Water is essential. It is the source of life for all living things, and its presence makes the difference between life and death. Climate change, too, manifests in water: too much or too little of it in the form of flooding, atmospheric rivers, blizzards, severe droughts, and wildfires. Activists the world over are working to protect and reconnect with the water. They argue that water is sacred, an essential element, and a kindred spirit. While their methods vary, the goal is the same: to defend water so it can keep us and our future ancestors alive.
Big Wind Carpenter is a two-spirit member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where fossil fuel extraction impacted every aspect of their life. “The river that we used to play in was being used for the dissolved solids of the fossil fuel industry,” they say. The local political and educational systems were also funded by (and reflected the values of) that industry.
Carpenter describes the extreme contrasts visible from their mother’s house: To the south is a sulfuric acid plant (which used to be a yellowcake uranium factory) and a largely Native population living in trailer homes. To the north are mansions, golf courses, and a largely white population. “Of course, they aren’t exposed to the industries that we were exposed to,” Carpenter explains.
Rebecca Wyn Kelly was running a restaurant and an art gallery when the COVID-19 pandemic brought her back home to the tiny Welsh village of her youth, Aberarth. She realized there was a lot of work to do with the River Arth, the waterway she’d been swimming in all of her life. Kelly uses art to connect her community with her local waters—in the form of art classes, group swims, and river safaris. “Artists have always been there alongside the physicians, alongside the mathematicians, the philosophers, the linguists, the thinkers.”
She says it’s because artists see the world through creative eyes that invite people to engage with concepts like climate change and pollution, even if they don’t fully understand them: “Wow, look how they’ve captured that water. Perhaps I should look at the water differently.” Much of her art embodies threats to the River Arth, such as a map of the river made up of 5,540 blue dots, each one representing an hour during which raw sewage was being discharged from a local water treatment plant into the tiny, 24-kilometer river in 2020.
“I’m using this river as a kind of metaphor for our autonomy as people and our language and our ways of living and our culture,” Kelly says. Historically, the Welsh language and ecosystems were undermined by colonialism and its consumption-centered worldview. “Our river holds all of that, so all … that has been lost within our village life can be regained through the story of this river.” Kelly says that when it comes to climate action, people are overloaded with data and exhausted by empty political promises. She aims to counter this by introducing the climate justice movement to what she calls “sacred activism.”
“By taking a walk, you are doing the work. By getting in the water, you are doing the work.” It’s enough to show up for the magic of cloud gazing or a storm or the tide going in and out, she says. Rekindling a relationship with nature is the first step in standing up for it. “There still is joy, and it’s still OK to seek that for yourself and for our surrounding environment as a way of protest and activism.”
When John Akec describes the Sudd Wetland, he makes it clear what’s at stake: the largest wetland on the African continent and the second-largest in the world, on the list of tentative UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
But swamps have never been easy for Western societies to love. Even delineating the Sudd Wetland’s area is squishy: During the dry season, it covers about 16,000 square miles, but come the rainy season, it expands to nearly 35,000 square miles. This seasonal flooding allows vegetation to grow in what would otherwise be desert, and fish to live in shallow ponds left behind. The fluidity of these food sources supports the nomadic pastoralism of approximately 1 million Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and Anyuak people who call this area home.
Historically, the wetland helped protect the region from British colonial forces. Today, the Sudd continues to support people and entire ecosystems. “Water is more valuable than gold, more valuable than oil,” Akec says.
Akec was in intermediate school when a project began in 1978 to channelize the flow of water through the wetland to capture what was being “lost” to evaporation. Despite his young age, he protested the project, which eventually came to a halt in 1984.
In 2021, the project to drain the Sudd Wetland was revived, this time in the name of flood mitigation. “I was horrified,” Akec says. Now a systems engineer, economist, social activist, and administrator at University of Juba, Akec took to social media to raise awareness of the proposed dredging and channelizing, which would disrupt the hydraulic cycle and leave the region drier. University students staged an enormous demonstration on campus, and that same day, Akec received a call from the South Sudanese president’s office telling him the dredging project had been suspended. There was also a thinly veiled threat to his job, but Akec plans to keep fighting.
“I know this country was fought for by people with their blood,” Akec says. “If you are living, then you try to fight with the tools that are available.”
Originally published in YES!
