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Water in Social Imagination
Nature, Culture and Literature
General Editors
Hubert van den Berg (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań)

Axel Goodbody (University of Bath)
Marcel Wissenburg (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Advisory Board
Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick)

Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Heinrich Detering (University of Göttingen)
Andrew Dobson (Keele University)
Marius de Geus (Leiden University)
Terry Gifford (Bath Spa University / University of Alicante)
Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester ma)
Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College)
Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University)
Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus)
Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida)
Kate Rigby (Monash University)
Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
Piers Stephens (University of Georgia)
Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo)
VOLUME 12
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncl

Water in Social Imagination
from Technological Optimism to Contemporary
Environmentalism
Edited by
Jane Costlow
Yrjö Haila
Arja Rosenholm
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Africa, from the series POWER BEAUTY/ 2011, by Marja-Liisa Torniainen.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Illustrations viii
Notes on Contributors IX
1 Knowing Water: An Introduction 1

Jane Costlow, Yrjö Haila and Arja Rosenholm
2 Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the Perception of Water 11

Scott Slovic
3 Water and Urban Space in Late Medieval Stockholm 28

Maija Ojala
4 The Many Roles of the Dynamic Danube in Early Modern Europe:

Representations in Contemporary Sources 49
Verena Winiwarter
5 Water, Space, and Desire in Soviet Fiction: The Case of Konstantin

Paustovsky 77
Arja Rosenholm
6 The Interplay of Water, Home, and Narration in Überfahrt by Anna

Seghers 100
Withold Bonner
7 The River in Thaw-era Soviet Popular Song (1954–1970): The Formation

of an Amicable Space 119
Maria Litovskaya
8 “The Sovereign of the River and the Sovereign of All Nature—in the
Same Trap” 145
Mika Perkiömäki
9 The Pollution of the Baltic Sea: A Mirror Image of Modernization 167

Nina Tynkkynen
vi contents
10 The Deep Waters of Literary Theme. Nature, Narrative, and Identity in

Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna 193
Markku Lehtimäki
11 A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. Water Myths and Risk Society in
Veronica Pimenoff’s Risteilijät 212
Toni Lahtinen
12 “It was only a tiny spring”: Veneration, Value and Local Springs in
Contemporary Russia 233
Jane Costlow
13 Securing Water: Ambiguities of Control vs. Coexistence 255

Yrjö Haila
Index 277
Acknowledgements
This volume originated under the auspices of a multidisciplinary project enti-

tled Water as Social and Cultural Space: Changing Values and Representations,
funded by the Academy of Finland. We are enormously grateful to the Acad-
emy for making this project possible. Their funding allowed for contributors
to meet periodically to discuss drafts of papers, a process that was enriched by
the participation of Petri Juuti, Tapio Katko, Christian Krötzl, Päivi Pahta and
Riikka Rajala. Matthew James provided expert assistance with editing. A grant
from Bates College provided funds for translation, and Nora Favorov gave us an
excellent and idiomatic translation of the Litovskaya essay.
List of Illustrations
Figures
3.1
Detail from the oldest map of Stockholm, from 1625 Source: Stockholm
Stadsarkiv/Handritade kartor 68/ 1625 års karta. 31
3.2 Detail from the Vädersolstavlan presenting the medieval city of Stockholm
Source: author’s photograph from Stockholm Storkyrka. 40
3.3 The unbuilt area that is the site of the medieval well (marked with green)
Source: Stockholm stad, geodataservice: <kartor.stockholm.se>
(markings by the author). 41
8.1 “Siberian Rivers,” a fountain in the Theatre Square, Krasnoyarsk. Source:
author’s photograph. 146
8.2 Queen Fish statue in Krasnoyarsk. Source: author’s photograph. 151
8.3 The Yenisei river on the Russian map. Source: Uwe Dedering, <http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_edcp_relief_location_map.jpg>.
Emphasis of the Yenisei by the author. Used according to the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (<https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en>). Distributed under the
same license as the original. 152
9.1 The Baltic Sea catchment area and sub-basins as defined for helcom. The Baltic
Sea Pollution Load Compilation. Source: Helcom, “The Fourth Baltic Sea
Pollution Load Compilation”. Reprinted with permission from the Finnish
Environment Institute syke and National Land Survey of Finland 2004. 176
12.1
The Orel region as Orthodox cross. Used with permission of Kartush publish-
ing, Orel. Source: Shchipakov. 238
12.2
“Gremiachii” holy spring. Photo used with permission of Orelrodnik.ru. Source:
<http://orelrodnik.ru/rodnik/86/rodnik-86.html> 242
12.3
“Andreevskii” holy spring. Photo used with permission of Orelrodnik.ru. Source:
<http://orelrodnik.ru/rodnik/7/rodnik-7.html> 247
Tables
4.1 Major wars and conflicts in early modern Europe featuring operations at or
near the Danube 55
4.2 Ice on the Danube and its tributaries changing fortunes in war 1687–1739 as
listed in the Burney collection 57
4.3 Bridges over the Danube in or near Vienna damaged by Ice 1715–1783 as
reported in the Burney collection newspapers 60
Notes on Contributors
Withold Bonner
is a lecturer in German Literature and Culture at the School of Language,
Translation and Literary Studies, University of Tampere, Finland. His fields
of interest include gdr literature, “Heimat” / home, memory and transcul-
tural German literature. His latest publications include the following articles:
“‘Mein Problem ist das Kontinuum’: Heimat als dynamischer Gedächtnis-
raum bei Franz Fühmann.” Eigler / Kugele (eds.): Heimat: At the Intersection of
Memory and Space. De Gruyter, 2012; “‘Du bist sowohl Muslim als auch Türkin,
verstanden?’ Kulturelle Übersetzungen von Hochzeiten und anderen Festen.”
Pasewalck / Neidlinger / Loogus (eds.): Interkulturalität und (literarisches)
Übersetzen. Stauffenburg, 2014.
Jane Costlow
is Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine
usa. She has written on the novels of Ivan Turgenev, Russian women writ-
ers and representations of the bear in late Imperial culture. Recent publica-
tions include Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century
Forest (Cornell 2013), which won the 2014 usc Prize for Best Book in Literary
and Cultural Studies; and, with Amy Nelson, Other Animals: Beyond the Hu-
man in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh, 2010). Her translation of Lydia
Zinovieva-Annibal’s The Tragic Menagerie received the aatseel prize for best
translation in 1999.
Yrjö Haila
is Professor of Environmental Policy (emeritus) at the University of Tampere.
He was educated as an ecologist, and his main research interests have centered
on the nature—society interface, from several complementary perspectives.
His books include Humanity and Nature, Ecology, Science and Society, together
with Richard Levins (Pluto Press, 1992), and in the 2000s, three books in Finn-
ish and How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition,
co-edited with Chuck Dyke (Duke University Press, 2006).
Toni Lahtinen
is a university instructor of Finnish literature in the University of Tampere.
His doctoral thesis Maan höyryävässä sylissä. Luonto, yhteiskunta ja ihminen
Timo K. Mukan tuotannossa (2013, In the Steaming Lap of the Land. Nature,
Human, and Society in the Works of Timo K. Mukka) is on ecocriticism and
on the metaphor of land-as-woman in the novels of the Lapp author Timo
x notes on contributors
K. Mukka (1944–1973). Lahtinen has also edited two posthumous anthologies

of writings by Mukka. He has published several ecocritical articles about Finn-
ish literature and is the co-editor of many publications, including first Finn-
ish ecocritical anthologies Äänekäs kevät. Ekokriittinen kirjallisuudentutkimus
(2008, Audible Spring. Ecocritical Literary Studies) and Tapion tarhoilta turkis-
tarhoille. Luonto suomalaisessa lasten- ja nuortenkirjallisuudessa (2011, From
The Farms Of Tapio To Fur Farms. Nature in Finnish Children’s Literature).
Markku Lehtimäki
is Senior Lecturer of Literature at the University of Eastern Finland and Adjunct
Professor (Docent) of Comparative Literature at the University of Tampere,
Finland. He is the author of The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction (2005)
and co-editor of several anthologies, including Intertextuality and Intersemio-
sis (2004), Thresholds of Interpretation (2006), Real Stories, Imagined Realities
(2007) and, most recently, Narrative, Interrupted (2012). His fields of expertise
are American literature, narrative theory, ecocriticism and visual culture.
Maria Litovskaya
is Professor of Philology at Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg and Professor
of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Chenchgi University,
Taipei. She has edited several volumes in the area of Russian literature and
culture. Her publications are on Soviet and post-Soviet culture and include
Massovaia literatura segodnia (Mass Literature Today, 2009). She is a co-editor
of the books Obraz dostoinoi zhizni v sovremennykh rossiskikh smi (The Idea of
Good Life in Contemporary Russian Mass Media, 2008); Russkaia Literatura xx
veka: 1930—seredina 1950-kh godov (Russian Literature of the 1930s to the middle
of 1950s, 2014).
Maija Ojala
is a junior research fellow at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities,
University of Tampere. Currently she is coordinating an interdisciplinary re-
search project Migration and multiethnic cities from the sixteenth century un-
til the present. Her research interests focus on economic and gender history,
urban history and environmental history. Her PhD Thesis Protection, Continu-
ity and Gender: Craft trade culture in the Baltic Sea region (14th–16th centuries)
can be found online from Tampere University Press website<http://urn.fi/
URN:ISBN:978-951-44-9574-8>.
Mika Perkiömäki
is a PhD Candidate of Russian Language and Culture in the School of Lan-
guage, Translation and Literary Studies, University of Tampere, Finland.
Notes on Contributors xi
His main field of research is late twentieth-century Russian literature from

an ecocritical perspective; he is currently working on his ecocritical dis-
sertation on the representation of rivers in Russian literature. Of the
many movements and trends behind ecocriticism his research is most in-
spired by deep ecology, ecofeminism, environmental justice and material
ecocriticism.
Arja Rosenholm
is Professor of Russian Language and Culture at the University of Tampere.
Her research interests include Russian literature and culture, gender studies,
ecocriticism and space. She is currently working on the imagery of water in
Russian literature and film in the project “Water as Cultural Space: Chang-
ing Values and Representations.” Rosenholm has co-edited several article
collections, e.g. Understanding Russian Nature: Representations, Values and
Concepts (Kikimora, 2005), Russian Mass Media and Changing Values (Rout-
ledge, 2010), Topographies and Popular Culture (nlo, in Russian, 2015), and
Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture (with Jane Costlow,
forthcoming).
Scott Slovic
is Professor of Literature and Environment and chair of the English Depart-
ment at the University of Idaho in the United States. The founding president
of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (asle) from
1992 to 1995, he has edited the central journal in the field of ecocriticism, isle:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, since 1995. A prolific
scholar of literary theory and comparative literature, his most recent coedited
book is Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of
Data (2015).
Nina Tynkkynen
is a senior lecturer working at the University of Turku, Finland. She defend-
ed her PhD in 2008 at the University of Tampere. Her main fields of schol-
arship are environmental social science and international relations, and her
research interests focus on the dynamics of international environmental
politics and the Baltic Sea region. Recent publications of Nina Tynkkynen
include: T ynkkynen, Nina (2015) Russia and the Baltic Sea. Frames and
spaces of environmental problems. Journal of Environmental Policy and
Planning 17 (2), pp. 201–216; and Korppoo, Anna, Tynkkynen Nina & Høn-
neland, Geir (2015) Russia and the politics of international environmental
regimes: Environmental encounters or foreign policy? Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar.
xii notes on contributors
Verena Winiwarter
is Professor of Environmental History at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
since 2007. First trained as a chemical engineer, she holds a PhD in Environ-
mental History from Vienna University, where she was granted the venia leg-
endi in Human Ecology in 2003. Her research interests comprise the history
of landscapes, tourism and its images, rivers, and the environmental history
of soils. She has co-founded eseh, the European Society for Environmental
History, and the umbrella organization iceho. A corresponding member of
the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she has published numerous articles and
edited several books. In 2014, she was Austrian Scientist of the Year.
chapter 1
Knowing Water: An Introduction

Jane Costlow, Yrjö Haila and Arja Rosenholm
Water is the mistress of liquid language, of smooth flowing language, of

continued and continuing language, of language that softens rhythm and
gives a uniform substance to differing rhythms.
bachelard 187
…
… der Mensch [kann] niemals als souveränes Subjekt dem Stoff Wasser
[gegenübertreten]. Vielmehr ist er als Körper zu einem überwiegenden
Teil selbst Wasser und vielfältig in seinen leiblichen Vollzügen und Erfah-
rungen mit diesem verbunden.
böhme 11
∵
How does one learn to know water? The authors included in this volume re-
spond to that question in a variety of ways, bringing different disciplinary
training to the question, and focusing on different kinds of water, bodies of
water, and moments in the history of water and humankind. Indeed, as Jamie
Linton has recently reminded us, water does have a history: water is not sim-
ply an abstraction or resource on which humans may draw at will, but a dy-
namic process that, paradoxically enough, depends on us. The history of water
has been deeply implicated in and shaped by human actors and ambitions,
most tellingly (for this volume) in the technological and engineering ambi-
tions of modernization. The technological prowess attendant on modernity
might more properly be called hubris. Venice and Holland—two vulnerable
sites termed by historian Salvatore Ciriacono “civilizations of water”—were
early developers of technologies and skills to control flooding; their experience
was then imitated by other modern societies. The threat of unintended con-
sequences was always pushed (at least temporarily) beneath the surface. Ciri-
acono elaborates these historical dialectics with some specificity: “[T]echnical
solutions favoured in one period—for example, the towpaths built along the
Loire in the sixteenth century, or the various diversion cuts (diversivi) created
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_002

2 Costlow, Haila and Rosenholm
in the Veneto in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—may turn out later
to be either inadequate or positively harmful” (16).
The utilization of the powers of water has opened up tow paths and trade
routes, sources of electricity and expanded agricultural capacity, culminat-
ing in complex forms of shared space that have necessitated equally complex
treaties. The stories of water as they are told here include wells and bridges,
dams and irrigation, Baltic treaties, but also inescapable, unintended risk. The
stories and histories do not end there, however. They continue—as indeed
culture continues—in a circulation of physical properties and human imagi-
nation. The histories of waters continue to be told. What matters, enormously,
is how they are told. To tell those histories involves considering social pro-
cesses (Lefebvre) and circulation, articulations of the polyvalent and deeply
ambivalent character of water as imagined and expressed within culture, state
ambitions and unintended consequences, the narratives of acclaimed writers
and the myriad actions of unnamed individuals. “Knowing water,” as this vol-
ume makes clear, necessitates modes of communication that are interactive,
reflexive, and capable of shifting scale, perspective and temporality, since, “as
a life-carrying medium water reacts with great sensibility on destructive mo-
ments of the technological civilization and demolition of nature,” as Hartmut
Böhme has put it (7).
“Trans-scalar thinking” opens this volume: the American ecocritic Scott
Slovic’s chapter focuses on work by various contemporary artists who are con-
cerned with challenging and developing our ability to grasp the magnitude
of ongoing environmental processes. For Slovic and the artists about whom
he’s writing, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries present with
particular urgency the need for perceptual strategies that can move from the
immediate, human scale of neighborhood streams or lakes to the vast systems
of watersheds and global movement that enfold and inflect our daily water. For
Slovic, the works of Chris Jordan, Andy Goldsworthy and Antony Hegarty are
exercises in trans-scalar representation, exercises not merely for the artists but
for their viewers and listeners, who are taken through the paces of learning to
shift back and forth between proximate and global perspectives. These artists
are, we might say, laboring against abstraction—the abstraction that has a role
in scientific and technical discourse, but which also drives passivity and what
Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,” the “incremental, accretive” impacts of
human development on “invisible” populations (2–3).
Many of the themes that Slovic broaches can be seen as central to this
volume as a whole, which investigates kinds of water, watery places, and hu-
man knowing at various scales. Born of a collaborative project that brought
together American, Russian and European scholars over a three-year period,
Knowing Water: An Introduction 3
the chapters investigate water, its functions and its meanings, in a range of dif-
ferent locations, time periods and contexts. The authors participating in this
volume work in a variety of academic fields ranging from literary and cultural
studies and history to environmental sciences. Key to the geographical diver-
sity of the project is the insight provided by George Perkins Marsh (referenced
in these pages by Slovic). An American diplomat and early environmental his-
torian, Marsh’s service in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century led
him to new perspectives and insights about his native Vermont. He travelled,
one might say, across scales, which turned out to be both spatial and temporal:
from the intimate landscape of his native New England to European sites where
the impact of human activity became acutely visible. Marsh enacted, from the
perspective of someone witnessing both the beginnings and the consequences
of human resource exploitation, some of the “trans-scalar” circulation of ob-
servation and conclusion that Slovic identifies in contemporary artists. For us
as scholars, this trans-scalar and circulatory process has seemed similarly es-
sential, both within and across chapters: our contributions work from the very
small (rural springs and medieval urban wells) to the vast (oceans and seas),
from sites that appear self-enclosed to those that are by definition mobile. To
this spatial circulation the contributors to this volume add what we might call
trans-temporal perspectives: the “immediate” condition of water in our daily
lives involves regularity and perceptual accessibility—tides, flow, rain. But the
perspectives offered here remind us that just as we must learn to shift among
spatial perspectives, we must also learn to shift temporally, recasting our at-
tention according to longer chronologies. This was essentially Marsh’s strategy,
when he wrote in 1864 of Mediterranean landscapes denuded by millennia of
habitation. Refocusing our attention again and again on the mechanisms by
which these shifts in time and scale become possible is the work both of the
scholars who write here, and of the artists and writers who form a prominent
but not exclusive focus of this collection.
The chapters in this volume move chronologically from medieval northern
Europe to the eighteenth-century Danube as the site of military campaigns
and navigational strategies; into twentieth-century eastern European ter-
rain, marked by state socialism and ideological fantas[ies] of a new world;
and from there into case studies of the environmental legacies of modern-
ization and the pollutants and anxieties that have leached out like sediment
into twenty-first century life. The book is a study of social processes and
the dynamics of water—how they create what Verena Winiwarter calls
“socio-natural sites”; but it is also a study of psychological dynamics and the
aesthetic strategies that aim to either repress or expose them. Because the
book draws on American, Soviet and Finnish literary examples, we deal with
the politics of literary representation in very different ideological settings. One

aim of the volume is thus to add to ecological awareness various social, cultural
and literary dimensions of how we perceive and represent water. The book’s
multidisciplinary content corresponds to a multiplicity of waters, and the mul-
tiplicity of ways in which humans value those waters. Inasmuch as the focus
of numerous authors’ attention is Soviet and East German writing, this volume
contends with how politics engaged in an engineering process that extended
not merely to hydrological processes but into the cultural imaginary. While it
tracks the ways in which Soviet and East German writers participated in the
damming of both water and imagination, it also documents artists and writers
(both late Soviet and outside the Soviet orbit) who have explored models for
linking environmental concern, politics, and fluid models of human psychol-
ogy, models that insist on the ambiguity of water and its non-identity with
purely instrumental aims.
The volume begins with chapters that investigate medieval (pre-modern)
water and the role of a river system (the Danube) in Imperial military cam-
paigns. Maija Ojala and Verena Winiwarter consider the human navigation of
water and its dynamics at very different scales: Ojala’s chapter focuses on the is-
lands, streams and lakes that became the location of medieval (and later mod-
ern) Stockholm; and Winiwarter’s focus is the extensive Danube River basin,
second in size only to the Volga in Europe. Both chapters investigate dynamics
and social complexity, but medieval Stockholm, Ojala suggests, offers an ex-
ample of a site in which “access to water did not create any major disputes.”
The Danube River Basin, on the other hand, “exhibits a plethora of potentially
conflictual issues.” What the two chapters share is their insistence on consider-
ing the dynamism and (in the case of the Danube) dramatic impact of bodies
of water on human history and communities. For Winiwarter, “the nexus of
arrangements and practices linking humankind with Nature should be labeled
‘socio-natural sites’”—a term that forces us to consider water in its many con-
figurations as active if not agent in human affairs.
The focus in a majority of the remaining chapters is on the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, and engineering is at the center of those chapters that
deal with Soviet modernity. Chapters by Arja Rosenholm and Withold Bonner
examine the “futuristic grandiosity” and technological aspirations of Com-
munist societies’ versions of modernity. Soviet dams, canals, and irrigation
systems gave evidence of the complex engineering involved in creating the
“Motherland of electricity,” Soviet writer Andrei Platonov’s moniker for Soviet
modernization. But even Soviet water mixed with the social, transformed—as
Rosenholm argues in her discussion of Konstantin Paustovsky’s novels—into
a means of imagining new worlds and “new people.” These chapters also show
the writers’ modes of resistance to fixation and the restriction of freely flow-
ing desire. Bonner argues that Anna Seghers—the “Grand Old Lady of gdr
literature”—figures an oceanic crossing as an extended liminal space of ambi-
guity, a watery depth that challenges the ostensibly socialist happy ending of
arrival in East Germany. Like Rosenholm, Bonner suggests an artist in whom
the deep circulation of desire and dream was psychologically and aesthetically
impeded—dammed—by the ideological constraints of Cold War Communist
politics. Both fascism and Soviet communism were committed to “drying up
the streams of the unconscious,” associated in these writers with the source of
fluent speech. It is, as Bonner puts it, no surprise that the watery space of Brazil
in Seghers’ novella is associated with the arts, and with the liberated circula-
tion of libido and creativity.
Ultimately the Soviet state made a measured retreat from the totalitarian-
ism of the Stalin era, in the period known as “The Thaw”—a phrase that analo-
gizes seasonal water cycles to name a political era of loosening constraints.
Maria Litovskaya presents an overview of the multiple meanings allocated to
water metaphors in popular songs in the Soviet Union during the “Thaw” years
in the 1950s and 1960s, noting the ways in which industrial production values
gave way to more intimate and convivial themes. Songs mediated between
official and private spheres in the lives of Soviet people, and river imagery
incorporated political and agenda-driven social commentary, even as popu-
lar experience of songs eluded complete state control. Litovskaya’s reading of
“river” songs documents how social trends manifest changes in cultural sym-
bols: the image of water, especially the image of the river, used to represent the
world as it should be, changed subtly as prevailing ideas about the transforma-
tion of society themselves changed.
Litovskaya’s contribution documents the emergence of “intimate space” in
the lyrics of Soviet songs of the 1960s. Mika Perkiömäki’s chapter focuses on
a 1976 novel by Viktor Astaf’iev, Queen Fish, structured as interlinking tales of
one of Siberia’s major rivers. Astaf’iev was part of a group of officially pub-
lished but dissenting writers known as the derevenshchiki or Village writers,
whose work offered nostalgic, often nationalistically inflected, critiques of So-
viet modernization and the devastation of both village culture and the natural
world. Perkiömäki is interested in what an ecocritical lens might contribute to
our understanding of the novel, its biocentric focus and representation of the
Yenisei River as “agentic”. Perkiömäki argues that the river connects human
space to the more-than-human world; the river becomes not only physically
but also mentally an active agent and a mediator of nature and culture.
The following chapters of the book bring us into the late twentieth and early
twenty-first century, a world coming to terms with the legacies of modernity’s
“organic machines” (White), and with post-Cold war terrains of unequal

development.
With Nina Tynkkynen’s chapter on Baltic environmental treaties we return,
in a sense, to the site of Maija Ojala’s discussion of Stockholm, but now to a
sea burdened by centuries of European and Soviet development. Ojala’s as-
sertion about the absence of disputes in medieval Stockholm can no longer
be claimed. Tynkkynen’s chapter brings us to the world of environmental con-
sequences, with a discussion of decades-long efforts to confront and mitigate
the severe pollution of the Baltic Sea. This chapter signals the simultaneous
potentials and challenges of trying to use “trans-scalar thinking” in the world
of international politics: the sea is shared space but situated along the fault
lines not merely between Cold War ideologies but different histories of mod-
ernization. As Tynkkynen notes, the Baltic came to serve as repository for those
unwanted side effects of material prosperity on land, which were pushed out
of sight (under water) and hence out of mind. Public recognition of Baltic
pollution came only in the 1960s, inflected in part by Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring, but also very much reflecting the region’s own long history of scientific
investigation. Tynkkynen’s analysis elucidates several alternative conceptual
framings used when characterizing the nature of the problems, reflecting the
paradox that the Baltic has been a pioneer site of both heavy human impact
(overfishing, eutrophication, contamination by hazardous substances) and
efforts to forge international environmental treaties. In Tynkkynen’s account,
efforts to mitigate impacts of urbanization and industrialization—both lega-
cies of modernization—are still firmly embedded in discourses of modernity:
calls for the transfer of “Western” technology to the “Eastern laggards” wind up
downplaying “either the social or natural aspects” of the Baltic.
Tynkkynen’s chapter ends by wondering whether Baltic politics do not in
fact run counter to Anthony Giddens’ argument that “modern society is in-
creasingly questioning the faith that it has traditionally placed in science,
technology, and the institutions of government” (168). The chapters that fol-
low Tynkkynen examine three different instances of aesthetic and experien-
tial “questioning” of modernity: Markku Lehtimäki, Toni Lahtinen and Jane
Costlow consider writers and social practices that respond to growing aware-
ness and concern about the environmental, spiritual and psychic legacies of
modernization. Lehtimäki focuses on the American writer Barbara Kingsolver
and the ways in which the “lacuna” of her novel of that name is both a physi-
cal and psychological space; Lahtinen draws on the work of Ulrich Beck and
his notion of risk society to consider Veronica Pimenoff’s contemporary Finn-
ish dystopian fiction, and Costlow considers how local veneration of natu-
ral springs as holy sites works to create local identity and an ethic of care in
post-Soviet Russia. Water works in these chapters in different registers and

scales: in Cruisers, Pimenoff imagines an “unnamed cruise liner…sailing an un-
known ocean,” (213) with a central heroine whose anticipation of cataclysm is
informed by the Titanic, mythic figure for the hubris and failures of technology.
Lahtinen reads Cruisers as evidence that even Finland, traditionally imagined
as a safe and peaceful haven, is vulnerable not only to uncontrollable disaster
but to the anxieties of modernity. Markku Lehtimäki’s discussion of Barbara
Kingsolver acknowledges the American novelist’s commitment to address-
ing environmental issues, not merely thematically but through exploring the
ways in which human mind and physical world interact. Literature, Lahtinen
suggests, is a “poetic form of social dialogue” (230), recycling myths in ways
that allow the reader to confront and engage with anxiety and the ambigu-
ity of desire and danger. Fiction in these instances is deeply involved in social
imaginary work. Both Lehtimäki and Lahtinen explore the work of contem-
porary writers writing with heightened awareness of environmental risk, cli-
mate change, and collapsed ideologies. With Jane Costlow’s paper we remain
in the world of collapsed ideologies—in this instance the post-Soviet country-
side—but our focus shifts from the literary to everyday rituals of spirituality
and place. Local waters—in this case holy springs in the contemporary Orel
region in central Russia—define places, but they also create spaces surround-
ing those places. These local waters are cherished by locals who consider them
part of their spiritual heritage, but they are also sites of meticulous care and
memory. These springs entail a recirculation of place, identity, cultural tradi-
tion and local inflection—and, as Costlow suggests, the potential for locally-
situated practices of environmental care.
While numerous theoreticians and writers cited in this volume remind us
of water’s ambivalence, its availability as a metaphor for narrative, the human
psyche, forgetting and remembering, life and death, Yrjö Haila, in his conclud-
ing chapter, urges us to acknowledge a different kind of ambiguity associated
with water: there are no guarantees. His contribution offers a sage reminder
that while modernist ambitions to dam and drain and irrigate may have prov-
en disastrous, or engendered the unwanted side effects that later generations
labor to mitigate, water’s ambivalence and ambiguity is finally rooted in its
ability to bring not only life but also death. Acknowledging such ambivalence
is a key task in learning to know water. A valuable resource for clarifying policy
controversies (Rein), ambivalence can on the other hand be used to muddle
controversial issues, as has been painfully evident in the case of climate change
(Pielke, Chapter 5, “Uncertainty”).
In excess or scarcity, as vector of disease, as impediment to or vehicle of
passage, water challenges human communities, driving both narrative and
ingenuity—whether of engineering or legislation. Haila’s concluding chapter

revisits key moments in an evolution of the history of water, and in so doing
touches on contexts for all the papers in this volume: from traditions of water
management to more ambitious efforts at regulation, from the politics of the
modern state to commodification and elaborate engineering. The end points
of this thumbnail history can seem very far indeed form what Haila calls the
“local knowledge of local waters,” acquired as “doers’ collective knowledge
(271).” The volume as a whole challenges us to consider how the knowledge
of water embedded in novels or artists’ renderings, in civic traditions and re-
ligious cultures, might speak with the scientific and technical vocabularies
necessary to confront the environmental and political challenges of the twenty-
first century.
This volume’s chapters, through their examination of water and its mean-
ings, contribute to contemporary understanding of water’s multiplicity, its re-
fusal to remain passive or abstract. In its entirety this volume and the project
from which it emerges call for ongoing dialogue between cultural and envi-
ronmental studies, attention to relationality and the implications of both dis-
cursive and material power (Goodbody and Wanning; Chen, MacLeod, and
Neimanis). Techno-scientific discourses frequently exclude or erase human
affects, memories, and dreams, and have tended to downplay the violence and
environmental catastrophes resulting from large-scale, deracinated imple-
mentations of instrumental reason (Böhme 15, Uysal). One of the aims of the
volume has been to rehabilitate knowledge and modes of perception left mar-
ginalized if water is perceived only in physical and technological terms and left
alienated from its social significance.
Of all the elements that demand a rethinking of traditional nature-culture
binaries, water is most insistent: human bodies are literally made of water, and
our lives and livelihoods depend on water.
The problematic of conceptualizing water in terms of nature-culture bina-
ries is a frequent motif in these chapters, investigated from multiple perspec-
tives. As a general conclusion, we suggest that an essential precondition for
learning to know water is to work against or through this pervasive dualism, to
recognize water as both physical substance and imaginative power simultane-
ously. It is quite simply impossible to separate these two sides of the social and
cultural presence of water, even if specific circumstances demand emphasis
or focus on one rather than the other. This collection might in fact be read as
exemplifying an exploratory strategy that Peter Elbow has called “binary think-
ing.” Elbow suggests that “When we are presented with conflicting data, our
organism itself seems to want somehow to find some kind of harmony or uni-
ty,” an impulse that leads to oversimplification and rigid oppositions. Elbow’s
counsel leads us in the opposite direction: “even though binary oppositions

tempt people to oversimple, black/white thinking, binary oppositions also
present us with uniquely valuable occasions for balance, irresolution, non-
closure, non-consensus, non-winning” (25). These are opportunities to “affirm
both sides in all their contrariness.”1 Not unlike trans-scalar thinking, such a
process involves shifting perspectives and both temporal and spatial frames,
along with a willingness to entertain multiple traditions of knowledge.
The very dynamism of water, its inherent properties of circulation and
change, make it imperative in considering water’s futures that we draw on
languages and traditions that move beyond the quantitative and abstract. The
chapters in this volume provide case studies and considerations that allow us
to shift scale, and to consider what knowing water might mean.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas:
The Dallas Institute Publications, 1999. Print.
Böhme, Hartmut. “Umriss einer Kulturgeschichte des Wassers. Eine Einleitung.”
Kulturgeschichte des Wassers. Ed. Böhme, Hartmut. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1988. 7–44. Print.
Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis. “Introduction.” Thinking with
Water. Eds. Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis. Montreal &
Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013. 3–22. Print.
Ciriacono, Salvatore. Building on Water. Venice, Holland and the Construction of the
European Landscape in Early Modern Times. London: Berghahn Books, 2006. Print.
Elbow, Peter. “The Uses of Binary Thinking.” English Department Faculty Publication
Series. University of Massachusetts Amherst. Paper 14, 1993. 22–51. Web. 25 Apr 2016.
<http://scholarworks.umass.edu/eng_faculty_pubs/14/>.
Goodbody, Axel, and Berbeli Wanning. Eds. Wasser—Kultur—Ökologie. Göttingen:
V&R unipress, 2008. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1991. Print.
Linton, Jamie. What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: UBC
Press, 2010. Print.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard U. Press, 2011.
Print.
1 The final phrase is taken from Elbow’s abstract of the web version of this paper, “The Uses of
Binary Thinking.”
Pielke, Roger A. Jr. The Honest Broker. Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.
Rein, Martin. “Reframing problematic policies.” Oxford Handbook of Public Policy.
Eds. Moran, M., M. Rein, and R.E. Goodin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
389–405. Print.
Uysal, Saniye. “Das Wasser und seine Erscheinungsformen als Peripherie der Mo
derne.” Wasser—Kultur—Ökologie. Eds. Goodbody, Axel, and Berbeli Wanning.
Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2008. 149–170. Print.
White, Richard. The Organic Machine. The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1995. Print.
chapter 2
Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the

Perception of Water
Scott Slovic
Abstract
We live during a time of acute ecological crisis, and an area of particular concern is
the damage human civilization is causing to water habitats and resources throughout
the world. In order to apprehend the significance of this problem, it is necessary for
twenty-first-century humans to change the way we typically think and develop what
scholars and artists have begun calling “trans-scalar thinking.” This means the ability to
move cognitively across spatial and temporal scales: for instance, from small to large,
from the individual to the collective, and from the present to the future. Contemporary
writers and artists have created strategies for cultivating trans-scalar thinking among
their audiences. This chapter focuses on the water-related trans-scalar work of digital
composition artist and photographer Chris Jordan, installation artist Andy Goldswor-
thy, and musician Antony Hegarty (now known as Anohni).
How do we interact with water as human beings in the twenty-first century?

A few minutes ago, I woke up at my home in Moscow, Idaho, used the toi-
let, then turned on the water faucet in the kitchen and filled a pot of water
for coffee. As the water heated on the stove, I gazed out the windows at the
frozen dew in the garden—it is December now, and the lilacs and tulips and
magnolias must endure sub-freezing temperatures each night. These are all
interactions with water on what I would call a human scale—the mechanical
use of water to flush away bodily waste, the drawing of drinking water through
the urban plumbing system, and the observation of nearby frost “with my own
two eyes,” as the saying goes. If I were not living in the city (Moscow is actually
a small college town of 24,000), I would likely have different kinds of interac-
tions with water, but most of them, nonetheless, would be direct and physical
and small and rapid.
When I teach my environmental writing classes each fall in the univer-
sity’s Semester in the Wild Program, which takes place in the remote center
of Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the students and I
live at the Taylor Wilderness Research Station, through which Pioneer Creek
cascades on its way to the Big Creek River, a tributary of the Middle Fork of the

12 Slovic
Salmon River. At Taylor, we can trace with our eyes and ears, and even with our
footsteps, the phenomenon of a watershed, the system or process by which
water falls as rain and snow in the mountains, then drains downward through
larger and larger creeks and rivers, eventually (beyond our sight) making its
way to the sea. The water that passes through Taylor Wilderness Research Sta-
tion winds through hundreds of miles of wild canyons before emptying from
the Middle Fork to the main Salmon River and then the Snake River, which
ultimately feeds the mighty Columbia River and then the Pacific Ocean at the
westernmost border of Oregon and Washington states. Only the anadromous
salmon and steelhead, which hatch in Big Creek, travel to the sea for most of
their lives, and then return to these mountain waters to spawn, experience the
entirety of this vast water system. But even I, a twenty-first-century human,
know this mountain water in a more visceral way than I know water in the
city: I hear the rush of pioneer creek incessantly, though muted in the back-
ground, as I work with my students at the research station. The water courses,
unfiltered, through pvc pipes into the rustic cabins where we sleep and cook at
the station. And, when our mouths feel dry or we happen to be talking about the
preciousness of water, the students and I walk over to the small bridge near the
grassy strip where the bush planes land a few times each week, and we dip a
small steel camping cup directly into Pioneer Creek, bring it to our lips one by
one, and drink. This is liquid scale on a fundamentally human level.
“Slow violence” and the Necessity of Apprehending Vast

Environmental Impacts
Although it is still possible (and, indeed, unavoidable) to experience water and

other natural phenomena on an individual human scale as we move through
the second decade of the twenty-first century, we also realize, of course, that
our collective behavior, greatly amplified by technology, has resulted in vast,
destructive impacts upon the planet and upon human societies. The great in-
tellectual bandwagon of the moment is the idea of “The Anthropocene,” the
notion proposed to the Geological Society of London in 2008 as a new geologi-
cal epoch said to have begun in July 1945 on the eve of the use of the atomic
bomb in Japan, an event symbolizing the planet-shaping power of human ac-
tivity. George Perkins Marsh, in his book Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geogra-
phy as Modified by Human Action (1864, 1885), identified the planetary impact
of our species much earlier. In December 1863, in the preface to his forthcom-
ing book, Marsh was already speaking in terms of caution and warning and
rehabilitation remarkably similar to what we hear today:
Liquid Scale: Trans-scalar Thinking & The Perception Of Water 13
The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, ap-
proximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the
physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of
imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a
large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic
or the inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and importance of the
restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of
waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, to illustrate the doctrine,
that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher order than any
of the other forms of animated life, which, like him, are nourished at the
table of bounteous nature. (3)
A century and a half later, in 2011, literary critic Rob Nixon published his study
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, extending the work of
postcolonial ecocriticism, which traces the intertwined degradation of Third
World environments and human communities through colonial processes,
into the realm of “slowness,” the occurrence of destructive activity not only in
a visible, easily confrontable way, but on a scale well beyond direct perception
and mitigation. As Nixon puts it:
By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight,
a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,
an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Vio-
lence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate
in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant
sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of vio-
lence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rath-
er incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out
across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the
representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative
invisibility of slow violence. (2)
And a few lines later, Nixon asks: “how can we convert into image and narrative
the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are
anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indif-
ferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?” (3).
I would suggest that we can find, in recent examples of water imagery and
narrative, strategies that may offer communication paradigms applicable to
a broader range of social and environmental concerns. We are beings con-
sisting of 60 percent water (blood 92 percent, brain and muscles 75 percent,
14 Slovic
and bones 22 percent) (“Water and Humans”), living on a planet where the
surface is 71 percent covered by water (“How much water is there on, in, and
above the earth?”)—from space, the earth appears to be a “pale blue dot,” as as-
tronomer Carl Sagan put it in his commentary on the February 14th, 1990, pho-
tograph taken by the unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft from the outermost edge
of our solar system. Water is an essential quality of our lives and the environ-
ment we inhabit, and it makes sense that our most eloquent and imaginative
artists devote their attention to representing not only the wondrous beauty of
water, but threats we pose, through our technologies and our actions, to water
quality and availability.
“Conscious evolution” through Chris Jordan’s Digital Compositions
One of the boldest recent artistic approaches to our understanding of

slowly violent human impacts the Earth’s aquatic environment—namely, its
oceans—appears in the work of Chris Jordan, from Seattle, Washington, who
has been attracting considerable attention in the past decade for his beautiful
and provocative photographs and digital compositions. After practicing law for
a number of years, Jordan became a full-time photographer with a particular
focus on the wastefulness of American consumer habits. He produced an ini-
tial collection of large-format photographs on consumption titled Intolerable
Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003–2006). These images
are, in a sense, “landscapes of consumption,” showing enormous stacks of tires
and shipping containers and sawdust. The 2006 book In Katrina’s Wake: Por-
traits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, which includes essays by the promi-
nent environmental writers Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin alongside Jordan’s
photographs, tells the story of the human cost of Hurricane Katrina, depict-
ing post-storm images of dilapidated homes and natural debris with an eerie
beauty that provides access to the intrinsic aesthetic dimension that Jordan
finds in all aspects of experience, even (frequently) in “terrible” or disturbing
circumstances.
More recently, Jordan has been exhibiting large-format digital composi-
tions from the Running the Numbers series at galleries throughout the Unit-
ed States. His 2009 exhibition at the Washington State University Museum
of Art resulted in the book Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.
A typical image from this series (captured also in the catalogue volume) is the
one titled “Plastic Bottles, 2007,” which, from a distance, depicts an abstract
and appealing field of multi-colored dots, akin to the appearance of a pebbly
ocean beach. The caption to the image, however, reads as follows: “Depicts two
million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the United States every
five minutes.” As the gallery viewer steps toward the composition, the individ-
ual bottles become increasingly visible, offering a powerful perceptual experi-
ence of American consumption. The experience of moving from the far-away
view to the close-up view, from the many to the more individualized objects
of consumption, is what Jordan refers to as the “trans-scalar imaginary.” Apart
from enticing viewers to experience the composition as an aesthetic object,
the practical goal of this work is to alert citizens to the enormity—the scale—
of problem of plastic objects, from bottles to plastic bags, that we are releas-
ing into the environment as a byproduct of our consumer behavior. “Plastic
Bottles, 2007” is a visually arresting work, but its connection to the five enor-
mous “gyres” of plastic in the Earth’s major oceans is rather abstract, even with
the explanatory caption about plastic beverage bottles. More recently, Jordan’s
work has addressed this connection more explicitly.
For more than five years, the artist has been working on a film and still pho-
tography project in the central Pacific Ocean titled “Midway: Message from the
Gyre,” which eloquently and graphically displays the endangerment of sea-
faring albatrosses, a unique aquatic bird whose existence on Midway Atoll (the
only place in the world where the species nests and raises young) is imperiled
due to the ingestion of plastic garbage—all the oceans of the world have be-
come a plastic soup, deadly to many animal species that depend on the sea
for survival. A trailer for the film and Jordan’s still photography are available
at his website (www.chrisjordan.com), and by clicking on the large-scale im-
ages, viewers can activate unique software that creates the trans-scalar impres-
sion of “zooming in” to perceive the specific items of consumption represented
in the images. In this way, even the still images require viewers to experience
them over time, not merely for the few seconds viewers ordinarily spend in
front of a painting in museum. (Art critic James Elkins cites a study that says
the average time viewers spend in front of a painting may be as little as two
seconds!) One click on Jordan’s “Plastic Bottles, 2007,” and the image appears
to move toward the viewer for twenty seconds, the size of the minute specks
of sand enlarging until it becomes clear that they are plastic bottles, the words
Pepsi and Gatorade and Dasani and Crystal Geyser fully visible. Another click
and the image appears to recede, mimicking the physical process viewers ex-
perience in a gallery, as they walk toward and away from each of Jordan’s many
digital compositions hanging on the walls.
When I interviewed Jordan in his Seattle studio in 2011 as part of the book
project titled Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a
World of Data, I asked him specifically how his visual works prompted viewers
to feel a sense of connection to the potentially numbing and abstract topics
16 Slovic
he explores, ranging from the consumption of plastic to the number of people

incarcerated in American prisons—how his work inspires audiences to feel
their own complicity in the phenomena his art represents. He responded with
the following statement:
Well, the image of two million plastic bottles [“Plastic Bottles, 2007”] is
by far the most effective one that way. I’ve had lots of people write to me
and tell me that they’ve stopped drinking water or soda out of plastic
bottles after seeing that image. I was at an exhibition in Boulder, Colo-
rado, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art with a friend of mine
[…], and we were standing in front of that piece. He had a bottle of water
in his hand and was drinking from this plastic bottle. And he said just a
second, and he went and threw the bottle in the garbage. Then he came
back and stood in front of that piece again, and he got this sheepish look
on his face and said, “Well, that was just one bottle.” Then he looked back
at my piece, and I saw him sort of reel back. His neck snapped back, his
eyes opened, and he looked at me and said, “I just got your piece. That’s
two million one-bottles.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s exactly it.” That’s one of
the issues I try to raise with all of the Running the Numbers pieces. I’m try-
ing to raise the issue of the individual’s role in the collective. With each
piece, when you stand back, you see the collective. I scale it so that when
you stand back at a distance, you can’t see the individuals that make
up the collective. You only see homogenous collective, and when you get
up close you see all the individuals, but by the time you get all the way up
close and you can see all the individuals, you can no longer make out the
collective. It’s a kind of Google Earth process. A friend of mine calls it “the
trans-scalar imaginary.” When you stand back at a distance, you can’t see
the details; and when you can see the details, you have to use your mem-
ory or your imagination to recall what the big picture looked like. (206)
The perceptual process Jordan describes here focuses on the relationship be-
tween the singular and the collective, between the small scale and a much larg-
er scale. What is particularly interesting about how audiences take in Jordan’s
digital compositions, whether in a gallery or on his website, is that there is a
transitional process that occurs when viewers stand back from the works and
then walk toward them. Over time, the distant collective image is replaced by
a close-up sense of the individual items that constitute the whole. This realiza-
tion that the hazy, abstract whole consists of “two million one-bottles” and that
the fuzzy understanding of society as a collective consists of millions of indi-
vidual people (like the viewer him- or herself) is what Jordan describes here as
the “trans-scalar imaginary.” On Jordan’s website, viewers encounter numerous

examples of compositions representing abstract images or pointillistic repre-
sentations of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand
Jatte” or the Mayan calendar, among many others.
Jordan’s work on plastic pollution in the plastic bottles digital composi-
tion and in the recent Midway Island work that focuses on how plastic in the
world’s oceans affects wildlife is potently relevant to the understanding of the
status of the world’s largest bodies of water. It is appropriate here to pause and
consider what psychologist George Loewenstein has identified as the under-
valuing of abstractions when human beings make decisions about personal
health or larger social and environmental phenomena. He writes: “Unlike cur-
rently experienced visceral factors, which have a disproportionate impact on
behavior, delayed visceral factors tend to be ignored or severely underweighted
in decision making. Today’s pain, hunger, anger, etc. are palpable, but the same
sensations anticipated in the future receive little weight” (Slovic, Smoking 114).
To the average inhabitant of any country in the world, the plastic contamina-
tion of the sea is essentially invisible—it is one of these “delayed” or imper-
ceptible factors that Loewenstein mentions above—and thus has minimal
impact on our daily consumption and disposal of plastic. This is despite the
fact that people such as Captain Charles Moore, who discovered what’s called
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (the enormous gyre of plastic debris in the Pa-
cific Ocean that is twice the size of the continental United States) has claimed
that “Humanity’s plastic footprint is probably more dangerous than its carbon
footprint.” In addition to the works by Jordan mentioned above, his digital
composition titled simply “Venus, 2011,” depicting a teary-eyed Venus emerg-
ing from the sea on a scallop shell, recreates and makes contemporary Sandro
Botticelli’s 1486 masterpiece. This composition, which from a distance looks
remarkably like the original oil painting, is actually comprised of “240,000 plas-
tic bags, equal to the estimated number of plastic bags consumed around the
world every ten seconds,” as the image’s caption states. To view distant and
close-up images from the Jordan composition, which is available in two large
sizes (60x103 inches in a single panel and 8x13 feet in three panels), one can
go to Jordan’s website at www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#venus and click
on the image once to move inward for the close-up, then a second time to see
the image recede and bring the full scope of the composition into view again.
Jordan’s various visual projects work to inspire what Robert Ornstein and
Paul Ehrlich call “conscious evolution” in their book New World, New Mind
(1989), which is one of the sources of inspiration for Jordan’s socially engaged
compositions, photographs, and films. Much of this evolution in audience
awareness of the importance of the issues raised in Jordan’s visual art occurs
18 Slovic
because of the striking experiments in scale, which help to guide viewers to

think across scale—to be more flexible in their own trans-scalar cognitive
capacity. This includes cognitive movement across the scales ranging from
close-up and far-away viewing of the art works and increased capacity to
understand the connections between the scale of individual human consump-
tion of plastic and the contamination of the earth’s vast bodies of water as a
result of plastic pollution.
Andy Goldsworthy, Antony Hegarty (Anohni), and the Performance

of Water’s Temporality
So what does this discussion of scale have to do with water in particular? One
of the subtle messages of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a classic work
of American environmental literature, is that in order to achieve attentiveness
to the planet and to our own relationship with the natural order of things,
we must make every effort to shift perspective, to see things in new ways. Al-
though this advocacy for perspectival shifts occurs throughout Walden, the
most dramatic mention of this idea, for me, occurs in the chapter titled “The
Ponds,” where the first-person narrator observes Walden Pond from various
nearby and distant points of view, finally referring to the haze above the water
as follows: “When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer
stretched across the valley…” (186). The idea of inverting our heads, looking at
the world upside down in order to see something otherwise undetectable, is
more profound in what it says about the need to make special efforts to see
the world anew than what it suggests about the specific view of a small lake
in Massachusetts. Today, in light of the extraordinary challenge of perceiving
important degradations of the global environment (including such large-scale
phenomena as vast gyres of plastic in the world’s oceans and such minute phe-
nomena as carcinogenic traces of agricultural and industrial chemicals in rivers
and creeks), it seems particularly important not merely to listen to technical
reports from scientists who use instruments to “observe” such phenomena and
numbers to describe them, but to learn from artists, musicians, and writers who
have developed strategies for helping audiences enhance their own perceptual
and conceptual faculties.
In his 2002 book Bringing the Biosphere Home, environmental education
specialist Mitchell Thomashow emphasizes the perceptual and cognitive
challenges inherent in the process of using our limited human abilities to un-
derstand large (“biospheric”) phenomena that we know to be important. He
refers, in particular, to the “stunning juxtapositions of scale” that must occur
in order for us to extrapolate from what is in front of our noses to what is hap-
pening slowly and imperceptibly across the planet, such as climate change
and extinction. Although Thomashow is particularly interested in large-scale
phenomena, his point about the perceptual challenge of biospheric change is
also true of minutely invisible occurrences, such as the presence of toxic sub-
stances in our water, air, and food. Ecocritics such as Stacy Alaimo have, in the
past decade, developed a new vocabulary of “trans-corporeality” to describe
the constant process by which human beings place our byproducts into the
environment and absorb material from the outside world into our own bodies.
On the bookshelf above the computers he uses to make his digital composi-
tions, alongside such works as William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s
Cradle to Cradle and Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land, Chris Jordan keeps the
book New World New Mind: Moving Toward a Conscious Evolution, by neuro-
scientist Robert Ornstein and population biologist Paul Ehrlich, which he
identifies as a pivotal work in his own thinking. Ornstein and Ehrlich argue
that human beings need to move beyond our limited physical senses in order
to perceive the real threats to our survival in the modern world. “The human
world, of course, is primarily a sight world and secondarily a sound world,”
they write. “Now the sight-sound world is woefully inadequate, because many
of the threats to our lives and future are not simple sensory events that can
be incorporated into our caricatures of the world…” (75). We cannot speed up
our physical evolution, but we must change our way of thinking in order to
achieve a “conscious evolution” that will enable us to adapt to the changing
world, including the contamination of the world’s water systems. Jordan and
other artists, such as sculptor Andy Goldsworthy and musician Antony Hegar-
ty, are engaged in the process of modeling trans-scalar thinking. One purpose
of this work is to guide audiences to “consciously evolve” their own trans-scalar
capacities.
Chris Jordan’s work highlights the potential of digital compositions to help
audiences confront the cognitive challenge of apprehending (and moving
back and forth between) vast and minute spatial scales, particularly as a way of
guiding the public to a deeper understanding of human impacts on the plan-
et’s water. How, though, might we consider the issue of temporal scale as well
as spatial scale? The temporal dimension of water—its capacity to change over
time—emerges vividly in the context of work by environmental installation
artist Andy Goldsworthy and the experimental music of trans-gender singer
Antony Hegarty (of the group Antony and the Johnsons and known, since 2015,
as “Anohni”). These artists explore what might be called the “intentional muta-
bility” of the medium of water. This work, like Jordan’s, is relevant to the idea
of liquid scale in that it represents large-scale transformation by way of small,
20 Slovic
specific instances of change, such as the melting of a human-built ice structure

or the alteration of a single human body.
In his 1993 essay “The Temporality of the Landscape,” Tim Ingold suggests
that we learn to associate the temporal dimension of place by associating spe-
cific locales with actions. He argues that we “perceive the temporality of the
taskscape […] not as spectators but as participants, in the very performance of
our tasks” (159). In other words, actions—especially our own actions—enable
us to understand change and movement in the context of place. Admittedly,
being an audience for another person’s artistic work might not always seem to
be the most engaging task to bring us into the life of a place. However, in the
case of British earth sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, work that tends to foreground
the process of its own creation represents an ongoing series of actions, or tasks,
on the part of the artist himself and an engaged interaction on the part of
the audience, which is compelled to question how the works have been pro-
duced. Ingold argues that visual artworks, as understood in the West, are often
perceived as “works that are complete in themselves,” not as works that “have
to be performed.” But he points, by contrast to non-Western societies, such as
Australian Aboriginal communities, in which “what is essential is the act of
painting itself, of which the products may be relatively short-lived—barely
perceived before being erased or covered up” (161). In this regard, a seemingly
static art form, such as painting, becomes akin to music—painting, like mu-
sic, when understood as ephemeral (or as “contingent objects,” as art theorist
Martha Buskirk puts it in her 2005 book The Contingent Object of Contemporary
Art), becomes “performance” rather than “form” (161). Citing George Herbert
Mead’s “The Process of Mind in Nature” (1977), Ingold considers the possibil-
ity that every object might be a “collapsed act” (Mead’s phrase), which means
that “the landscape as a whole must likewise be understood as the taskscape in its
embodied form: a pattern of activities ‘collapsed’ into an array of features” (162).
Ingold refers to this view of landscape art as “temporalizing the landscape”
(161). When the landscape in question is actually a “waterscape,” as is often
the case in Goldsworthy’s work, the temporal dimension is even more evident.
Goldsworthy’s art foregrounds its existence as process. This is true even in still
photos of his stone constructions—and all the more so in his constructions
made of frail, ephemeral materials such as leaves and wood. But Goldsworthy’s
constructions of ice and snow—i.e., of water—are paradoxically visible and
evolving, even as he fashions them. It is as if he is creating such works out of
living/changing materials—this vitality intrinsically involves the use of water
in the work.
In addition to publishing still images of his constructions of natural materi-
als, Goldsworthy is featured in the 2003 documentary Rivers and Tides, which
shows him actually building many of his well-known works, such as a serpen-
tine ice sculpture, pieced together from found ice near the sea. The film shows
Goldsworthy attaching finger-sized segments of ice to the left and the right
with a piece of wood in the middle. The sculpture shows ice become strangely
animate, snake-like, with the flowing tide visible in the background. As the art-
ist works throughout the morning to put the work together, the sun rises and
shines brilliantly through the undulating ice, vivifying the sculpture and at the
same time melting it, showing its temporality. Working with this found ice in a
particular place in the world, the artist says, “I shook hands with the place.” He
engages with the place itself and with the medium of water. As Ingold would
say, the landscape actually becomes a “taskscape” when we observe, through
the medium of film, an artist performing his craft in a particular place. I would
argue that by working with frozen water in the serpentine ice sculpture dis-
played in Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy is exploring not only the temporality
of water—its mutability over time—but the relationship between a short-
lived specific construction of ice and the vastly more durable phenomenon
of the sea in the background. It may well be true that the sea is durable in
comparison to a small structure made of ice. However, contemplating Golds
worthy’s ice work in relation to Chris Jordan’s digital constructions and his
Midway Island film on the subject of plastic pollution clarifies the scarcely
perceptible and yet hugely destructive impacts of plastic on the Earth’s wa-
ter systems, suggesting that we need to be cautious in attributing flawlessness
and purity to a phenomenon like the ocean. Even if we cannot easily see the
human contamination in a vast body of water, the destructiveness of human
impacts may be right in front of us.
Musician Antony Hegarty, or “Anohni,” considers human agency vis-à-vis
water in a very different way than Andy Goldsworthy and Chris Jordan, but
the notion of process is clearly emphasized in his songs, much like the pro-
cess embedded in the film representations of Goldsworthy’s sculptural work.
As Ingold suggests, music is essentially a process-oriented medium—it takes
place over time (constituted of sequential sounds). A medium of performance,
it inherently consists of process. Just as Goldsworthy’s small-scale ice sculp-
ture, in the above example, is placed beside the large-scale sea, Hegarty’s songs
about personal transformation often function synecdochically to engage view-
ers and listeners with natural and unnatural environmental change on a much
larger scale. Born in the u.k. in 1971, Antony Hegarty moved with his family to
San Francisco as a boy and later attended New York University. He underwent
“sex reassignment” surgery in 1993, thus experiencing a radical personal trans-
formation. Much of her music explores obliquely the phenomenon of change
or transformation, such as the idea that boy might become girl or girl might
22 Slovic
become bird. Indeed, though born a boy, Hegarty sings with a curiously multi-
gendered voice, sometimes low and thick, other times effeminately high. Her
characteristic mode of vocalization is a unique warble, a projecting of English
words into a bird-like register. When she sings about topics relevant to per-
sonal change and the human relationship to nature, listeners realize that she
is a person who deeply understands what it means to reflect on one’s original
condition versus the condition of one’s body that feels “natural.”
I first became aware of Hegarty’s work when I was driving home in my car,
and her version of Bob Dylan’s song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” came on the
radio. I found myself transfixed by the singer’s strange voice and the quasi-
symphonic accompaniment of her band. I began to collect as many cds by
Antony and the Johnsons as I could find. Natural images and environmental
themes are abundant in this work—and it seems to me this musician’s con-
templation of change and the trans-scalar understanding of change (ranging
from personal transformation to planetary change/loss) are particularly acute.
In a 2009 interview with The Sun, Hegarty stated that her 2008 song “Another
World” explains “how I feel about the vanishing aspect of the environment and
thinking ‘This is my world.’ The Earth is the greatest creative force that we know,
she’s invented so many beautiful aspects.” The song itself, which appears on the
cd Another World, is an extended lament for a world “nearly gone.” The “I” in
the song recognizes this disappearance, or change, and repeatedly expresses
the “need” for “another world.” The disappearance of the world we currently
inhabit is described not as a hypothetical possibility but as a fait accompli.
While water is not the focal point of the song, there are many references that
imply the centrality of water to the earth’s vital processes, such as the lines:
“I’m gonna miss the sea / I’m gonna miss the snow / I’m gonna miss the bees /
I miss the things that grow […].” In this passage, the future tense becomes the
present tense, intensifying the Angst of loss. Wavering in the background of
Hegarty’s warbling lament are the sounds of synthesized whale song, also re-
inforcing the connection between the singer’s concerns for the planet and the
fate of the sea.
In the 2012 cd Cut the World, Hegarty includes a mini-lecture called “Future
Feminism” along with several songs. While much of the talk focuses on the
social implications of intolerance toward gay and transgender people, there is
also a fascinating riff on the artist’s ecological concerns. The theme of losing
one home and moving to another, so prominent in the song “Another World,”
also appears here:
I’m worried that the ecology of the world is collapsing and that I won’t
have anywhere to be reborn because I actually believe, like, where is any
of us going? Where have any of us ever gone? We’ve come back here in
some form. Did you know that whales were once land-roaming mam-
mals? And then they crawled back into the ocean trying to find some-
thing to eat? And then they eventually got rid of their hands and legs.
The idea of “getting rid of” un-useful or inappropriate appendages, of course, re-
minds listeners of the singer’s own sex-change operation. But in this s tatement
she is focusing on hands and legs, body parts suited to one environmental con-
dition and not another. The whales, in Hegarty’s version of evolution, inten-
tionally opt for life in the sea rather than life on land. But she explicitly asserts
her sense that human beings will not be able to make this kind of choice. She
concludes by arguing that we should not be thinking about finding or making
another place or world. We are not going to emulate the whales and return to
life in the sea—indeed, the subtext here may be that the sea is no longer a safe
and sustainable environment. The lecture concludes:
I’ve been searching and searching for that little bit of my constitution
that isn’t of this place and I still haven’t found it. Every atom of me, every
element of me, seems to resonate, seems to reflect the great world around
me. So, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is God’s best idea—that this
manifest world is the frontier of his dream, or her dream in my opinion.
So, that’s just my point of view from where I can start to establish a new
way to value the world that I’m a part of. ’Cause if I’m not heading off to
paradise elsewhere when I die, then I have more of a vested interest in
observing a sustainable relationship with this place. (Cut the World)
Thinking through the song “Another World” in the context of the “Future Femi-
nism” lecture, we come to realize that the singer is not merely lamenting the
inevitable loss of the earth as an inhabitable planet but actively resisting this
destruction, this transformation. Because of the artist’s own unique experi-
ence of personal change, we have the sense that some changes are necessary
to embrace, even when they may seem radical, while other kinds of changes,
such as planetary contamination, must be resisted, even when they seem over-
whelmingly vast and extreme. While Anohni does not always sing explicitly
about planetary transformation in relation to water, she does often focus on
the sea as an important dimension of the planet she seeks to hold onto. The
musical motif of synthesized whale song in “Another World” provides an emo-
tional undercurrent to the lyrics, reinforcing the sense of yearning, the resis-
tance to destructive change, that she articulated more explicitly in the lecture
a few years later.
24 Slovic
The Conceptual Challenge of Biospheric Thinking
Mitchell Thomashow argues that a routine practice of natural history observa-

tion can help people overcome the tendency to become fixated on the static
immediacy of experience. Nature changes constantly. When we train ourselves
to observe the natural world over time, we become fundamentally aware of
change and our imagination becomes more elastic, better able to extrapolate
from observable processes and understand their implications across space and
time. Thomashow states:
Interpreting the biosphere is such a profound conceptual challenge because

it entails stunning juxtapositions of scale—moving from a fifteen-minute
thunderstorm to a million-year climatological trend, shifting from tend-
ing your garden soil to observing the patterns and trends of biodiversity
[…]. (106, my italics)
Various kinds of extrapolation must occur in order to move from the merely
observable to the vast and unseen dimensions that so greatly exceed the per-
ceptual capacities of the human body. Because of our limited ability to per-
ceive with physical sensory organs, we must use our brains to imagine the real
connections that underlie our existence—our hidden impacts on the planet,
the “slow violence” that Rob Nixon’s work urges readers to consider.
In addition to contemplating changes occurring all around us in the ev-
eryday natural world, we can also train ourselves to apprehend change over
time and trans-scalar connections by experiencing artistic representations of
these phenomena in the above-described media: digital compositions, sculp-
ture using natural materials, film, and music. Ecocritic Ursula Heise suggests
that we should turn our attention to alternative literary genres (such as sci-
ence fiction) or avant-garde technologies (such as Google Earth) in order to
overcome the limiting tendencies of traditional narrative styles or conceptual
modes, which has resulted, as she puts it her 2008 book Sense of Place and
Sense of Planet, in “the ethic of proximity.” As we become increasingly aware
of the translocality (or movement across space) of our lives in the twenty-first
century, what sense does it make to use proximity, or small-scale perceptibil-
ity, as the primary means of validating our experience of the world. She is
referring, of course, to the tendency among major American environmental
writers, ranging from Wendell Berry to Scott Russell Sanders, to celebrate the
local and dismiss the global. In his 1990 essay “Word and Flesh,” for instance,
Berry writes:
The favorite adjective of [the environmental] movement now seems to

be “planetary.” This word is used, properly enough, to refer to the interde-
pendence of places, and to the recognition, which is desirable and grow-
ing, that no place on the earth can be completely healthy until all places
are.
But the word “planetary” also refers to an abstract anxiety or an ab-
stract passion that is desperate and useful exactly to the extent that it is
abstract. How, after all, can anybody—any particular body—do anything
to heal a planet? The suggestion that anybody could do so is preposterous
[…]. (197)
A quarter century ago, Berry was railing against the tendency he perceived
among environmental scholars, activists, and politicians to try working on
large-scale problems by thinking planetarily or at least across regions. He
sensed in this effort a fundamental confusion regarding the capacity of the
human mind to attach itself to multiple places or to numbingly vast regions
when, as he put it in the same essay, “Only love can bring intelligence […] into
the presence of the work that must be done” and “Love is never abstract” (200).
“Love” is another way of saying emotional attachment. If we are not emotional-
ly connected, or invested, in the work we are trying to do, the places or s pecies
we are trying to save, then how can we intelligently care for these phenom-
ena? Human beings—human minds—have not fundamentally evolved since
Yi-Fu Tuan was writing about attachment to place in the 1970s and Berry was
writing about our psychological capacity to “adhere” to large- and small-scale
locales in 1990. But we have become increasingly attuned to the translocality
and trans-scalarity of our impact on the planet, as is evident in the work of the
artists I have described in this chapter.
Heise, in her chapter titled “From the Blue Planet to Google Earth: Environ-
mentalism, Ecocriticism, and the Imagination of the Global,” writes:
Recent recuperations of the concept of “cosmopolitanism” in the context

of debates over nationalism and globalization […] provide a useful ba-
sis for thinking about environmental allegiances that reach beyond the
local and the national. What such a consideration might achieve […] is
not only a more accurate understanding of how individuals and commu-
nities actually inhabit particular sites at the beginning of the third mil-
lennium but also a more nuanced understanding of how aesthetic forms
such as allegory and collage have shaped the environmental imagination
of the global. […] In this context, the transition from the image of the
26 Slovic
“Blue Planet” to the infinite zooming capabilities of the internet tool

Google Earth marks a formal as well as conceptual shift with important
implications for representations of the global across various forms of en-
vironmental art and thought. (21, my italics)
The shift toward global—and trans-scalar—cognitive habits is evident in the

work of Jordan, Goldsworthy, and Hegarty, demonstrating formal experimen-
tation that may help to train audiences to employ flexible ways of thinking
necessary to the reality of our lives, and the reality of the planet’s precious
water, in the Anthropocene.
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Blooming-
ton: Indiana UP, 2010. Print.
“Another World by Antony and the Johnsons.” Web. 28 Oct. 2013. <http://www.song-
facts.com/detail.php?id=14290>.
Berry, Wendell. “Word and Flesh.” What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point,
1990. 197–203. Print.
Cho, Renee. “Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup.” 26 January 2011. Web. 28 Oct. 2013. <http://
blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2011/01/26/our-oceans-a-plastic-soup/>.
Elkins, James. “How Long Does It Take to Look at a Painting?” Huffpost Arts & Culture,
8 Nov. 2010. Web. 25 Feb. 2016. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/how-
long-does-it-take-to-_b_779946.html>.
Hegarty, Antony. Another World. Bloomington, IN: Secretly Canadian, 2008. CD.
Hegarty, Antony. Cut the World. Bloomington, IN: Secretly Canadian, 2012. CD.
“How much water is there on, in, and above the earth?” The USGS Water Science School.
Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html>.
Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.
Print.
Jordan, Chris. Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption. Self-
published, 2005. Print.
Jordan, Chris. In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Print.
Jordan, Chris. Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait. Pullman, WA: Washing-
ton State University Museum of Art, 2009. Print.
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human
Action. 1864. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965. Print.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
Ornstein, Robert, and Paul Ehrlich. New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious
Evolution. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Print.
Riedelsheimer, Thomas, dir. Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers and Tides. Docurama, 2003.
Film.
Sagan, Carl. “The Earth from the frontiers of the Solar system—The Pale, Blue Dot.”
Parade Magazine, 9 Sept. 1990. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <https://news.google.com/
newspapers?id=_upSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=noEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4800,1930437&dq=pa
le-blue-dot+-book&hl=en>.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. 1994. New York: Bal-
lantine, 1997. Print.
Slovic, Paul. Smoking: Risk, Perception, & Policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. Print.
Slovic, Scott. “Introspection, Social Transformation, and the Trans-scalar Imaginary:
An Interview with Chris Jordan.” Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and
Meaning in a World of Data. Eds. Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic. Corvallis: Oregon
State UP, 2015. 200–216. Print.
Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Envi-
ronmental Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. Print.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Place: An Experiential Perspective,” The Geographical Review LXV.2 (April
1975): 151–165. Print.
“Water and Humans.” Water Facts. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.waterinfo.org/
resources/water-facts>.
chapter 3
Water and Urban Space in Late Medieval

Stockholm
Maija Ojala
Abstract
This chapter discusses the interconnections between water and multifaceted urban
space. As a vibrant coastal city and major commercial center Stockholm provides an
intriguing case study; it is located on an island surrounded by water and access to wa-
ter has been crucial for trade and the success of the city. With the help of source mate-
rial such as court records and craft ordinances the chapter examines how use of and
access to water was regulated in late medieval Stockholm. Additionally, analysis of 16th
century paintings and the oldest city map illustrates the imaginary aspects of water
and space, showing how urban space and its water borders were conceived by citizens.
Empirical evidence is discussed within a theoretical framework of the Lefebvrean no-
tion of three-dimensional space. The chapter demonstrates how questions related to
the access to, use of and right to water show long historical continuity.
Introduction
In modern school books, Stockholm, the Swedish capital, is often depicted as

a city connected by bridges. Water is a significant part of the city’s identity,
a fact that shows in many ways. For example, after the royal wedding of Princess
Victoria in 2010, the bride and bridegroom took a cruise on the surrounding
waterways. In this article, I study how water shaped, constructed, and affected
the urban space of medieval Stockholm. Within the theoretical framework of
space, this article discusses some of the essential elements of everyday life that
affected every urban inhabitant: the use of and access to water.
My starting point is the Lefebvrean notion of three-dimensional space:
physical space—or perceived space—is the material and concrete surround-
ings where spatial practices take place. These spatial practices are created
through the routines and actions of everyday life that connect specific places.
These places could be, for example, a marketplace, a well, and a home. Mental
space—or conceived space—encompasses the abstractions and conceptual-
izations of physical spaces and places. These representations of space mirror

Water And Urban Space In Late Medieval Stockholm 29
what a specific place signifies to a person (or a group or community). Social

space—or lived and experienced space—represents social values, traditions,
and collective actions. In this representational space, social actors (people)
interact, adopt, and transform their environment, and places bear symbolic
meaning (Lefebvre; Bertuzzo; Swyngedow; Cassidy-Welch). In research, these
three dimensions can be separated and used as conceptual tools for analys-
ing a phenomenon. However, in reality, these dimensions interact, and when
a physical place is connected with the worldviews and values of contempo-
rary people, it becomes a social and mental place. In the medieval world, these
imaginary and mental aspects of space had a great impact on how the physical
space was perceived and utilized. In the context of medieval urban society,
the concepts of space and spatiality have been applied par excellence to social
topography (Lamberg, “Introduction”; Lamberg, Dannemännen.).
Stockholm was chosen for the case study in this article for several reasons.
Firstly, it represents a major urban centre and costal town in the Baltic Sea
region, and it grew to become a dominant metropolis (by contemporary stan-
dards) in the early modern period. Stockholm was established in the middle
of the thirteenth century and it has been the capital of Swedish realm since
the Middle Ages. With a population of 5,000–6,500, late medieval Stockholm
was the largest city in the Swedish realm and one of the leading cities in Baltic
trade. Tallinn and Riga were approximately the same size as Stockholm, where-
as Lübeck had over 20,000 inhabitants (Graßmann; Lilja; Mänd). Secondly, the
preserved, comparatively rich medieval source material offers a unique oppor-
tunity to examine the connections between water and the three dimensions
of space. With the help of written sources, it is possible to study how the use
of water, access to water, and waste management were regulated from various
perspectives. The illustrative sources offer fruitful material for examining the
mental and imaginary aspects of water and space in the context of medieval
Stockholm. In addition to the medieval source material, up-to-date geological
and hydrological knowledge is applied in order to understand the possibili-
ties and restrictions that nature provided. Scholars have been able to recon-
struct the social topography of medieval Stockholm quite well, thus making
it possible to investigate the relation between water use and space. Thirdly,
Stockholm sits on mixed water: it is a place where fresh and salt water meet. It
therefore makes an interesting starting point for inquiry. Finally, the use and
access of water in medieval Stockholm is still quite an unexplored field. For ex-
ample, the basic studies on medieval and early modern Stockholm handle wa-
ter supply and sanitation only briefly in a few paragraphs (Dahlbäck; Ahnlund;
Hult et al.). Furthermore, the journal of water, Tidskriften Vatten, has published
a few articles that briefly handle the history of water supply and sanitation,
30 Ojala
although these have mainly focused on the time after the eighteenth century
(Cronström). Hence, this article provides a fresh perspective on medieval so-
ciety and urban life.
Three Islands Surrounded by Water
Like so many other cities around the Baltic Sea, the Stockholm of today has its
roots in its medieval city. Five hundred years ago, the settlement was centred
on three islands, the most significant of which is today called the old town
(Sw. Gamla Stan). The islands are located in the middle of a stream between
the rocky shores of the mainland (Sw. malmen) and other islands. This stream
separates the fresh water lake Mälaren from the Baltic Sea (Friberg). In this
article I focus on the island of Gamla Stan, where the majority of the inhabit-
ants lived. In addition to its beneficial location in terms of fresh water sup-
ply, the location of Stockholm was strategically important in many other ways.
In medieval times, the Crown and noblemen could control the trading routes
inland from Stockholm and the city held an important position against both
domestic and international enemies. Because of land uplift during the early
Middle Ages, the stream on the north side of the city, Norrström, became the
only sailing route inland to Mälaren (Ahnlund; Dahlbäck; Friberg; Lamberg,
Dannemännen). Indeed, like Stockholm, all the major urban centres in the Bal-
tic Sea region are coastal towns located at intersections to inland water routes.
Surrounded by the streams, water marked the physical boundaries of medieval
Stockholm, separating the city from the countryside (see fig. 3.1) (Rothauser).
Access to water was crucial and often affected to the choice of place when
new cities were founded. In the medieval world, service water was taken from
free running waters like lakes and rivers or springs and wells. The island of
Gamla Stan on which the heart of medieval Stockholm was build is a gravel
ridge that has rich groundwater reserves. This enabled the building of wells
and the provision of a fresh water supply for the inhabitants (Biermann; Cron-
ström; Gläser; Mührenberg, “Wasser ist Leben”; Seppänen).1 In other words,
these natural forms, the streams, and the areas of water generated visible and
concrete boundaries for the inhabitants.
Maps can be considered multi-layered representations of space furnished
with various kinds of information. Hence, maps provide a useful source
material to investigate the various aspects of space in a medieval context.
1 Today, the quality of groundwater in this area is poor due to pollution. The gravel ridge is also
a watershed that runs a north–south course. See Dricksvattenförekomster 38, 53–57, 66.
Figure 3.1 Detail from the oldest map of Stockholm, from 1625
Source: Stockholm Stadsarkiv/Handritade kartor 68/ 1625
års karta.
Furthermore, a map mediates a particular understanding of the surrounding

world (Lamberg, “Introduction”; Herva et al.). Figure 3.1 presents the oldest
preserved map of Stockholm from the year 1625.2 The map illustrates how the
city was surrounded by water, revealing the typical medieval structure of the
city, still visible today in the old town (Söderlund). In the map, the emphasis is
clearly on urban inhabited space: the water ways are left blank.
The closeness of water and access to it were expressed in the illustrations
of the city as well as in the regulations concerning building and construction
work. Scholars like Göran Dahlbäck and Margareta Weidhagen-Hallerdt have
2 The map is part of the collections of the City Archives. SE/SSA/Handritade kartor 68/1625
års karta. The map is digitalized and can be found in the database stockholmskällan.se. See
<http://www.stockholmskallan.se/PostFiles/SSA/PDF/Stockholm_1625.pdf> (accessed 7 Oct.
2016). Prior to the 1620s, maps were a rarity in the Swedish realm and systematic map making
began in 1628 as the Swedish land survey was established. See Herva et al. 321.
32 Ojala
argued that many citizens who owned rectangular plots stretching to the shore
(see fig. 3.1) built a jetty as a direct extension of their site or alternatively con-
structed their buildings on pillars over the water. Thus, citizens with water-
front plots considered the strand part of their private space. Towards the end
of the fifteenth century, the city council tried to restrict and control building
over water.3 It seems that it took a while for the citizens to accept the new
building regulations because the council had to repeat the prohibition sever-
al times (Dahlbäck). Clearly, water affected the material surroundings of the
inhabitants.
Besides defining and marking the physical location of the city, water and
access to water also affected to the location of various trades within the city.
Medieval towns were multi-ethnic societies, and urban society was strongly hi-
erarchical, although social mobility did occur. The upper social class consisted
of rich merchants, while craftsfolk formed the middle social class. At the bot-
tom of the social hierarchy were the inhabitants without citizen rights, such as
unmarried maids and journeymen, wage-labourers, the poor, and prostitutes
(Lager-Kromnow). With the help of preserved tax books, it is possible to deter-
mine where the practitioners of various trades lived. Medieval Stockholm was
divided into four quarters in response to town law’s regulations on fire safety.
The tax records follow this division and list the taxpayers according to their
quarter of residence.4
Many large-scale merchants preferred the south side of the city for their
living quarters because the two most important harbours were located on the
southern corner of the city, one on the Mälaren lakeside and the other one
on the seaside at Saltsjö. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the liv-
ing quarters of the city’s leading elite were more equally divided to the south,
east, and inner quarters. Swedish (and German) large-scale merchants held
the most political, judicial, and economic power, as the members of the city
council were elected from among these merchants (Lamberg, Dannemännen).
Artisans, the middle strata of urban inhabitants, were more equally scattered
around the city, but certain tendencies can be found. Dahlbäck has concluded
that those craft trades that needed access to water or used open fires were situ-
ated in the west quarter where they had access to fresh water on the lakeside
of Mälaren (Dahlbäck). The majority of butchers, bakers, smiths, and tanners
lived in this part of the city.5 It seems that water from Mälaren was used in
these trades, although the fresh water could mix with seawater and thus it was
3 Stockholms stads tänkeböcker 1474–1483 (hereafter shortened to sstb), 228.

4 Stockholms stads skotteböcker 1516–1525 (hereafter shortened to sssb).
5 sssb 1460.
not suitable for drinking (Cronström). It is interesting that trades that are of-
ten considered as unclean, smelly, and even polluting—such as tanning—and
trades that require clean surroundings—such as baking—were both located in
the same quarter. However, sometimes pollutants dumped into the waters by
tanners or dyers could be reused by skinners and curriers who tended to work
further downstream (Courdert). Another explanation could be that perhaps
the amount of impurities discharged into water was small and/or the current
was so strong that no significant damage was done.
The location of Stockholm, between the fresh-water Mälaren and brackish
Saltsjö, with its many straits, streams, and small islands, offered outstanding
opportunities for fishing. The fishing trade was of the utmost importance to
Stockholm, as it was to many other coastal towns and villages. In medieval
times, fish was a major part of people’s diet: not only because the calendar of
the Catholic Church included 180 fast days per year—when meat was off the
menu—but also because salted fish kept for so long. Both archaeological and
written evidence attest to the lively fishing trade in Stockholm and show that
all possible fishing methods were used. The fishing trade was segmented ac-
cording to fishing tackles. Additionally, fishmongers—who bought large quan-
tities of various fish—and so-called månglerskor—women who engaged in
smaller retailing in the city’s streets, piers, and market squares—were also in-
tegral parts of the fishing trade (Dahlbäck; Hallerdt). The tax accounts of 1460
lists no less than forty fishermen, nearly all of whom lived in the eastern quar-
ter of the city. Logically, the fish market was also located on the eastern shore
of the old town island. On average, fishermen paid well below the average tax
of that time, thus they were lower middle-class citizens in terms of wealth. In
the sixteenth century, the number of fishermen dropped below ten,6 however
the Crown employed around 21 fishermen in the year 1566 (Dahlbäck; Hallerdt;
Lager-Kromnow; Lamberg, Dannemännen). In general, the fishing trade has
not received much attention in previous studies related to late medieval Stock-
holm, nor has research paid much attention to the long-term changes or con-
tinuities in the fishing trade.
Water use and access to water were essential for many craft trades. Therefore
it is somewhat surprising that none of Stockholm’s 19 medieval preserved craft
ordinances regulated the use of water. For this study, I have examined all the
preserved craft ordinances for the time period 1450–1600. The craft ordinances
primarily regulated the actual trade of the craftsmen, but they also included
articles related to festivities, craft assemblies, and funerals. Usually, each craft
had its own ordinance, and one of the main purposes of the ordinance was to
6 sssb 1516–1525, year 1524.

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Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick)

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

1 Knowing Water: An Introduction 1

2 Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the Perception of Water 11

3 Water and Urban Space in Late Medieval Stockholm 28

4 The Many Roles of the Dynamic Danube in Early Modern Europe:

5 Water, Space, and Desire in Soviet Fiction: The Case of Konstantin

6 The Interplay of Water, Home, and Narration in Überfahrt by Anna

7 The River in Thaw-era Soviet Popular Song (1954–1970): The Formation

9 The Pollution of the Baltic Sea: A Mirror Image of Modernization 167

10 The Deep Waters of Literary Theme. Nature, Narrative, and Identity in

13 Securing Water: Ambiguities of Control vs. Coexistence 255

This volume originated under the auspices of a multidisciplinary project enti-

K. Mukka (1944–1973). Lahtinen has also edited two posthumous anthologies

His main field of research is late twentieth-century Russian literature from

Knowing Water: An Introduction

Water is the mistress of liquid language, of smooth flowing language, of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_002

the politics of literary representation in very different ideological settings. One

“organic machines” (White), and with post-Cold war terrains of unequal

post-Soviet Russia. Water works in these chapters in different registers and

ingenuity—whether of engineering or legislation. Haila’s concluding chapter

counsel leads us in the opposite direction: “even though binary oppositions

Liquid Scale: Trans-Scalar Thinking and the

How do we interact with water as human beings in the twenty-first century?­

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_003

“Slow violence” and the Necessity of Apprehending Vast

Although it is still possible (and, indeed, unavoidable) to experience water and

“Conscious evolution” through Chris Jordan’s Digital Compositions

One of the boldest recent artistic approaches to our understanding of

he explores, ranging from the consumption of plastic to the number of people

the “trans-scalar imaginary.” On Jordan’s website, viewers encounter numerous

because of the striking experiments in scale, which help to guide viewers to

Andy Goldsworthy, Antony Hegarty (Anohni), and the Performance

specific instances of change, such as the melting of a human-built ice structure

The Conceptual Challenge of Biospheric Thinking

Mitchell Thomashow argues that a routine practice of natural history observa-

Interpreting the biosphere is such a profound conceptual challenge because

The favorite adjective of [the environmental] movement now seems to

Recent recuperations of the concept of “cosmopolitanism” in the context

“Blue Planet” to the infinite zooming capabilities of the internet tool

The shift toward global—and trans-scalar—cognitive habits is evident in the

Water and Urban Space in Late Medieval

In modern school books, Stockholm, the Swedish capital, is often depicted as

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_004

what a specific place signifies to a person (or a group or community). Social

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_002

How do we interact with water as human beings in the twenty-first century?

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_003

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004333444_004