Water seems deceptively simple and is easy to take for granted. It has no color, taste or smell and is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth. Recycled endlessly through the biosphere in its various forms, it is fundamental to keeping our planet’s operating system intact, and has done so for millions of years.
Water is life. Earth’s oceans are where life likely originated, and freshwater is essential for plants and animals to persist and thrive. It is basic to all human development. But as our 21st-century world gallops ahead, we are vastly manipulating the water cycle at an unprecedented rate and scale to meet the ever-growing needs of an exploding population.
By 2030, we will have built enough dams to alter 93% of the world’s rivers. Estimates vary, but we already use around 90% of the planet’s freshwater to grow our food. More than half of us now live in cities, but by 2050 a projected 68% of the world’s nearly 8 billion people will reside in urban areas. That metropolitan lifestyle will require astronomical amounts of water — extracted, treated, and piped over large distances. Humanity also prevents much rainwater from easily infiltrating underground, reducing aquifers, as we pave over immense areas with impermeable concrete and asphalt.
But these easily visible changes are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Researchers are shining new light on sweeping human alterations to Earth’s water cycle, many playing out in processes largely unseen. In the Anthropocene — the unofficial name for the current human-influenced unit of geologic time — we are already pushing one of Earth’s most fundamental and foundational systems, the hydrological cycle, toward the breaking point.
Trouble is, we don’t yet know when this threshold may be reached, or what the precise consequences will be. Scientists are resolutely seeking answers.
Water flows past Copenhagen in Denmark. As Earth’s urban areas expand, so do population pressures on the freshwater supply and the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Water cycle basics
The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and flows through eternal inhalations and exhalations of water in different states, as it is exchanged between the atmosphere and the planet. Liquid water from oceans, lakes and rivers rises via evaporation into the sky, to form water vapor, an important greenhouse gas that, like carbon dioxide, helps insulate the planet to maintain that “just right” temperature to maintain life as we know it.
Atmospheric water vapor then changes to liquid, falling to earth as precipitation. It then flows as runoff again across the landscape, and what doesn’t go back into waterbodies, settles into soils, to be taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward. A large amount of freshwater is also locked in glaciers and icecaps.
Within this cycle, there are constant complex interactions between what scientists call blue and green water. Blue water includes rivers, lakes, reservoirs and renewable groundwater stores. Green water is defined as terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture.
Partitioning of rainwater into green and blue water flows. Image by Geertsma et al. (2009)/Baseline Review for the Pilot Programme in Kenya. Green Water Credits Report 8, ISRIC–World Soil Information, Wageningen.
A fully functioning hydrological cycle, with balanced supplies and flows of blue and green water, is essential to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, human food availability and production, and our energy security.
It also regulates Earth’s weather and influences climate. Atmospheric temperature, for example, is dependent on evaporation and condensation. That’s because as water evaporates, it absorbs energy and cools the local environment, and as it condenses, it releases energy and warms the world. Throughout the Holocene geological epoch, a relatively stable water cycle helped maintain balanced temperatures and conditions able to support civilization.
However, in the Anthropocene, human activity has impacted the water cycle, the climate and ecosystems. For one, as more human-produced CO2 and methane build up in the atmosphere, more solar energy is held by the planet, causing global warming. And the hotter the air, the greater the quantity of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. That’s bad news because water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, greatly increasing the warming.
As our anthropogenic manipulation of the water cycle escalates on a global scale, we urgently need a holistic way to monitor these modifications and understand their impacts. Yet, the topic has not received the urgent scientific attention it requires. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no study comprehensively investigating whether human modifications of the water cycle have led, could be leading, or will lead to planetary‐scale regime shifts in the Earth system,” researchers noted in a 2020 paper on the role of the water cycle in maintaining fundamental Earth functioning.
One key concern of scientists: If severe hydrological shifts occur in too many regions, or in key regions that greatly influence the water cycle or water availability (such as the Amazon), then that could provoke shifts in other regions, in a global chain reaction, says study co-author Dieter Gerten, working group leader and Earth modeling coordinator at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Conceptually we know that there must be a limit for how much we can disturb the [hydrological] system before we start feeling serious impacts on the Earth system and then, by extension, to humanity,” says one of the paper’s other co-authors, Miina Porkka, a postdoctoral researcher at the Water and Development Group at Aalto University in Finland.
International researchers under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre have been hammering away at answering these questions. They had to start with the basics. One big problem to date has been scientists’ lack of a metric for quantifying serious water cycle alterations. How do we even measure changes to the water cycle?
“It gets complicated,” says Gerten, who has been involved in the research to bring a global perspective to local water management since 2009, as conducted under the Planetary Boundaries Framework; Gerten is also a professor of global change climatology and hydrology at Humboldt University of Berlin.
The Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan. The Anthropocene is producing wholesale manipulations to Earth’s water cycle. For example, by 2030, more than 90% of the world’s rivers will likely be altered by dams. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Measuring change: Blue water
The Planetary Boundaries Framework defines a safe operating space for humanity as represented by nine natural global processes that, if severely destabilized, could disrupt Earth’s operating system and threaten life and civilization. The freshwater planetary boundary presents one such threshold, and scientists are working to define a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications.
Initially, in 2009, river flow was used to try and measure the boundary threshold, Gerten explains, because blue water in all its forms was seen to integrate the three largest anthropogenic manipulations of the water cycle: human impacts on precipitation patterns, modifications of soil moisture by land use and land cover; and water withdrawals for human use.
This research used a simple calculation of the global sum of the average annual surface water flow in rivers, with an assumed 30% of that accessible water needing to be protected. This “freshwater use” boundary was set at 4,000 cubic kilometers (960 cubic miles) per year of blue water consumption. This is at the lower limit of a 4,000-6,000 km3 (960-1,440 mi3) annual range designated as a danger zone that takes us “too close to the risk of blue and green water-induced thresholds that could have deleterious or even catastrophic impacts on the Earth System,” researchers wrote in a 2020 paper that evaluated the water planetary boundary.
The Padysha-Ata River in Kyrgyzstan. Blue water includes rivers as well as lakes, reservoirs, and renewable groundwater stores. Image by Petro Kotzé.
With only an estimated 2,600 km3 (624 mi3) of water withdrawn annually at the time of the study, scientists concluded we were still in the safe zone. However, “That [conclusion] was immediately criticized,” Gerten says, in part because scientists were already seeing ample regional water-related problems. Another criticism argued that the measure of blue water alone did not reflect all types of human interference with the water cycle and Earth system.
Gerten later led work that proposed quantifying the boundary by assessing the amount of streamflow needed to maintain environmental flow requirements in all river basins on Earth. This approach had the advantage of recognizing regionally transgressed limits and thereby deduced a global value.
According to this newer calculation, the freshwater use planetary boundary should be set much lower, at about 2,800 km3 (672 mi3), Gerten says, which means humanity is already much closer to the danger zone than previously thought. “Water is more limited on Planet Earth than we think,” Gerten cautions.
The nine planetary boundaries, counterclockwise from top: climate change, biosphere integrity (functional and genetic), land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, and release of novel chemicals. In 2022, scientists announced the transgression of both the freshwater and novel entities boundaries. Image courtesy of J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. (2015) via Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Redefining the freshwater boundary: Green water
Over time, a consortium of researchers was formed to deeply scrutinize the freshwater boundary. This resulted in follow-up work in 2019 and 2020 proposing that the freshwater boundary be divided into sub-boundaries related to major stores of freshwater: namely atmospheric water, frozen water, groundwater, soil moisture, and surface water.
Since then, scientists simplified their approach further. “Even though we are talking about very complex matters,” Porkka says, the boundary definition, to be useful as a metric, needed to stay “relatively simple.”
The most recent and sweeping reassessment of the freshwater planetary boundary was published in 2022. “Our suggestion is to … change the name from ‘freshwater use planetary boundary’ to ‘freshwater change planetary boundary,’” says study lead author Lan Wang-Erlandsson from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Then, to have two components,” she adds, “One for green water, and one for blue water.”
“Water has so many functions in the Earth system, and many of them happen invisibly via green water,” Gerten explains. “We don’t see it and we don’t feel it. That’s why [green water] has been neglected over decades. The focus has been on river flows and groundwater because we can see it, feel it, use it, and touch it. But [as a result] a big share of the water cycle has been overlooked.”
The Tsitsikamma forests in South Africa’s Garden Route region. The water taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward is an integral part of the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
The newly accepted metric for tracking green water: The soil moisture in the root zone of plants, or more technically: “the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture anomalies exit the local bounds of baseline variability in any month of the year.”
This new proxy is appealing because it is directly influenced by human pressures with change over time measurable. In turn, soil moisture directly impacts a range of large-scale ecological, climatic, biogeochemical and hydrological dynamics.
Using this novel green water boundary transgression criteria, scientists detected a major hydrological departure from the baseline set during the Holocene. And the evidence for such a departure is overwhelming: Researchers found “unprecedented areas [of Earth] with root-zone soil moisture anomalies,” indicating an exit from the so-called “safe zone.”
A second criteria, Earth Systems Resilience, was also instituted. Researchers evaluated the state of regional climate systems (ranging from monsoons to land carbon sinks and large biomes) to see which have seen enhanced changes in their process rates, resulting in ripple effects that could destabilize the Earth system, Wang-Erlandsson explains.
Lake Sary-Chelek, part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, in Kyrgyzstan. The hydrological cycle represents an eternal exchange of water in different states between the atmosphere and the planet’s surface, and it maintains the biosphere as we know it. Within this cycle, there is constant interaction between blue and green water. Image by Petro Kotzé.
A transgressed freshwater change boundary
Unfortunately, examples of compromised Earth System Resilience transgressions are rife across the planet.
Take the Amazon Rainforest, for instance. It is now understood that carbon uptake likely peaked there in the 1990s, with a sequestration decline since then driven by escalating climate change and fires, along with global demand for agricultural commodities, which spurred extensive Amazon forest clearing, bringing major land-use change. More recently, African tropical forests have passed their carbon uptake peak.
When these vast biomes and natural systems are put under extreme multiple stressors, the effects can self-amplify and lead to greater, more rapid, rates of change, Wang-Erlandsson says: In South America, this combination of stressors, particularly deforestation and climate change, is inducing intensifying drought, which is now leading to cascading perturbations in living systems. Scientists now think the rainforest biome, stable for thousands of years, is reaching a tipping point, and could quickly transition to seasonal forest, or even a degraded savanna. This shift could lead to the transformation of the South American monsoon system, and a permanent state of reduced rainfall and impoverished biodiversity.
But what starts in the Amazon won’t likely stay there: The rainforest’s destruction will release massive amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change, potentially leading to climate and ecological tipping points in other biomes.
Agricultural development in Uzbekistan. Global land-use change, including large-scale deforestation and irrigation, is contributing to major alterations in the water cycle, leading to a destabilized climate and major global environmental and sociopolitical disruptions. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Another concerning example (although debated) of an Earth system shift is the suggestion of a weakening carbon fertilization process, in which higher atmospheric carbon concentrations result in speeded-up photosynthesis as plants try to improve water efficiency in the face of drought. It is thought that this effect is happening already, brought on by limitations in nutrient and soil moisture availability.
In drylands, climate change and ecosystem degradation are triggering vicious cycles of infiltration capacity loss — a decrease in soil moisture and moisture recycling, resulting in increasing desertification and biodiversity loss. In polar permafrost regions, soil moisture saturation could accelerate thawing, generating dangerous methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Alarmed by the water cycle’s departure from the Holocene baseline, and noting “worrying” signs of low Earth System Resilience, researchers early in 2022 declared the green water boundary to be “considerably transgressed.” The situation, they said, will likely worsen before any reversals in the trend will be observed. “Green water modifications are now causing rising Earth system risks at a scale that modern civilizations might not have ever faced,” the study states.
We don’t yet know what the planetary-scale impacts will ultimately be, but, Porkka says, we have an idea of how impacts could be felt in different parts of the world.
An irrigation canal runs past apricot orchards in the Batken region of Kyrgyzstan. We have vastly manipulated Earth’s water cycle to suit humanity’s needs. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Disastrous extreme weather events
Regional extreme events, including floods and mega droughts, are already occurring, Porkka notes. Examples are to be found on every continent.
On Africa’s southeast coast, as just one example: the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network of scientists has found that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of heavy rainfall associated with tropical cyclones. The group based their findings on an analysis of tropical storms Ana and Batisrai, which battered parts of Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in early 2022. Both cyclonic systems brought devastating floods that caused severe humanitarian impacts, including many deaths and injuries and large-scale damage to infrastructure. These sorts of extreme weather events put great pressure on socioeconomic and political institutions, and could easily destabilize struggling developing nations.
Of the top 10 climate disasters, those causing the largest human losses during that period were droughts (650,000 deaths), storms (577,232), floods (58,700), and extreme temperature (55,736 deaths). In economic terms, the top 10 events included storms (costing $521 billion) and floods ($115 billion).
Clouds above a dusty road in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and is an eternal exchange of water between the atmosphere and the planet. As climate change escalates, so do extreme weather events such as droughts and intense storms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Porkka points out, however, that freshwater system destabilization impacts can be more subtle than extreme events. Widespread irrigation of croplands, for example, can increase evaporation to such a high degree that even distant precipitation patterns are altered. Part of the problem is that we do not know if consequences like these are negative or positive.
“[W]e know that we’re changing the [hydrological] system in fundamental ways and, once we do, we don’t really know how the impacts accumulate,” says Porkka.
While many riddles remain, scientists now feel they have a reliable metric for accurately tracking transgressions of the freshwater change boundary. “The prime question was what the key variables are, and I think that is relatively solid now with soil moisture [green water] and river flows [blue water],” Gerten says. “The next questions are, where exactly to put the boundaries, and what happens if they are transgressed?”
Based on these findings, researchers are calling for urgent action: “The current global trends and trajectories of increasing water use, deforestation, land degradation, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and climate change need to be promptly halted and reversed to increase the chances of remaining in [Earth’s] safe operating space.”
That’s a tall order, and no matter humanity’s actions, we don’t know how things will play out. “Water is so fundamental and elemental, and at the same time, so varied,” Gerten says, and there is no silver bullet for solving our hydrological problems.
South Africa’s Orange River tumbles over Augrabies Falls. Water is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth and is recycled endlessly through the biosphere in different forms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Banner image: Farmers tending to their agricultural land in Uzbekistan. Image by Petro Kotzé.
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Editor’s note: Campaigning for protecting wildlife and ecosystems is rarely successful if only fought in court. But in this case, a Peruvian court decided to give the river Maranon rights that would ensure its conservation and protection from oil spills. For this decision, the indigenous groups led by Kukama women have been fighting for their river for over three years. As with many people living on the land they depend on clean water and fertile land to feed their families. Now the court victory gives them the necessary legal foundation to keep on fighting for a life free from ecological disasters.
The decision “establishes a groundbreaking legal framework that acknowledges the inherent rights of natural entities,” said one campaigner.
After years of campaigning, an organization of Indigenous women in Peru’s Loreto province celebrated “a landmark decision” on Tuesday by a court in Nauta, which found that the Marañón River has “intrinsic value” and that its “inherent rights” must be recognized by the government.
The Mixed Court of Nauta ruled that specific rights of the river must be codified, including the right to exist, the right to ecological flow, the right of restoration, the right to be free of pollution, the right to exercise its essential functions with the ecosystem, and the right of representation.
Led by Kukama women, the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana Federation in the Parinari district of Loreto began its legal fight on behalf of the Marañón River in 2021, demanding that the state and federal governments protect the waterway from “constant oil spills.”
Petroperu’s Oleoducto Norperuano, or Norperuvian oil pipeline, caused more than 60 oil spills between 1997-2019, and the 28 communities represented by the federation are still recovering from a 2010 oil spill that sent 350 barrels of oil into the river near Saramuro port.
Oil spills not the only threat
Indigenous groups blocked the river in protest in September 2022 after another spill sent 2,500 barrels of crude oil into the Amazon, of which the Marañón is a main tributary.
The Marañón supplies drinking water directly to communities in Loreto, and is a vital habitat for fish that help sustain Indigenous communities.
“We do not live on money. We live from what we grow on our land and our fishing. We cannot live without fish,” Isabel Murayari, a board member of the federation, told the Earth Law Center, when the group filed its lawsuit in 2021.
The Kukama women also aimed to halt infrastructure projects including hydroelectric dams and the Amazon Waterway—recognized as environmental risks by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—and warned that illegal gold mining has left the Marañón with mercury contamination that must be remedied.
Martiza Quispe Mamani, an attorney representing the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana Federation, said the “historic ruling is an important achievement of the Kukama women.”
“The fact that the judge of the Nauta Court has declared the Marañón River as a subject of rights represents a significant and transcendental milestone for the protection not only of the Marañón River but also of all rivers contaminated by extractive activities,” said Mamani.
In addition to granting the river inherent rights, the court named the Indigenous group and the Peruvian government as “guardians, defenders, and representatives of the Marañón River and its tributaries.”
Precedent for global river conservation
Loreto’s regional government was ordered to take necessary steps with the National Water Authority to establish a water resource basin organization for the river. The court also required Petroperu to present an updated environmental management plan within six months.
Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of the federation, said the group’s fight to protect the environment in the region “will continue.”
“It encourages us to fight to defend our territories and rivers, which is fundamental,” Murayari said of the ruling. “The recognition made in this decision has critical value. It is one more opportunity to keep fighting and claiming our rights. Our work is fundamental for Peru and the world: to protect our rivers, territories, our own lives, and all of humanity, and the living beings of Mother Nature.”
The women who led the legal action noted that courts in recent years have recognized rights for other waterways, including Colombia’s Atrato River, New Zealand’s Whanganui River, and Canada’s Magpie River.
Monti Aguirre, Latin America director of International Rivers, which supported the federation in its lawsuit, said the ruling “underscores the vital impact of community-led advocacy in safeguarding river ecosystems and sets a crucial precedent for river conservation efforts globally.”
“By recognizing the Marañón River as a subject of rights, this decision is significant not only in terms of environmental protection but also in advancing the rights of nature and the rights of rivers,” said Aguirre. “It establishes a groundbreaking legal framework that acknowledges the inherent rights of natural entities, paving the way for similar legal recognition and protection of rivers worldwide.”
Editor’s note: Fishermen are engaging resistance against the natural gas industry and its expansion of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals. They aim to defend their traditional work that goes back hundreds of years, their fishing habitats, and the health of their community. Europe, especially Germany, has increased its demand for LNG since refusing to buy gas from Russia when the attack on the Ukraine started. Texan gas company Cheniere delivered 70 percent of its natural gas supply to Europe last year.
At the border coast between Lousiana and Texas there is magnificent biodiversity which is barely found anywhere else in the US, such as marshes, coastal prairies and rare species like white alligators and brown pelicans. Nearly half of US wetlands in are in Louisiana.
Their LNG terminals are polluting air, the water and the soil, which is completely legal. They need to be stopped for good. This can only happen through a decrease in both economic growth and energy addiction, the elephant in the room that politicians and business people don’t want to talk about.
We wholeheartedly support this resistance against the gas conference. At the same time, we need to distinguish between subsistence fishing and commercial fishing. Subsistence fishing is a way of life where a community fishes in order for its survival. They share an understanding that their way of life is intricately intertwined with the health of the fish community. As a result, their intent is to fish in amounts that would not harm the river or oceanic community.
Commercial fishing, on the other hand, is driven by commercial interests and is, as a result, insatiable. Since the advent of industrial fishing, more than 90 percent of large fish in the ocean are gone. This ecocide is normalised as shifting baseline syndrome. In the seventeenth century, cod (from which cod liver oil was extracted) was so plentiful in the Northwest Atlantic that there was a saying that you could walk across the ocean on their backs. As a result of commercial fishing, these cod are nearing extinction. As a biophilic organization, DGR’s primary allegiance lies with the natural communities. We are against any action that harms the natural world, including commercial fishing.
In the current context of overshoot, there is also a need to reevaluate subsistence fishing. Subsistence fishing of an abundant species does not harm the fish community. However, since commercial fishing has endangered many of those once abundant species, subsistence fishing of these now endangered species might even lead to extinction.
Frontline Fishers Force Early End to New Orleans Gas Conference
Frontline fishers and environmental justice advocates forced the meeting of the Americas Energy Summit in New Orleans to end two hours early on Friday, as they protested what the buildout of liquefied natural gas infrastructure is doing to Gulf Coast ecosystems and livelihoods.
Fishers and shrimpers from southwest Louisiana say that new LNG export terminals are destroying habitat for marine life while the tankers make it unsafe for them to take their boats out in the areas where fishing is still possible. The destruction is taking place in the port of Cameron, which once saw the biggest catch of any fishing area in the U.S.
“We want our oystering back. We want our shrimp back. We want our dredges back. We want LNG to leave us alone,” Cameron fisherman Solomon Williams Jr. said in a statement. “With all the oil and all the stuff they’re dumping in the water, it’s just killing every oyster we can get. Makes it so we can’t sell our shrimp.”
The protest was part of the growing movement against LNG export infrastructure, which is both harming the health and environment of Gulf Coast residents and risks worsening the climate crisis: Just one of the more than 20 proposed new LNG terminals, Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2, would release 20 times the lifetime emissions of the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. Activists have also planned a sit-in at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., from February 6-8 to demand the agency stop approving new LNG export terminals.
The Americas Energy Summit is one of the largest international meetings of executives involved in the exporting of natural gas. More than 40 impacted fishers brought their boats to New Orleans to park them outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, where the meeting was being held. After a march from Jackson Square, the fishers revved their engines to disrupt the meeting. One attendee said the disruption forced the meeting to conclude at 11 am ET, two hours earlier than scheduled.
“Wen you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes.”
“They going to run us out of the channel and if they run us out of the channel then it’s over,” Phillip Dyson Sr., a fisherman who attended the protest with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, said in a statement. “We fight for them. We fight for my grandson. Been a fighter all my life. I ain’t going to stop now. So long as I got breathe I’m going to fight for my kids. They are the future. Fishing industry been here hundreds of years and now they’re trying to stop us. I don’t think it’s right.”
The fishers were joined by other local and national climate advocates, including Sunrise New Orleans, Permian Gulf Coast Coalition, Habitat Recovery Project, the Vessel Project, For a Better Bayou, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and actress and activist Jane Fonda.
“I thought I understood. I read the articles, I read the science, I’ve seen the photographs. But when you’re here on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes and talking to the people… it feels like looking into the devil’s eyes,” Fonda said at the protest. “I’ve talked to people who have lost what was theirs over generations and are losing their livelihoods, the fishing, the oystering, the shrimping…”
Fonda called on the Biden administration to take action: “If President [Joe] Biden declared a climate emergency he could take money from the Pentagon and he could reinstate the crude oil export [ban]. Once the export ends, the drilling will end. They’re only drilling because they can export it.”
The successful action came despite interference from police, who threatened to issue tickets and tow away the six boats the fishers had originally parked in front of the convention center. Some participants agreed to move their boats, but the group was able to park two boats in front of the center and persevere in their protest.
“We’re standing in the fire down there. And these people over here, the decisions that they make, for which our fishermen are paying the price. That’s bullshit,” Travis Dardar, who organized the fishers’ trip and founded the group Fishermen Involved in Sustaining our Heritage (FISH), said in a statement.” The police got us blocked here, they got us blocked there. But know that the fishermen are here and we’re still going to try and give them hell.”
Editor’s note: We wrote this article to give you a historical and current background of how people of the Philippines work relentlessly against dam constructions. It is a summary of the book Mapping Anti-Dam Movements: The Politics of Water Reservoir Construction and Hydropower Development Projects in the Philippines by Fernan Talamayan of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
The Filipinos, of which some of them are DGR allies, bravely try to protect water and land, even though the military persecutes and sometimes kills them for doing this.
A few years ago two DGR members went to the Philippines to exchange training and struggle methods. Since then the connection has developped into an ongoing solidarity, where we are able through donations by readers like you to support the allies’ activism and work together in grassroot projects. DGR Asia Pacific Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dgrasiapacific/
By Mary Ann Jasper and Benja Weller
The people of the Philippines Archipelago are known as one of the world’s “most vibrant and advanced” multicultural society. They know how to organize in different affinity groups such as youth groups, workers alliances, and indigenous women’s groups, and how to build a culture of community and resistance to engage in important issues that the government fails to address.
There’s been more research done on the anti-mining movement in the Philippines, and less research on the anti-dam movement. But dam building is as relevant, and impacts as many local people, as mining projects do. National organisations such as the Haribon Foundation, Infrawatch PH and the Philippine Movement for Climate Change are also involved in helping the anti-dam movement.
Development means less indigenous land
Most regions affected by dam building are indigenous ancestral lands around the Manila metro area, because the country’s capital suffers chronic water shortages.
The indigenous peoples in the Philippines are the most marginalized people regarding health care, education, and income. This dates back to the late 19th century where the Spanish colonialists, on the basis of a new law, took away the land of indigenous peoples.
The existing Philippine law should protect indigenous peoples with it’s “Freedom, Prior and Informed Consent” policy and “The indigenous peoples rights act of 1997”. Instead research of Fernan Talamayan shows that these rights are being violated across the country. The Philippine government supports hydro power dam projects under the declaration of “development” and “clean energy” in order to purportedly create more jobs and solve the energy crisis.
“Red-tagging” as a method to silence people
In announcing the construction of the New Centennial Water Source Kaliwa Dam 2019, President Duterte pointed out that his government will push infrastructure projects at the cost of indigenous and environmental concerns:
“Let me be very clear to the citizens. You have every right to protest [infrastructure development] if it places your life in jeopardy, but if the safeguards are there between your concerns and the crisis that you’re trying to avoid, I will use the extraordinary powers of presidency.”
In other words, he sees no alternative for the water crisis other than dam building, whereas the indigenous peoples aim for restoring the true source of fresh water: healthy forests and watersheds.
The government uses a method called “red-tagging”, where it willfully accuses the most influential members in the anti-dam movement of being supporters of the New People’s Army (NPA), an armed wing of the Philippine Communist Party. That gives the military a mandate to surveille, harass and even kill these innocent local people.
These extrajudicial killings and other forms of state violence can weaken or strengthen anti-dam movements. While they can intensify the popular call for justice, they are also used to directly intimidate indigenous communities and force them to sell their lands to the government.
Stopping the Laiban dam
The Philippine state, meanwhile, employs divide and conquer tactics to manipulate local people into voting for the dam building by using shady voting methods which can cause division between the community members.
But if the protests stay strong, then the government’s dam-building plans can be stopped, as we see in the case of the Laiban dam project: The pressure of mobilization of the opposition consisting of religious groups, farmers, local environmental justice organizations, fisherfolk, local scientists and professionals stopped the construction of this dam in 2019.
A Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) commented on the halt of the project, saying that “Laiban is out, insofar as this administration is concerned, because of the social engineering nightmare that we’ll encounter in resettling 4800 families”.
Nonetheless the success of the opposing groups was overshadowed by several extrajudicial killings of engaged activists and indigenous peoples who the Philippine military harrassed prior to their murders.
No livelihood nor income when resettling
The same story of state-sponsored violence continues in other anti-dam construction projects.
A local group called Peasant Movement to Free the Agno (TIMMAWA), against the construction of the San Roque Dam, which several national and international environmental justice organizations supported, had a leader called Jose Doton or Apo Jose. He received death threats and was surveilled and “red-tagged” by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a “communist sympathizer and a terrorist” before he was killed on May 16th 2006 near his home in San Nicholas, Pangasinan in northern Luzon.
Even when such extreme methods aren’t being used, indigenous peoples are paid to leave their ancestral land – but these resettlements under the Philippine law to other locations don’t turn out as successful as promised by the government.
One member of the Ibaloi people, who had to leave their land to make way for the San Roque Multipurpose Project, says in an Interview by Imhof:
“Before we moved, we were far better off. We had smaller houses but we had sources of livelihood. We could eat, grow vegetables, do gold panning. Here we need money to survive, but we have no source of income.”
The consequences of the Kaliwa Dam in 2019, where indigenous peoples lost their sacred burial sites and fishing and hunting grounds, led to the destruction of their culture and source of livelihoods in such a way that future generations may not be able to survive.
Communities mobilize against San Roque dam
The dam in the Pangasinan Province in northern Luzon stopped the natural overflow by the Agno River which was a traditional method used by farmers of San Nicolas to irrigate their fields. When the region is struck by strong typhoons, as happens frequently in the Philippines, the dam needs to release excess water which causes major flooding. In 2009 the release of excess water killed 57 people and destroyed crops and infrastructure worth billions of dollars.
It is no surprise therefore that local communities accompanied the building of the San Roque dam on the same river by huge protests: They filed lawsuits, engaged in judicial activism and media-based activism, sent letters and petitions to government officials, and mobilized public campaigns and street protests.
Philippine’s wildlife needs rivers
The survival of endemic wildlife is also in danger, as the planners want to build the dam within the National Wildlife Sanctuary (NPWS) and would directly impact 96 endemic species. Among those are the endangered Raflessia Manillana corpse flower, the Philippine mahogany and the endangered Philippine eagle. When dams are being constructed, entire ecosystems of rivers collapse and rainforests are destroyed, causing the loss of countless individual animals and species.
Despite all the threats and repression that local people have to endure, their opposition against dam building stays strong. When the solution of the government to energy crises in the Philippines is “development”, environmentalists and indigenous peoples ask, “development for whom?” and do everything in their power to keep protecting the livelihoods and rich ecosystems all of the Philippines depends upon.
The population in the Philippines is among the fastest growing in the world and consequently the Philippine government faces an enormous challenge as to whether it can provide for its human population without obliterating the environment that provides the basis of life.
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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the book Wild Yoga by Rebecca Wildbear. In this excerpt, Rebecca talks about connecting with spirituality, and demonstrates how caring for the nature and other nonhumans is an integral part of it. Learn more about her work at the end of this post.
I walk through the cave’s rocky, wet terrain, placing my hand on a wall to steady myself as my eyes adjust to the dark. Pausing, I hear the soft, dripping echo of dew sliding off rock. It sounds like a heartbeat from within this cool earthen interior. As water trickles over my feet, I remember watching springs emerge from darkness, rising from under the ground to feed streams, lakes, and rivers. I thank these waters for nourishing all life on our planet.
As a guide, I invite others to be nourished by the imaginal waters that spring forth from the depths, releasing visionary potential, expanding consciousness, and revealing other ways to live. Being in our deep imagination while attuning to nature’s wild imagination can enlarge our perception, align us with a deeper intelligence, and remind us of ancient and new potentialities. Grounded in reverence for the living planet, we can listen for what she needs.
Visions and dreams spring forth from the belly of the Earth, as does actual water, to nourish our souls and the world’s soul and keep everything alive. The majority of drinkable water worldwide comes from underground aquifers, now being rapidly drawn down. Rain is unable to replenish the amount being mined. Globally, water use has risen to more than twice the rate of population growth. It is still increasing. Ninety percent of water used by humans is consumed by industry and agriculture. When these waters are overused, lakes, streams, and rivers dry up.
In the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, a third of houses lack running water; in some towns, the figure is 90 percent. Peabody Energy, a large coal producer and Fortune 500 company, pulled so much water from the Navajo aquifer before closing its mining operation in 2019 that many wells and springs have run dry. And it is not only coal mining that usurps water. Since 1980, lithium mining companies in Chile have made billions consuming so much water that indigenous Atacama villagers were forced to abandon their settlements. For millennia, they had used their scarce water supply carefully. Now, where hundreds of flamingos once lived on beautiful lagoons, the ground is hard and cracked.
The cave womb of the Earth is creative and life-giving but fragile. As we bring awareness to life underneath the surface, we can grieve and offer our tears for the massive losses of groundwater and the poisoning of underground waterways. We can pray for a vision to help us respond to clear-cut forests, plowed prairies, drained wetlands, and the harms of human-only land use, like mining and agriculture. It is hard to bear witness, but we are part of the Earth’s body. We need to feel what is happening and seek and offer help.
Spirit abides in all living things and is inseparable from the natural world. To destroy the Earth is to desecrate God. Prayer is a way of being present and in relationship with everything. We begin to restore balance when we honor the sanctity of life. By listening to dreams, our muses, and nature, we align ourselves with powerful allies and can glean our purpose and understand how to serve the whole. The harm humans are causing the Earth asks us to return to her, listen, and pray for visions that can help us restore balance.
Into the Heart of the World
Opening to the suffering of the Earth carries us into the heart of the world. It is gut-wrenching to see the world around us becoming more damaged. The pain is not something we can deal with and move on. Once we finally grasp the immensity of ecological devastation, it is hard to bear the feelings of depression, rage, anxiety, cynicism, overwhelm, hopelessness, despair, and apathy. The feelings are not ours alone, but what we are sensing from our planet home. Stephen Harrod Buhner wrote it’s “our feeling response to a communication from the heart of Earth” urging us “to re-inhabit our interbeing with the world.” We need to face what is happening and let the feelings speak to us. To listen to their messages and let them alter the course we are on.
Whatever we love and may lose carries us into the world’s heart. When I was twenty-one, I had non-Hodgkins lymphoma and thought I might die. Many people prayed for me. Their good wishes healed me and brought me joy. I was surprised by how well I felt, despite the physical pain. Later, I wondered if their prayers had helped me feel good.
Prayer connects us to the moment and invites us into a cocreative partnership with life. In the yoga asana classes I teach, I invite our movements to be prayer and our bodies to be a doorway to the sacred.
I pray with others in nature, guiding people to let go and listen. To feel their unmet longing to find deeper meaning and purpose, to become whole and live a soul-centered existence. Sometimes the prayers we live can feel intensely tricky. In the cave womb of transformation, visions can emerge, and the dark nights of our souls can pull us toward the holy mystery at the center of our lives.
I am aligned with my soul, and I know others who are too. Yet ecosystems are collapsing under the greed of global capitalism, and more species and lands die each day. Our prayers need to stretch beyond the individual. Soul-making is a collaboration tied to the fate of Earth, asking us to descend into the collective dark night of our planet. To love the natural world is to weep at how humanity harms her. If we open to the tremendous sorrow of our failure to protect oceans, forests, and rivers, this can bring us into the world’s heart, dismembering our sense of self and what we have believed about the world. We can receive visions for the Earth through a collective descent into the underworldly depths. We can let the Earth touch us and listen to what she is saying through feelings engendered in our hearts.
Alicia, a young woman who lives in a yurt in southwestern Colorado, places her forehead and hands on the red soil of the desert. “This isn’t yours,” she cries, fierce and mournful. “This belongs to all of us.” She repeats this phrase over and over, her voice increasing in intensity, her hands slapping the ground.
Sixteen of us sit in circle in the Utah desert, participating in a five-day Prayers in the Dark program. The sky is blue, and the sun is bright. It is late morning, and the desert is silent except for the occasional call of a mourning dove. Today, we are engaged in a ceremony similar to the Truth Mandala practice developed by Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, expressing our feelings about what is happening to the planet. Mary stands up and opens her mouth in a bloodcurdling scream.
The group is silent, frozen, taking in her scream. It pierces us and the land and is disturbing and relieving as if we had all howled, shrieked, or wailed.
Alex says, “I grew up on the Boundary Waters,” a wilderness area in Minnesota that is part of the Superior National Forest. He talks about canoeing as a child and all the birds he saw. “Trump has granted leases to mining companies,” he points out, referring to a past American president. “The land and water will be poisoned.”
Thomas, from Wyoming, is trembling and in tears. I asked him if he wanted to share his thoughts with the group. He shakes his head no. “I can’t speak,” he says, choking. “It’s too sad.”
I feel my longing for cement, metal, and tin to melt away. For machines that mine the Earth to be dismantled. For rivers to run clear and be full of salmon. Flocks of birds to darken the sky. Ancient trees to cover the land. Oceans to teem with whales, dolphins, and coral. People to stop extracting and start honoring. The Earth to breathe herself alive.
“Close your eyes and root in the Earth,” I suggest to the group. “Imagine you are liquifying in a cocoon or hibernating in a cave. Descend into your despair and listen for what emerges. Ask for visions of how we can respond.”
Our souls are linked to the underground heart of the world. Deeper under the surface of our planet than water is fire. Magma, a hot, semifluid material, can move up to the surface and be ejected as lava. Our feelings are linked to what is happening on our planet. Our fire — our rage — is an active and receptive grief cry. We can speak and listen, surrender and serve, and offer ourselves. We can embody what we receive as responses arise through images, emotions, words, dreams, or sensations. To live and die the visions we are given is a prayer.
Death
An ongoing relationship with death changed my life and kept me close to the Mystery. My scare with cancer did not end once I was in remission. Symptoms I felt when I had cancer — pressure in my chest, a chronic cough, nausea — sometimes returned. I had frequent CAT scans after I recovered, checking to see if it had reappeared. Statistically, the odds of a reoccurrence were high. I worried cancer would return, and I’m incredibly grateful it did not.
Death will claim all of us and those we love one day. It preys on us, bringing us to our knees in humility, inspiring us to pray and listen. Death initiated me into the mysteries, connecting me more deeply with my soul and the sacred. Nature is a place where I’ve always experienced the holy. When I had cancer, I also encountered a divine presence within me. I didn’t know what it was then. Now I understand it as an aspect of my mythic soul.
Our death can feed the spirits if we offer our lives to what matters. According to Martín Prechtel, young people in the Tz’utujil Mayan village where he lived “wrestled with death” during their initiation ceremonies. They tried to court their souls back from death with eloquence. Death was likely to agree to give them their souls only if the initiates committed to “ritually render a percentage of the fruit of [their] art, [their] eloquence, and [their] imagination to the other world.” The Earth and Spirit are fed by how we live and die. I imagine them starving and grieving for people to listen, create beauty, and give back. When we live and die eloquently, our lives and deaths nourish the spirit world, like a grandmother tree nourishes a forest in her life and death.
Guiding on rivers, I sometimes feel close to death. Praying for my life, I am surprised by the images that arise and remind me of what I love and value — the sacred beauty of wild places; quiet moments alone with my body and my muse; being with loved ones, my dog Xander, friends; swimming or rafting; water.
On quests, I guide others to put their lives on the altar if they are emotionally and developmentally ready. Seeking a psychospiritual death is part of their prayer to receive a vision of their deeper purpose. People sometimes encounter their souls on their deathbeds, but they have no time left to live it. Intentionally letting go of the familiar and stepping into a liminal unknown is a kind of death, and visions of soul or other extraordinary or numinous possibilities can come. Some questers seek an initiatory dismemberment, hoping to receive what David Whyte calls
your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.
In a meadow in the Colorado high country, twelve people stand at the edge of a portal made of sticks, pine cones, and flowers. A deer peers out from behind a ponderosa pine. Quaking aspens, lupines, and bluebells surround us. Each person reads their prayer before walking across the threshold to fast alone in the wilderness for three days and nights.
Initiation ceremonies like these were common in ancient cultures of indigenous and nature-based peoples, and some still do them. Yet, as Martín Prechtel explained, when an entire culture “refuses to wrestle death with eloquence, then death comes up to the surface to eat us in a literal way, with wars and depression.” Perhaps if modern Western culture supported its people to grow and face death, it would stop consuming all life on the planet.
The dominant culture will not last. Founded on the principles of individualism, capitalism, human supremacy, white supremacy, and colonialism, this mainstream culture is incompatible with the Earth’s living systems. Yet industrial civilization continues on the path of futile addiction to an unsustainable lifestyle, in denial of its impending collapse.
The world will be healthier once the dominant culture ends — animals, plants, water, soil, developing nations, indigenous cultures, and rural people. The sooner it comes to a halt, the more animals, fish, trees, and rivers will remain, and the more likely it is that we will have sustainable food sources for future generations. Waiting for things to unravel may make the crash worse for humans and nonhumans living through it and those who come afterward.
If only the ecological crisis would catalyze radical change that would compel industrial civilization to let go of harming the natural world to keep itself alive. Government and corporate leaders and the systems of power that rule society do not seem willing to put global empire on the ceremonial altar, despite how much harm it causes. The global empire has been going on for a long time without any significant shift. Individuals and communities need to reclaim the power to take the necessary courageous steps to ensure global empire is put on the altar. We can let go of what we don’t believe in and know isn’t working. We can align with what and who truly matters.
Visionary Power
Modern culture has separated us from our land and the instinct to protect it. We reclaim power when we deepen our relationship with the Earth and descend into the heart of our planet to grieve and receive visions for our souls and the world. Visions imbue us with mysterious powers and guide us into greater alignment with nature in ways our minds can’t conceive. Dreams are real. Listening gives us authentic power by which we can change the world, bringing together our visionary and revolutionary natures.
When we let go, we don’t know what is next. We descend into our prerational instincts, listen and attune to our planet home, and invite our visionary selves to guide us. A caterpillar offers her life in the cocoon, not knowing she will metamorphose into a butterfly. We can liquefy in our wild imagination and pray within the dark Earth. Feeling our watery souls and the water flowing under the ground, we can pray for a vision to help us restore forests, birds, oceans, and justice. Yearning for a world where the sacred is blended with all we do, we can partner with the dream of the Earth. Will the universe hear us and respond?
I close my eyes and remember visions — mine and others’ — that have sprung forth from the depths of wild nature and dreamtime. I remember springs I have drunk from in the wild, my lips on a mossy rock, my mouth filling with the sweet flavor and vibrant texture of waters that have long gestated in the dark Earth until they were ready to rise. I lean in and receive the generosity of water, longing for her elixirs to stir visions of ways to halt the human-caused harm and restore and nourish her ecosystems back to life.
A Wild Yoga Practice for Praying within the Dark Earth
Go out at night or find a dark place in nature, be present in your body with all your feelings, and listen, wait, and pray. Find a cave or other wild place where you can sit in darkness. Imagine yourself deep inside the Earth. See if you can sense the place where water arises or feel her heartbeat. Imagine you are gestating in the underground heart of the world. Wait and listen. Notice what you feel and what arises. Ask the Earth what she wants. Explore whatever comes with all of your senses. Write or create art to honor the visions you receive. Let them guide your actions in the world.
About Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth
Wild Yoga invites you to create a personal yoga practice that seamlessly melds health and well-being with spiritual insight, Earth stewardship, and cultural transformation. Wilderness guide and yoga instructor Rebecca Wildbear came to yoga after a life-threatening encounter with cancer in her twenties. Over years of teaching and healing, she devised the unique and user-friendly practice she presents in Wild Yoga. In this book, she guides you in connecting to the natural world and living from your soul while also addressing environmental activism. Whether you are new to yoga or an experienced practitioner, by engaging in this vibrant approach, you’ll discover greater levels of love, purpose, and creativity, along with the active awareness we know our planet deserves.
In this video produced by New World Library, Rebecca Wildbear discusses how Wild Yoga connects us to the Earth. Check out this excerpt from the book, “Playing Your Part in the Symphony,” on the publisher’s website.
Rebecca Wildbear is the author of Wild Yoga:A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth and the creator of a yoga practice called Wild Yoga, which empowers individuals to tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth’s community, dreams, and their own wild nature so they may live a life of creative service. She has led Wild Yoga programs since 2007 and guides other nature and soul programs through Animas Valley Institute. Visit her at http://www.rebeccawildbear.com.
