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A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

With piracy raging in the Indian Ocean, international disputes over undersea oil and gas, and chronic overfishing, the oceans have rarely been subject to such varied and environmentally damaging conflict outside a world war. In Who Rules the Waves? Denise Russell gives us a rare insight into these issues and how they could be resolved.

International law states that a coastal country has territorial rights for 12 miles into the sea beyond its coastline, and economic rights for 200 miles, but in practice many countries have virtually no control over their own waters, and there is no international agency powerful enough to settle disputes. Russell provides a thorough examination of the politics of the sea, showing that without a radical change in ocean governance, accelerating climate change and overuse of the sea's resources is likely to have catastrophic effects.

Reveals the intertwined nature of imperial mapping and map history through the making of the colony of French Soudan in nineteenth-century West Africa.

Thomas J. Bassett’s Writing the Land argues that mapping played a key role in France’s territorial conquest of Africa, and that the process of imperial expansion and colonization shaped map history by influencing how maps were constructed, circulated, and used. Analyzing military and surveying campaigns over half a century in an area that became the colony of French Soudan, Bassett focuses on the social and spatial problems that surveyors and mapmakers tried to solve in the process of territorial conquest, as well as the conflicts that arose as they pursued their goals.

In their efforts to obtain this territory, French military leaders, cartographers, and expedition members came into continual contact with local Africans, with whom they negotiated and clashed. Often, imperial officers relied on intermediaries to navigate West African geography, drawing on the knowledge of political authorities, interpreters, guides, and long-distance traders; the maps they produced are inextricable from these interactions. Ultimately, Bassett claims, examining the processes of mapping in the context of these encounters leads us to understand these maps anew as Euro-African constructions, ones that emerge from a complex process of exchange and domination.