation movements, scientific knowledge on tidal flats exploded over the past two decades that have produced new imageries of tidal flats as biologically rich and diverse. Biological tidal flats, as opposed to geomorphological and physical tidal flats, have co-evolved with social tidal flats as seen in the emphasis on their harmonious existence with local fishing communities. Finally, in the age of sustainability, tidal flats are subject to managerial governance that stresses economic value and spatial efficiency. I demonstrate that such different ontologies of tidal flats, while having distinct historical trajectories, co-exist and influence one another.

Expanding the focus of geography into the muddy unfamiliar terrain is more than case studies. As Steinberg and Peters argue, the oceanic space for its dynamism and the ways in which it interacts with the society offers us new perspectives on world-making as well as new politics. Similarly, I argue that endorsing the slippery ontologies of tidal flats opens up new possibilities of encountering, using, and protecting tidal flats. These possibilities, on the one hand, have a capacity to address emerging challenges such as climate change and intensified effort to capitalize tidal flats. On the other hand, they have broader implications on how to reimagine and reconfigure human-nature relations in the Anthropocene where change and uncertainty become a norm. Although slipping through easy conceptualizations, thinking through the slippery ontologies of tidal flats is in this sense useful and needed.

Straight Channels and Drained Swamps: Resituating River Control and ‘Wetland Cultures’ in China and India
Christopher Courtney (University of Durham)
Rohan D’Souza (Kyoto University)

Throughout history and across regions, acquisitive states and expanding markets have often sought to drain marshes and control rivers. They have imagined wetlands to be wastelands – using terms like marsh and swamp that conjured images of sluggish edges or uninhabitable spaces within a river system.  Yet the wetland ecologies that lay at the interface between land and water and river and sea not only brimmed with diverse flora and fauna but were also home to cultures that could harness the flow and ebb and craft a range of productive livelihoods. In this essay we will compare some of the “wetland cultures” that existed in ambiguous littoral areas in China and India, exploring the alternative patterns of settlement and subsistence that existed in water-abundant environments. We will examine how despite the success (and failures) of modern engineering wetland cultures persisted and even resisted the steady domination of river control.

Though both India and China have engaged in widespread wetland reclamation, increasingly so in the modern era, in the middle and lower Yangzi vibrant communities continued to fish, forage, farm and float, while in many parts of deltaic Eastern India people conducted a similar dance with rivers at their sluggish depths. In our essay, we will explore the defining conceptual contrasts between wetland ecologies and river control. While in the former, harnessing the marsh ecology meant being attentive to the distinct potentials of a niche environment, in the case of the latter, rivers could only be controlled through the universal application of mathematical rules and formula. Wetland cultures drew upon the art of harvesting unique ecological features while river control depended upon the science and statecraft of dominating nature. Discussing how these two different hydraulic paradigms clashed, adjusted and perhaps even found middle ground will help debate whether river control entirely overwhelmed wetland cultures in China and India.

The Future of India’s Rivers – Natural Systems or Human Artefacts?
Shripad Dharmadhikary (Manthan Adhyayan Kendra)

A number of interventions in India’s rivers, some decades old, some more recent, have resulted in severe modifications of rivers, converting them increasingly into human constructions. Recent years have seen some policy initiatives that intend to protect rivers and could shift them back towards a more natural state. These include the Ganga rejuvenation program and mandating environmental flows in several cases. On the other hand, interventions leading to anthropogenic modifications also continue. This paper will examine the interplay of these two trends in the context of the political economy around rivers and how it is shaping rivers, what are the elements that push rivers into becoming more and more of human constructions and whether there are elements that may facilitate a move towards a more natural state of rivers.  This will include examining the interstate river disputes in India in which competitive sub-nationalism is pushing rivers towards increasing human interventions, and whether this is changing, or can change, in newer river disputes.

While these issues will be explored at a broader policy and national level, it would also draw upon experiences from two river basins – the Ganga and the Narmada.

Wetlands and Power in the Central Yangzi Valley of Late Imperial China
Yan Gao (Duke University)

This paper analyzes the favoritism and environmental justice issue in the central Yangzi valley from a long-term perspective and reflects on the environmental legacies of such historical justice issue. Used to be a vast wetland, the central Yangzi valley was colonized by migrants over a span of several centuries. As the central Yangzi valley was flood-prone and drainage-inflicted, building dikes to secure agricultural irrigation and flood control was a crucial part of the socio-economic and cultural life of local communities as well as of the government. Though most of the dikes were financed and maintained by local communities, the state undoubtedly played critical roles in diking the main sections of the Yangzi and Han rivers, and often, favored the northern over the southern bank of the Yangzi. This paper focuses on various factors leading to such a favoritism including high officials’ ancestor tomb building, local ties with the government, finances, local conflicts, and hydro-geomorphological features. It argues that human intervention and politics had altered the landscape of the central Yangzi valley, causing a beehive shape lowland in the middle of the central Yangzi valley and that was especially salient after we looked at the social and environmental transformation in a longue durée.

Water and Sovereignty in the Indus Basin:  The River Basin and the Anthropocene
David Gilmartin (North Carolina State University)

Examining the history of Water in terms of Law, Conceptions of Nature, and the Imagining of the State opens critical windows for thinking about changing conceptions of Sovereignty.  But grounding sovereignty within larger conceptions of the cosmos that shape the Anthropocene is also central to thinking about the modern river basin.  This paper will briefly track conflicts over water in the Indus basin for the insights they give us on changing conceptions of sovereignty over the long duree, from the precolonial and British colonial periods, to the crisis of partition and the new social and political conceptions of relations with water that emerged under the Pakistani state regime.   The paper will raise questions about how control over—and adaptation to–the ecologies of water flow provides clues to the ways that power itself is imagined and to the ways such imaginings have shaped both the legitimacy of and challenges to the power of the state

Ethnolinguistic Cleavages and Interstate River Disputes in the Union of India
Scott Moore (Univeristy of Pennsylvania)

This chapter examines why interstate river disputes have arisen and persisted in India despite legislative provisions designed to prevent them. It makes reference to a primary case study, the Krishna River basin dispute in peninsular India, and a secondary case, the Damodar Valley Corporation in northeastern India, one of the country’s few comprehensive river basin governance institutions. India’s interstate water disputes show how sectional tensions sustain long-running disputes over shared water resources. Because irrigated agriculture is so critical to the economy of many regions and because it enjoys commensurate salience as a political issue, shared rivers have become focal points for ethno-linguistic tensions and cleavages, which moreover have become more pronounced with the rise of state-based political parties that wield outsized influence in India’s federal system. Against the background of sectional tensions, subnational politicians derive electoral benefit from seeking additional water resources at the expense of their neighbors.

How the water comes to Tianjin? The Changes of Drinking Water Solution of Tianjin in the past century
Cao Mu (Tianjin Normal University)

Tianjin is the biggest water transportation hub in North China, located in Haihe River basin, along the sea shore of Bohai Bay. Sitting on a low costal land, Tianjin plain attracts numerous upstream rivers passing through it to join the sea, making Tianjin a enormous port city which connected land, river and sea transportation. Since Ming dynasty, Tianjin became the gate city of empire’s capital from the rivers and sea, and a key business city. Rivers brought Tianjin opportunities as well as risk and difficulties. Though it seems like Tianjin will never face water shortage problem, it actually suffers freshwater shortage since the low-lying land is soaked in alkaline water and intrusive sea water.

In the past century, Tianjin people has a ruthless pursuit for sufficient drinking water. From digging deep underground water, building running water system to transfer water from Yellow river, Huai River and Yangtze River, Tianjin has solved a dozen of water crisis but mainly using two methods—-finding new kind of water resource or seeking for interbasin water transfer. Looking back to the history, we can easily find Tianjin is always eager for water, especially since the beginning of modernization and industrialization, however, it seems like the past solutions to water shortage of the expanding city could not solve the problem fundamentally. As we are pursuing a harmonious state between man and nature, this is a right moment to think this problem from a new aspect. Tianjin’s water shortage solution would be an urgent task for scientists and humanity researchers who should co-work together to inspect the relationship of human and nature, balance urban development and resource consuming, and make a rational use of natural resources.

Rivers and the Amphibious Pulse of History
Sudipta Sen (University of California, Davis)

My paper explores the possibilities and pitfalls of the history of rivers and river basins across the longue durée. It is based on my recent work on the history of the Ganges and the Gangetic Valley in northern India, but focused in this instance on a larger comparative framework across historical time and geographical space. It takes up the urgent question of how rivers and riparian social formations of the past have been integral to our understanding and appreciation of expansive and dynamic social and natural systems and the inseparability of environmental and social histories, especially on a concerted planetary scale. It also proposes a reconsideration of historically agrarian and land-based empires (such as Mughal India or Qing China) and societies from an essentially amphibian perspective, rivers being the tireless conduits between terra firma and the ocean, connecting all that lies in between.

The perpetuating oxymoron of “sustainable hydropower” and its significance for the future of river ecosystems of the world.
Eugene Simonov (Rivers without Boundries Coalition)

This paper explores the reasons for high viability and prospects of dam-based hydropower despite globally recognized body of knowledge about its negative effects on biodiversity, ecosystem services and population relying on them. Paper will briefly examine how several key conclusions of the World Commission on Dams by 2000 (WCD 2000) Report correspond with actual hydropower development in the 21 century and broadly describe driving forces shaping possible scenarios for the future of the hydropower and free-flowing rivers.

Major and largely negative political, social, economic and environmental consequences or large-da construction were documented by the World Commission on Dams by 2000 (WCD 2000) profiling large dams as risky development solutions, which should be considered only when no alternative is available. However, two following decades witnessed a massive renaissance of dam building for hydropower, most of them having the same typical features and drawbacks as those described in the WCD Report. Only mass-development of inexpensive alternative energy sources made dam building boom subside during last 5 years (see graph below).

Graph based on statistics from International Renewable Energy Agency shows annual incremental increases in capacity of hydropower and key renewable energy sources.

Given that free-flowing river ecosystems are finite, non-renewable resource, their use became arena of intense competition between interest groups promoting different values: nature conservation, cultural survival of indigenous people, fisheries, water supply, energy, tourism and recreation. The hydropower sector in 21 century has been most successful in harnessing new rivers at the expense of many other values.

This advance in the “West-dominated” international institutions was legitimized through the climate change awareness and the industry’s “sustainable hydropower” rhetoric developed to carry on without any major changes. In emerging economies and other developing countries hydropower development was legitimized largely as a tool to control and direct development by ruling elites while satisfying skyrocketing energy demand and maximizing project benefits to these elites. In many cases competition for water resources between countries and desire to exert influence on downstream neighbors were additional potent incentive for dam construction.

Use of climate rhetoric by all participants of debate is also one of central aspects of our study, exemplifying how notion of “sustainable development” is compartmentalized and particular UN Sustainable development goals (SDGs) owned by specific interest groups are being used in competition for preservation and utilization different river ecosystem values.

Graph: Annual hydropower installation in last decade.

This paper also explores the role of specific emerging economies, like China and Russia, in influencing the fate of major rivers of the world, with major environmental and social consequences. By 2019 Chinese state-owned companies are present in 70% of hydropower projects being developed globally, while adjacent Russia almost halted hydropower development while still possessing many free flowing rivers. The inquiry why this seeming complementarity does not lead to active bilateral cooperation in harnessing new rivers will shed light on driving forces for international hydropower construction in its current phase.

Post -WCD 2000 hydropower development and related discourse allows us to explore why and how humankind perpetuates certain modes of water management despite overwhelming evidence of their risks and inefficiency as well as consequences of such collective behavior.

The Entangled Relationship among the Yellow River, Huai River Systems and Human Activities in the Recent One Millennium
Han Zhaoqing (Fudan University)
Xiao Yang (
Center for Historical Geographic Studies, Fudan University)

This paper intends to review the changes of the lakes, rivers on North Huaihe Plain triggered by the migration of the lower reaches of the Yellow River since 1128 based on analyses of a variety of historical literature. It will then discuss the role human activities have played in this long process.

“Who own(s) water?” and “Who use(s) water?”: Discourses on Inter-Village Water Disputes in Republican China
Qian Zhu (Duke-Kunshan University)

The paper considers the inter-village water disputes appeared in China’s public discourse as an indicator of “a rural problem” during the Republican period of 1920s-1940s. Water from a river, for the agricultural irrigation purpose, was seen as a natural resource to use by the villagers along the river. However, it was during the 1930s, there emerged water disputes claimed ownership of rivers/water that determined the usage right of water, especially when the drought and water stress occurred. This research focuses on the “Life Education Movement” initiated by Tao Xingzhi, the mass educator in the 1930s, which employed the democratic method to reorganize the rural community in dealing with the local village water disputes in Xiao Zhuang, the suburb of Nanjing. Through negotiations and voting, the “Life Education” promoters aimed to restructure the rural society by separating the collective ownership from the usage right of river water. In so doing, the kinship-based villages were gradually transformed into units of collective ownership, through which the border conflicts over water usage were solved on the democratic framework rather than violence. The research argues that the water ownership and usage right discourses in the Republican era provided the organizational structure for the socialist control of water resources in the PRC era after 1949.