Agraria Journal Winter 2021

6 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 What does “watershed” mean to you? A “watershed moment” can be a cusp, mark a divide. Earthly watersheds make for differences and natural diversity. Watersheds are basins that gather, channel, absorb and filter precipitation; they collect waters from their uplands. These flow downslope and congregate: seeps and rivulets connect with brooks, streams, rivers, lakes, and seas. Watersheds are life-places. They outline and embrace distinct realms. They collect fluid intelligence from animate terrains. Watershed maps strikingly resemble placentas. Their capillaries and tributaries, their veins and main stems, carry water and—every substance or organism— that can be dissolved, eroded, relocated, or washed from the land to replenish or contaminate the water bodies along the way to the world ocean. On this terraqueous planet, with its varied geologies and landforms, however, they’re effaced. Whether the water’s in the ground, impounded, or captive in mains, watersheds are biogeographic, natural territories: small to large, related interconnected, nested wholes. They’re the bodies and circulatory systems of our bioregions. Their outlines seldom reconcile with geopolitical boundaries. Lately the idea that nation-states, this nation-state in particular, might usefully devolve into smaller polities is being mooted, even in the august New York Times. Very well then: Decentralize to where? Relocalize to where? Could gargantuan political entities deliberately and consensually scale down and become organic, interrelated realms like watersheds and bioregions, transcending the Enlightenment’s geometric, geopolitical strictures? Stratigraphers say we’re far gone into the Anthropocene. Although that term is rightly contested for overrating us rogue primates, it asserts that Homo sapiens’ reshaping of the world has become a full scale geophysical force, on par with orogeny. Volcanos ‘r us. In this new epoch nothing in the ecosphere is as it was a mere fifty millennia ago. Our long contentious history with the planet’s water and its ways and the effects of our unceasing attempts at control began with intensive agriculture. Human beings started remodeling watersheds, hoeing runnels, digging ditches, channeling streams, sinking wells, draining marshes and fens. Wetlands became real estate. Deserts bloomed. Epochal changes, rearrangements, and dependencies being fait accompli the world around, I wonder: Is espousing a more reciprocal, intimate consciousness of our watersheds, counseling humility before the ways of the land, and learning the histories of its living waters poetry, not politics? Perhaps. But if you anticipate that the energy-intensive centralization, resource extravagance, total digitization and consequent embrittling of globalized industrial civilization will prove wholly unmanageable and unsustainable, maybe supporting individuals, respecting communities, healing the land and thereby renewing the waters—the practice of local futures— will spawn what bioregionalist forerunner Peter Berg termed “a life-place politics.” “The logic of watershed protection must travel upstream to the divides and follow the watercourses all the way down.” WATERSHED CONSCIOUSNESS— Is Streaming Wisdom a Community Solution? BY STEPHANIE MILLS