Abstract
Chapter 9 will return from this deep immersion in biblical tradition under tutelage to indigenous vision by pulling the various threads of the exploration back into the present of the Strait of Detroit. Cameo descriptions of the “state of water war” globally will set the tone for a sketch of geologist and forestry-warden insights into water’s role in mediating atmosphere and lithosphere, mineral, metal, and gas into symbiotic health, turn personal in recounting a Native encounter schooling me in Turtle Island wisdom about place-based origins, and finally re-visit the shutoff struggle and supplement Foucault’s Biopower grasp with Black Lives Matter ferocity and the necessity to recover myth as the house of Spirit.
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Notes
- 1.
As Alexandersson clarifies in the Introduction, his text does not provide specific citations for much of the Schauberger material, except by way of the German bibliography appended to the back.
- 2.
Indeed, raising water to the highest mountain peaks to appear as mountain springs (Alexandersson, 54). Schauberger differentiates “atmospheric water (rain water, condensed water, distilled water, water exposed to a strong current of air and intensive light)” from “good mountain spring water” matured by a long underground journey enlivening its vitality by minute uptake of salts and minerals (Alexandersson, 58–59).
- 3.
Reflecting on Schauberger’s notion of “living water, Chris Seebach offers that, when not interfered with by human re-direction, water might be understood to “mirror” the vortexian energy of the earth itself, reducing friction—perhaps (we would ad lib) tending towards the kind of rhythmic “entrainment” phenomenon recognized by metronomes and other synchronizing structures of movement (Seebach, 142; Leonard, 13ff.).
- 4.
And not always scientifically or practically verifiable—in part due to the disappearance of the pristine wilderness which he himself frequented, whose natural interconnectedness has since been trammeled and broken down.
- 5.
Interestingly for this writing, biblical exegete James Tabor argues that the Rev. 18 description of Babylon’s fall is actually a blow-by-blow depiction of the effects of Mt. Vesuvius’ 79 CE eruption in obliterating Pompeii—understood by Jews and Christians of the time, as divine “pay-back” for Rome’s 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem—an eco-agency, offers Tabor, more responsible than “mission” for Christianity’s “takeover” of the Roman Empire (Tabor 2013).
- 6.
Adapting sociologist Avery Gordon’s notion of the continuing “seething energies” (“ghosts”) of those disappeared or killed without the requisite spaces for grieving by a given society, to the disappearance of non-human life forms and even agencies such as waters and soils, pushed to the edge of irrecoverable loss (Gordon, 17, 21, 195).
- 7.
See likewise the disruptive return of ancestors—including trees wantonly cut down for the sake of “progress”—articulated in African Independent Church experience in Zimbabwe as an ngozi or aggrieved spirit, troubling the living community with a demand for vengeance, mollified only by ritual attention and confession, certified as acceptable by God in sending rain (Daneel, 259–260).
- 8.
An expression in my wife’s Filipino culture for someone who still has much to learn in entering into a new situation.
- 9.
Of course, this text must be read critically as an invocation of ancient memory, taken over by seventh century BCE Israelite monarchy and “spun” to justify its on-going colonization of Canaan and suppression of Israel’s own much more complicated past as a hybrid mix of Canaanite peasant and Hebrew herder and Midianite smith, etc.
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Perkinson, J.W. (2019). Water Wars on a Living Planet: The Globe and the Strait. In: Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14998-7_9
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