June 20, 2015
SynTalk thinks about the past, present and the future of water, and its dialectical relationship with Earth and life. We enter the worlds of rain, snow, ocean, monsoon, subterranean & surface rivers, dams, volcanoes, canals, lakes, estuaries, mountains, polar regions, and drains. What exactly is a river? Is water the same everywhere? The concepts are derived off / from Thales, Anaximander, Pierre Perrault, & Edme Mariotte, among others. We think of water both as an element and a compound. What would water be as a ‘ground’ of design and thinking, given that we are so wedded to the fixed dimensions of terra firma? How water is open, fluid (in space & time), and relative, and always retains its identity (?). Why are maps blue only somewhere, when water is everywhere? Do we privilege one moment in time (as rivers) in the hydrological cycle? Can we challenge ourselves to live in moments of (say) the rain or evaporation? Is there a need to include soil moisture in our imagination? How the sun is the essential driver of the water cycle, even though sunlight penetrates only till about ~100 metres in the sea. Do rivers also need water? How water is a lot more than H2O, with dissolved & suspended loads, nutrients, isotopic content, and microbial life. How & why rivers keep changing their dendritic courses? Are rivers fundamentally a series of holding & overflow systems, rather than systems with a source and a destination? How the ‘main stream’ of certain rivers may have been fallaciously justified historically by the surveyors? How stagnant water can be anti life. Have we (contextually) subjugated and privileged water, and told it: ‘be there, don’t come here’? Are floods a problem? Why do we channelize rivers, when water finds its own level? Is the earth losing water? When did it first rain on earth, and did rains come much before the rivers? The links between ~11 days, Cameroon’s Lake Nyos disaster, Catcher in the Rye, stream orders, The Big Muddy, photolysis, fair weather, Nile floods, run-offs, Sun, ecological cycles, electricity, Avogadro’s number, gravity, & independence. How water acts as Earth’s thermostat, & also helps the planet self sustain. Why doesn’t water vapour heat the earth up despite being a powerful greenhouse gas? Are there some water molecules that have never left the deep oceans or the atmosphere? How variation (a feature, & not a bug) is the life of water flow. What would happen if 100% of the rivers were dammed; could nature strike back? Can/should we simulate nature? Should dams be undone? Can future be a place of liberated water, with dissolved lines between land and water? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Dilip da Cunha (architecture, design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Shripad Dharmadhikary (social & environmental activism, Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, Pune), & Prof. Ramesh Rengaswamy (paleoclimatology, oceanography, PRL, Ahmedabad).
