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By Lucy Rodina
Is it ethical to let a river run dry?
Is it ethical to have clean drinking water in Vancouver and hundreds of
boil water advisories in Indigenous communities all across Canada?
Is it ethical to take away water from rural areas to quench the thirst of ever growing cities?
Try to think about a river and ethics together. These two words do
not fit together easily because we tend to separate the world of the
“natural” from that of the “ethical.”
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Dry land in Saskatchewan (Photo credit: Lucy Rodina) |
We rarely ask ourselves these questions. Worse, we think it’s the
philosopher’s job to figure out the ethics questions. Not true. Ethics
is not abstract, not just an idea. We apply ethics everyday— from our
personal choices to making decisions about the environment.
So what
is environmental ethics? In short, it is derived
from the human relationship with the natural environment. Broadly
speaking, it is about deeply held values related to our connections with
non-human beings and ecosystems. It goes without saying that different
people and peoples hold different values and therefore convey and abide
by very different ethics. Unfortunately, in environmental governance
(i.e., the ways in which we manage natural resources, such as water,
forests, fisheries, and the environment) we rarely acknowledge our own
values, let alone critically engage with them. Instead, environmental
planners and decision-makers often bury value judgments in the technical
language of efficacy and expediency. A lack of critical engagement with
ethics constitutes a major blind spot in environmental governance. As a
result we fail to acknowledge that competing ethics can be sources of
environmental and social injustice and conflict.
With 780 million people without access to clean water for drinking
and domestic use and close to 2.5 billion people without access to
adequate sanitation (most of whom live in aboriginal communities and
impoverished rural and urban areas in the Global South) combined with
population growth, urbanization and climate change, water access is
indeed a complex problem. In conventional water management, economic and
technical thinking have been the main drivers of decision-making and
planning. As a result of relying too heavily on the productive uses of
water, we have seen water grabbing, diversion, damming and displacement
of peoples in the Global South and elsewhere.
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Bagmati Rvier in Kathmandu, Nepal (Photo credit: Lucy Rodina) |
Why do we value efficiency in water supply systems more than their
impact on wildlife or marginalized peoples? Would we still build dams if
we understood them to be unethical? This is not to say that we should
not care about efficiency at all, but to question
why we value economic and technical aspects more than other considerations.
Deciding where and how water should be allocated only based on
economic and technical principles risks severely undermining the
livelihoods and cultural, spiritual and environmental worldviews of
those whose access to water is already precarious.
A Water Ethics Charter
Rather than bemoan all problems, let me tell you about the
Water Ethics Initiative
– a relatively small, but committed movement (and by movement here I
mean a loose network of scholars and practitioners working with water in
various ways) advancing an ethics agenda for water management. The
initiative is mostly led by the Water Ethics Network, which was
established at the Water-Culture Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in
2010.
The Water Ethics Initiative builds on the work of a number of
scholars and organizations (for example see the work of Groenfeldt,
2013; Groenfeldt & Schmidt, 2013; Schmidt & Peppard, 2014). One
of the key objectives of the Initiative is to create a Water Ethics
Charter— a consensus document outlining the guiding moral and ethical
principles in water governance— to be endorsed by governments, NGOs,
water stewardship organizations, Indigenous nations and companies.
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Water taps in Nepal (Photo credit: Lucy Rodina) |
The process of creating the Charter does not have a clear
pre-determined water ethic in mind. Instead, through the deliberation
process, the Initiative hopes to raise awareness around ethics, a far
too mute aspect of water governance. The process of creating the Charter
aims to build up a more grounded understanding of the values that do
and those that should guide decision-making around water. An ethical
framing of water governance, for example, could be significantly more
attentive to questions of social and environmental justice as well as
diverse cultural and spiritual beliefs around water. An ethics-based
water paradigm could start by asking
whose water we are talking about,
who
is involved in the governance process, and how burdens, benefits and
responsibilities are shared among the community of water users.
Ethics in a classical sense refers to morals— and deeply held
values—that determine which social practices are acceptable or
unacceptable. Ethics offer a guide in deciding which actions to take
(i.e. between two choices, the ethical one is more desirable).
Traditionally, in Western industrialized contexts, we tend to think
about morals only in reference to humans. Valuing
nature, for
example, happens in terms of its utility to society. In contrast, First
Nations communities in British Columbia have had historically a rather
different mentality around water and the biosphere in general—one more
in tune with the various relationships between humans and nature and the
obligations that arise from these deep interconnections.
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Communal water tap in Cape Town slum (Photo credit: Lucy Rodina) |
With the rise of environmental ethics in philosophy, scholars started
talking about nature’s intrinsic value and questioned the lack of moral
considerations for non-human species and ecosystems. Today, many,
including myself, argue that we have numerous reasons to start thinking
more comprehensively about ethics in environmental governance. One
reason is the fact that the ways we manage or intervene in ecosystems
often have serious ethical implications that are explicitly related to
social an environmental justice. For instance, a decision to increase
water supply through dam building has oftentimes led to displacement of
people, dramatically altering watercourses, destroying fish habitats and
other ecosystems.
Re-thinking Our Relationship to Water
A few powerful lessons have already emerged from the work of the
Water Ethics Initiative. First, fairness, justice and equity are
important dimensions of water governance. This of course is not new, but
few water policies score very well on these points. Second, there are
many moral worldviews (western, Indigenous, cultural and spiritual) that
pertain to water and the biosphere in general. Many of them are
incommensurable. This challenges the possibility to arrive at “mutually
agreed upon” water ethics and raises the need for place-based approaches
to thinking about ethics. Third, a number of water experts and
practitioners are highlighting the need to think about water as a
complex social-ecological system (in other words, seeing nature and
society as highly interlinked) and argue for embedding our ethical
worldview in this systems understanding. And lastly, water ethics, and
environmental ethics in general, should start from a (re)thinking of our
relationship with the ecological world around us.
Clearly,
coming up with a Water Ethics Charter poses a number of conceptual and
practical challenges: how to reconcile diverse and often incommensurable
values? How to conceptualize ethics within an understanding of water
and society as interlinked? One thing is clear, a deceptively
value-neutral technical or economic way of thinking about water, or
other elements of the natural environment for that matter, misses a set
of important social and ecological relationships around it. We need to
expand our understanding of the water cycle to account for power,
culture, and politics. In simple words: water does not exist only
naturally. It has a social and a political life, permeated by power
dynamics and often injustice.
Social and environmental (in)justice are highly interlinked
processes. We see this in the inequitable distribution of pollution and
“clean” environmental spaces between richer and poorer populations.
Power relations and inequality do not only affect society. Instead,
power relations also affect different kinds of environments,
prioritizing sites for conservation and contributing to environmental
degradation to maintain the interests of social elites to the detriment
of marginalized, impoverished and racialized populations— and to the
detriment of ecosystems themselves. In other words,
social injustice is often played out through the ecosystem.
An understanding that ecosystems have political lives can take us a
long way. As water is simultaneously material and political (Bakker,
2012), so are other ecosystems, natural resources, or ecosystem
services. This can help us start seeing that power relations are
internal to social-ecological systems, not external. Employing ethics
could help explicitly and directly address the social and environmental
justice implications of decisions in environmental governance. This is
not just wishful thinking. We have already made tremendous progress over
the past centuries in extending our ethical boundaries beyond personal
self-interest. Historically, we have seen progress in adopting ethical
principles of fairness, solidarity, and equity in social systems that we
could perhaps draw from to apply to ecological systems. However, we
have had much less success in adopting a more ethical relationship with
the surrounding environment.
This new water ethic should move beyond human relationships between
individuals. It should involve responsibilities and obligations among
communities and nations, between humans and non-human species and
ecosystems, and between present and future generations. We can start by
first asking whether a decision we make around water is ethical. We can
start by evaluating the outcomes of water policies in terms of how
ethical they are. We can also collectively work towards building a
shared vision for more ethical water governance.
Lyudmila (Lucy) Rodina is a PhD student, working with Leila Harris, at
the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES)
and a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. In her
research, Lucy explores the intersection of water governance and climate
change in urban contexts using a social-ecological systems
approach. Lucy is a Steering Committee member of the International Development Research Network at UBC and a member of the EDGES research collaborative and the Program on Water Governance. She is also a social media intern for the Water Ethics Network.