Review by Peter Reason
This slender collection of writing around the theme of freshwater is published by the Wellcome Collection to accompany its current exhibition of the same name, which ‘explores humanity’s vital connection with freshwater as an essential source of life and pillar of good health’. The exhibition looks fascinating, well worth a visit if you are a Londoner or visiting the city.
The book itself is a collection of short pieces, many by well-known writers, around the theme of freshwater. This is a lovely collection nicely presented (although with slightly too-narrow margins); it will certainly serve its main purpose as a memento of a visit to the exhibition – people do like to have something to take away – and which also stands as an independent publication.
Robert Macfarlane is acknowledged on the cover for his Foreword, although it is not clear to me in what sense his piece is any different from the other contributions. I think it a pity that the editor, Ellen Johl, is only credited on the information and copyright page – there must have been a lot of networking and careful editorial work to draw this together.
The books starts with Macfarlane’s reflection on the springs near his home in Cambridge – a theme familiar to readers of Is a River Alive? – and on the moral and imaginative dimensions of water: ‘water, once healed, heals us in return’. Mojave/Akimel O’odham poet Natalie Diaz reminds us that ‘Every story is a story of water’. Writer Rebecca Solnit contemplates the blueness of a water planet; novelist Elif Shafak echoes some of her wonderful novel There are Rivers in the Sky with a reflection of how our legends, stories and silences are shaped by rivers. Vandana Shiva writes about the struggles of Indigenous people for water rights, a piece that is slightly too long and a bit too preachy for my taste. Emanuel Vaughan-Lee draws on Sufi teaching and the metaphor of water to remind us that ‘the worlds of spirit and matter must flow together’. British-Egyptian artist Lora Adiz teaches us how to make Hawthorn Water Essence.
I hope these summaries give some sense of the wide-ranging content of the essays. It would be tedious repeat this for all twenty-one, so I will pick out a few from the rest of the book that particularly attracted me.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, of Braiding Sweetgrass fame, wrote an earlier book Gathering Moss; indeed, the study of mosses was the focus of her scientific career. In Ancient Green she offers an engaging account of how mosses relate to water. Mosses are everywhere, the first plants to blanket the Earth, and they may be the last. ‘All they need is a little light, a sheer film of water and a thin decoction of minerals. If they hydrated and illuminated, they will exuberantly photosynthesize… but when times are tough most simply stop growing and wait until water returns. They don’t die, they just crinkle up and pause…’ The mosses share water: they have evolved so that ‘Water is passed from shoot to shoot across leafy bridges and down canals of capillary space to moisten the whole ecology’. In her elegant writing, Kimmerer tells us both something of the botany of mosses, and more about the significance of mutuality and how ‘small is beautiful’.
I also enjoyed the longer piece Divining Mary by Gaylene Gould and Calthorpe Community Participants, which tells us how London’s landscape is shaped by the memory of rivers, many of which have been buried underground. This piece tells of Black Mary’s Well in Clerkenwell, of the eponymous Mary, and of the inquiry project by contemporary Black Londoners to uncover Mary’s hidden history. Of one of the key researchers they write ‘it was searching for Mary that led her back to herself in the same way that Mary was leading me back to myself. Four hundred years after Mary disappeared, here she is, healing us still.’ This community inquiry has led to the creation of a healing garden and the engagement of other communities – Afghan women, Hongkong and Ukraine communities, Latin American elders.
Other writing in the book is about disappearing waterways, the impact of unregulated tube wells, rivers as healing, and much more. Naturally, some pieces appealed to me more than others, although I was thoroughly engaged throughout the book. I both learned about the many ways of water and enjoyed some very diverse writing styles. What I missed is some kind of editorial integration (as I have one with other collections of writing; see my review of the Humans and Nature Kinship collection). Can we please have some kind of overview that helps pick out some of the themes within the diversity? Can we know on what basis the contributors were invited? Is there a link with the Thirst exhibition which we might understand better?
Despite this, Thirst is a lovely little book, both informative and engaging, with wonderfully diverse stories and styles of writing.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Thirst: In Search of Freshwater, ed Ellen Johl (Wellcome Collection, 2025).978-1999809058, 128pp., paperback original.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
