downstream: reimagining water brings together artists, writers, scientists, scholars, environmentalists, and activists who understand that our shared human need for clean water is crucial to building peace and good relationships with one another and the planet. This book explores the key roles that culture, arts, and the humanities play in supporting healthy water-based ecology and provides local, global, and Indigenous perspectives on water that help to guide our societies in a time of global warming. The contributions range from practical to visionary, and each of the four sections closes with a poem to encourage personal freedom along with collective care.
This book contributes to the formation of an intergenerational, culturally inclusive, participatory water ethic. Such an ethic arises from intellectual courage, spiritual responsibilities, practical knowledge, and deep appreciation for human dependence on water for a meaningful quality of life. Downstream illuminates how water teaches us interdependence with other humans and living creatures, both near and far.

Dorothy Christian is a visual storyteller from the Secwepemc and Syilx Nations of British Columbia. She is a Ph. D. candidate at UBC’s Department of Educational Studies and currently writing her dissertation “Gathering Knowledge: Visual Storytellers & Indigenous Storywork.” Publications include chapters in Thinking with Water (Chen et al., eds., 2013) and Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity (Mathur et al., eds., 2011).

Dorothy Christian's profile page

Rita Wong teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: http://downstream.ecuad.ca/ .

Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/rrrwong.

Rita Wong's profile page

• Short-listed, Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize

This collection of works successfully expands our knowledge of and experience with water by merging natural science, social science, arts, and humanities approaches to water. It offers new, innovative, and engaging ways to think about and experience water, especially as it relates to life and vitality.

American Review of Canadian Studies

Downstream stakes out a bold and creative claim to collaborative and cross-cultural eco-spiritual-neo-traditional knowing and, with it, new approaches to policy and action.
A timely read that lends depth and resonance to some of the material and voices [in other books on the subject].

Literary Review of Canada

This rich collection brings together the work of artists, writers, scientists, scholars, environmentalists, and activists, all focusing on the looming global water crisis. ... Writing styles vary from piece to piece throughout the book–poetic, personal, journalistic, and academic–but the shifts between each are well worth navigating for any reader interested in human futures on Earth.

Publishers Weekly