Lea Schick

Lea Schick is the editor and moderator of this debate forum. During the RETHINK exhibition she will facilitate the RETHINK NATURE discussions here on her blog. We will very much encourage you to participate in the debate!

The natural circle of water, or “Where does your poop go when you flush the toilet?"

“We are no longer a minor species living in diverse ecosystems. We are now a dominant species that has homogenised ecosystems. […] Today we behave as if we are exceptional from natural systems and operate by controlling and excluding nature. For example, where does your poop go, when you use a flying or flushing toilet? Yes, the human system of disposal means it disappeared from having a direct presence in your life. It may have moved away from your area of habitation, but it hasn’t really disappeared, no matter how much you wish it to be so. It has merely moved to another place on earth. Your poop is still present in the world, and its presence has effects in the world that you created. Yet we persist in pretending that the poop really is no longer our concern. We don’t think about its cumulative effect until it bursts through into what we consider the human system, with direct and detrimental consequences to our lives.”

Tse-Hui Teh gives us, in her article RE: URGENT – You in the Water-Cycle, a fascinating insight into the water-cycle, which we in the industrialized world most often take for given, but which we none the less are a main ingredient of. Because we are the only species that has managed to find ways to transport more water than we can carry, we have manipulated the water-cycle in a non-sustainable way, leading way to much fresh, drinkable water out into the salty ocean. This doesn’t only makes us run low on drinking water in some places of the world, but the water further more crosses all kind of borders on its way, transporting and washing away as well natural minerals and human pollution and shutters and destroys our fragile eco-system.

Which kind of view on nature do we perform by using water as was it a magic stream? How can we provide people with a better understanding about the ecosystem of the earth? How can we develop a water-cycle that are more true to our nature and in which we share the water with all other organisms?

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Contributions for RETHINK NATURE

 

ABOUT RETHINK NATURE

Discussions about climate change often seem to be centered around the concept of nature as ‘the Other’ – something that is outside of us. Sometimes lost, sometimes distant, often something we have left behind, and something to which we should perhaps return, in one form or another. But thus nature is also something, which we have been largely able to happily forget over the course of our industrial revolutions, and to omit almost entirely from consideration in conventional human planning and development.

But the reality of climate change – a force of Nature so all-pervasive and profound in the severity of its realized and projected effects that it is compelling us to rethink practically every aspect of life on our planet – makes this romanticization and idealization of ‘Mother Nature’ difficult to maintain, and demonstrates that our perception of any meaningful distance from nature is shockingly illusory. We have not returned to nature; nature is returning to us, forcing us as it did our ancestors to transform our methods of devising and executing every sphere of human existence. When we can (un)intentionally change the weather, when water and air are commodities that we can own, and when the very climate has become a subject of intense political debate at every level, then nature again becomes a complex and ambiguous phenomenon.

How does climate change force us to rethink our notions of nature? And how does our perception of nature affect how we deal with climate change? Through a number of articles approaching different aspects of what we call ‘nature’, we encourage you to share your opinions and thoughts with the writers and with other interested.

 

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