Critical Performance: A Short Play on Water

Activity idea #474:
Have students create their own scenarios, tableaux on water use.  Short films also are great awareness-raising tools like the competition above done by high school students in B.C.


As much data there is available by scientific communities about better stewardship and improved education,
as a classroom teacher my thoughts, feelings and conceptions must be checked at the classroom door along with my jacket and bicycle. 

Invariably as studies on “objectivity” indicate individuals can never really divorce themselves from their inclinations and biases in any activity, be it analytic or educational. Professionally, however, we as teachers are bound to norms, standards and responsibilities; fundamentally, cultivating critical thinking, pluralism and civic responsibility involves establishing a values-based learning environment rooted in care and criterion-based objectives.

At this point nearing teacher certification, my pedagogical leanings are informed by service-learning, experiential and inquiry-based strategies.

However what beckons are improved commitments to sources of life. Whereas gentle taps and reminders to be more responsible to air, water, soil and bio-diversity can feel like scattering seeds on barren landscapes,
the inception of environmental consciousness ideally might come from more thorough prodding, civic participation, tougher legislation ... and perhaps satire.

At our disposal are multiple pop culture referrents that can awaken the conflicting roles of stakeholders. The Simpsons universe for example has bogeymen and heros which are recognizable in society.

The corporate polluters (embodied as Montgomery Burns),


witless consumers (the bumbling Homer and other townsfolk),

corrupt politicians (the leacherous Mayor Quimby),

and teethless law-enforcement (the hapless Chief Wiggum),

are regularly challenged/transformed by the television show's conscience, the practicing-Buddhist activist-intellectual, Lisa Simpson.

Also I am becoming convinced that integrating Performative and Imaginative Inquiry can create lasting impressions amongst co-learners, opening the possibility for a conscientization of society, an ecological literacy and change.

Over the years “culture jamming” was a fashionable notion referring to intentionally disrupting the familiar, everyday rituals surrounding consumerism or democratic participation.

Reading the works of Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner Augusto Boal, I recognized elements from Forum and Image Theatre that potentially can empower participants.

Long recognized within majority-world countries (variously called Third World or developing countries with their pejorative connotations), drama for social change has been integral for emancipating women, different-sexualities, AIDS, family planning, sanitation and agricultural practices.

By extension Anti-bullying campaigns (variously called community training) and environmental youth organizations have similarly impacted thousands of school communities.

The premise for Forum Theatre has actors re-creating a scenario where a form of oppression takes place; the audience is invited to step out from their passive position to become “spec-actors” in order to sympathize, identify and transform the oppresive situation.

The sub-branch of Image Theatre stresses the non-verbal and embodied movement. One scenario that a small group and me constructed for our Drama and Education course indeed connected bodily expression, props and place as a “morality play” about water. Below is a reflection on this experience:

SFU Burnaby campus contains multiple corridors, staircases and “contemplative” spaces that can shape and sculpt a scene; the site we selected were like steppes across rockface terrain. In the contained central space covered with a green canopy of deciduous trees, the audience witnessed a Water Origin Myth fall upon them.

An Aquarius female figure beared the planet water, that descended upon them, animating the spec-actors via immersing them with tarps and streaming sheets with a life force animated by a water nymph hero (yours truly). A playfulness and dynamism ensued as we romped, connected together by a permeable web of water. The Creation Myth extends however to the introduction of the human species, who adjacently crept up from the floorboards below. Our two other actors represent avarice, at first awestruck with Water's bounty but quickly convinced that they were stuck in a zero-sum game, recreating a Tragedy of the Commons. The more you take means less for me; amass the most I can before it's gone was coded in their greedy movements, stripping the waterworld from everyone's hands. Our deux ex machina was Aquarius, resolutely angry, funneling the Source in a tug-of-war with me, the Water-Player in tow. And off water and me were swept down, perhaps reabsorbed by the water table. The Water Goddess tried to stave off this punishment, this Fall akin the Garden of Eden; yet the message that was hand-delivered is veritably heard once the (re)Source has been exhausted, extinguished.

Indeed in the classroom debrief, participants were disturbed with the water-snatching; some even latched on momentarily as Adam/Eve took the very water from their fingertips. Nevertheless no spectator fully took ownership of the common resource even if a minority usurped control, losing it for everyone.

Due to the nature of the assignment and time constraints, we did not reproduce fully the extensions characteristic Forum Theatre. These extensions however flesh out the realms of possibility. For example, the scene would be recast in fast-forward, perhaps with the Nymph acting as joker/mediator. A participant would shout “Stop!” and make suggestions as to name, change and revise a protagonist's course of actions, with the actors implementing/integrating the adaptations. Alternately the audience members can swap spots with a protagonist to “try out” divergent actions, interpretations.

Nevertheless since Image Theatre consists with participants representating (“scuplting”) their experience and oppression, meaning is democratized. A range of associations are made by individuals towards the sculptor's image, with various cross-cultural and unconscious ramifications. Similar to “culture jamming” as described above, embodied work effectively “short-circuit[s] the censorship of the brain, the 'cops in the head' placed there by society or personal experience” (words by Jackson, a translator of Boal).

Downstream

Limitless growth as a “root metaphor” urgently needs redress. While Classical Economics does include scarcity in its models, its strength as analytical tool is as strong as the variables included. Multiple factors key to ecological stewardship are considered as “externalities”- and as educators for social responsibility, problematizing metaphors about the environment is key.

What is troublesome however is when sources of life are commodified--made into products to be bought and sold. When riverways, atmosphere, oceans, soils, wetlands and forests become toxic, the impacts are distributed while the benefits are private. In other words, property, maximized profit are bound to shareholders, and a trickle-down effect occurs for the rest through employment, economic activity; yet the pollutants extracted, produced and disposed permeate these boundaries.

(An exception is when industries are “nationalized”--the modes of production belong to a state—where benefits are shared. The key question is how do localities participate? For example the Cree Nations around James Bay took action about the mega-hydroelectric projects during the 70s and 90s so to develop the first modern treaty with Quebec.)

Here are a few inquiry trajectories for the classroom:

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  What chemical compounds are found in our bodies? What products and factors increase these? On the micro-level, contaminants enter our bloodstreams, digestive tracts and lungs. One study revealed in astounding rates of bodily toxicity Canadian Members of Parliament .

• 
  
  
  
  "Sum of the Parts" is an Enviro-Ed game from Project Wild.  Actions and  pollutants upstream by river-front property-owners is shared by all those down river.  This is a helpful means to understand watersheds, which like oceans redistribute human extraction, transformation and disposal activities. This can be a springboard to study contaminants from industry, construction and transport that seap into ground-soils.

• 
  
  
  
  When studying economic models, challenge students to include environmental or social variables into the supply and demand curves, such as with oil. Or inversely integrate micro-economics into other understandings.
  
  
• 
  
  
  
  New laws have been passed in B.C. and other provinces that electronics producers are responsible for their proper disposal. This is also called product stewardship and applies to a variety of other products.  (Notice the fee added to your bill next time.) 
  
  
• 
  
  
  
  The issue of transparency of where these items go when “recycled.” The smelter in Trail BC takes a good proportion, but much ends up dismantled by hand like in Mainland China or Nigeria . Have students ask tough questions of where items go once "recycled." See what local groups are doing to reuse and reduce (for example, my computer is one recycled and free after volunteering at Free Geek Vancouver.)
  
  
  Examine as a class current relationships between First Nation bands and industry as extension to units on the fur trade.

Water without Borders

In my seminar class on methods in Enviro-Education when I was assigned this project “The Environment and Me” I felt like how Rufus Rainwright self-described his relationship to the Opera. This emotive songster openly rebelled against his folksinger mum at the age of fourteen: “I didn't choose opera, she chose me.”


I feel a similar connection to lakes, rivers, ponds and streams—and on summer holidays oceans, tides and canoe-rides. Now acknowledging this aloud sounds like grandiosity ...

Yet it makes sense on an intuitive level, as Suzuki has lucidly said, water and humanity are inseperable

Every one of us is at least 60% water by weight, we’re just a big blob of water with enough organic thickener added to keep us from dribbling away on the floor. When you take a drink of water you think it is London water. But in reality the hydrological cycle cartwheels water around the planet and any drink you take, wherever you are, has [some] molecules from every ocean on the planet, the canopy of the Amazon, the steppes of Russia. We are water.  Whatever we do to water we do to ourselves

If I were to have had a rite of passage with water it was in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Specifically landlocked Burkina Faso reinforced in me how

the 21st century will be dominated by concerns of provisions of water.

As countries became submerged in post-9/11 hysteria, I took part with a number of Canadians in a cultural immersion and non-formal learning exchange to the pays des hommes intègres [the country of noble men].


From the capital of Ouaga--devoid of a significant water-table--our group was first whisked to the arid North, then to the greener parts of the southwest. For the next four months we completed the second portion of our service learning project—hosted by host families and taking part in “deep hanging out” (an expression I picked up about fieldwork when I later studied Cultural Anthropology).

Pals from the exchange--Sidiki, Abdoul, Hamadé, Théao & Kadisso. Greentea, music and "la causerie" [shooting the breeze] made for great afternoons

Once I let go of ideas that I was there to help, there emerged room for mutual understanding.

Completely contrary to “charity”-driven notions we are customarily force-fed about Africa, these urban dwellers embodied a strong sense of civic engagement, neighbourliness and good-living that was at once familiar and novel. 



In West Africa, desertification expands at a rate of five kilometres per year. No matter how often the main culprits for expanding aridness were “taught” to the populace—avoiding les feux de brousse [intentional fires to cause grass growth for herds], reducing tree cutting, and halting cotton-crop production—these practices abounded.

The International Monetary Fund's legacy: for many cotton is the only means to cash, but soils are exhausted within 3 years and debts ensue to cover fertilizer, pesticide costs. (Personal photo.)

Solutions rooted in survival and empowerment were those described by localities as successful. 

For example this year, an action taken by 5000-strong was done to draw attention to sanitation and water need in Burkina.

Néré oil extracted at women's coop group we fundraised for

Contrary to tree replanting practices in Canada, seedlings in the Sub-Sahara require fertilizing, watering and care. In turn, eucalyptus, mango, shea and néré trees are breeds favoured in reforestation efforts. Sold locally or for export, families have an incentive in not falling these trees.








Who I learned most from was my "host father".  Agriculturalist, activist, traveller, intellectual and socialite, he found agency not only with the diverse crop-system he grew, managing multiple small-business ventures (animal husbandry, honey production).  To quote I poem I wrote a long-while ago, he  also he was driven by solidarity and organizing with

the many without 
the means to fulfill the ills of believed potential
to arrive à manger                               [to be able to have enough to eat]
to combattre la galère                        [to fight utter poverty]
which will be death of us all  ...

His stance on drawing upon the ideas & technologies from both the global North & South is very much like "two-eyed seeing" discussed before.  His perspective was the result of his own praxis and imbued by an agricultural exchange to France:

"Evolve" as we stand with one foot in the village
and the other in the West.  Belonging to neither
not sure where to stand, but aware of what we
don't have and rejecting 
les vieux who keep us from moving "forward"

Be sure to have a saine idea of what          [French pun "saine": healthy]
development policies have on notre peuple         [our people/nation]
Cotton for northern export and the dumping of Northern
products from global markets.  Charity for
white man's conscience, and employment.


C'est une longue lutte, mais même s'il       
n'y a pas de travail, il y a beaucoup de     
travail à faire                 

[It's a long struggle, but even if there is no work, there's is still plenty of work to do]                             

I also befriended a guy who ran a water-dispensary. He charged 50 francs CFA or less to the women and children who came to fill the basins they carried atop their heads. We talked politics and town gossip while filling these tubs.

My time in Burkina never felt like the scenes from World Vision tele-devised to make you feel guilt. True, many families cannot afford installing a tap on their property, and true parents make the tough calculation between primary school or survival,

what is patently false are the harmful ways we the global minority condescendingly represent Sub-Saharan subsistence.


Adult literacy and the education of women and girls reverberate social and environmental justice. Practices of family planning, birth control, water use, hygiene and agriculture are récoltés chez les apprenants [cultivated amongst learners to borrow the phrase of one literacy trainer]. Improvements from microcredit, cooperatives make noticeable changes too.

Finally the points that resound for me in my educational practices involve:

• Ask tough questions when dishing out cash for “international development” initiatives. What percentage of money goes to admin fees? What is their larger vision? To what extent are local stakeholders articulating their needs?

• Advocate Stephen Lewis argues structural adjustments policies should be rectified to meet the UN's Millennium Development goals (listen to this powerful lecture series he gave in 2005).  Initiatives that support primary education and fight discrimination against women will fight the AIDS pandemic and fulfill the promises of past G8 Summits. Let your member of parliament know how urgent a priority this is (email counts like a letter).

• Before dishing out cash for a well-intentioned well-building project, or for that matter, traveling there yourself, consider a few hard questions. Is there evidence of community consensus in terms of need, location and access? 

• Quality water access is also issue closer to home: write to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs that contaminated water is unacceptable on First Nation reserves.

In Ureal Time - Lessons about waste-water

OK, first thing this morning I urinated in the ocean. Having slept under the stars on a bed of crushed-shells on Galiano Island, I relieved myself once I got in half way in the freezing water.

Not my typical urinal of choice when camping: dozens of meters away from waterways is far more eco-kosher.

Now home shower-fresh (albeit with soap-ingredients that Story-of-Stuff's lady might poopoo in her latest scribble-diatribe on cosmetics) my next wave of concern is what goes down the drain (see bottom for lesson plan ideas on water-waste).

While I appreciate the teasing by one metafilter contributor, 

"It's a little known fact that sheep, cattle, and other wildlife, do not infact feel free to pee freely wherever they are, but harbour concern that their urea might somehow corrupt their natural environment, bringing about the end of times"

humans do need foresight when dealing with our proverbial piddles.

Withstanding my 150mL this morning,
un- (or little) treated raw sewage is main-stream. 

Cruise-ships regularly dump crusaders'deeds straight into the Georgia Straight. One organization tallied the average waste for a seven-day voyage to:

• "210,000 gallons of sewage, 
• a million gallons of gray water (runoff from sinks, baths, showers, laundry and galleys), 
• 25,000 gallons of oily bilge water, 
• 11,550 gallons of sewage sludge and 
• more than 130 gallons of hazardous wastes" (NY Times article).

Example of separated sewer connection

Combined sewage overflows routinely have rainwater intermingling with Vancouverite fecal-matter. While the City is reducing this "networking" by a per cent a year, rain deluge is the norm for the majority of the year (being in a temperate rainforest, this should not be a surprise). 

Activists in Victoria designed a 7-foot mascot akin to South Park's Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.  In turn the "movement" surrounding Mr. Floatie effectively shamed B.C.'s capital city to go further than primary level sewage treatment.  (The project approved in 2009 will likely take 10 years to adhere to the norm of secondary & tertiary treament.)

History also highlights the essential role of sewage in urban planning. 

Years ago when a guide-interpreter of Callière's Point archealogical site in Old Montreal, stories of poop also figure strongly.  This point of land forged by la petite rivière St-Pierre served as breeding ground for water contaminants; the location also was where the alliance system of the Great Peace of Montreal was established between la nation française along with 40 indigenous nations in 1701 (see Choosing Water).

Historically like many major cities, cholera outbreaks caused thousands of deaths during the 1800s: the medical community attributed these deaths to miasma. 

Rendition of Pointe-à-Callière Museum: what lurks below our cities?

Versus recognizing water contamination as its true source (the vibrio cholarae microorganism), foul-smelling lagoons, ponds and streams were thus walled up to contain the believed air-particle carriers. Very much by accident this did represent an improvement in sewage treatment (see bottom left corner of above mural of buttressed sewer line constructed in Montreal in 1838).

A-HA! Connecting the dots: Statiscal research and cholera

However statistical analyses in London forged the connection between seeping latrines, the water table and wells.

Thus a germ theory necessitating the treatment and proper disposal of waste water supplanted the miasmatic theory of cleansing air near sites of decaying-organic matter.

Needless to say, what comes into a system must go out.  However, in today's green-washing jargon:

our bio-solids need not be seen as just another infrastructure expenditure.

The cities of Kelowna and Vernon for example have harnessed the Okanagan's collective poop, turning it into brown gold.  The Ogogrow site (a great play on words of the Anglo-Saxon version of the name of the Lake-dwelling serpent) manufactures high end compost from "dewatered biosolids."  A three-month process with considerable energy inputs has all major pathogens killed by means of aerobic heat reaching 55 degrees Celsius. 

Lastly on a pedagogical note,

our stools and urea are "fertile" ground for environmental inquiry...

For example research-action projects can :

• humanure compostable toilets can be studied cross-culturally.  See for example this couple's work in Victoria, offering guided tours;
  
• grey water can be studied as an applied-science project or in interior design classes so to redesign our kitchens and bathrooms;
• quantify waste water rates to real locales; for example, in Montreal the average per day is approximately equal to the volume of the Olympic Stadium;
• get to know the specific bylaws, enforcement and practices with your students, or arrange a visit to treatment plants with the city's engineers; for example in my quick survey, Vancouver deserves a Mr. Poo mascot like Victoria since 95% of all waste water receives only primary level treatment at the Iona Plant;
• the Project Wet guide offers multiple activities co-relating pathogens, disease and sanitation (Super Sleuths, p107), reproducing the poison-pump discovered by Dr. Snow in his spatial and statiscal research for cholera;
• have students guide a water drop through a labyrynth of drainpipes (Project Wet, Amaze-ing Water, p.219); recognize how contaminants from household and commercial (intentional or not "runoff") enters the watersystem via storm pipe;
• investigate quantities of waste water produced with other modes of travel (planes, trains and RV), or during festivals; 

Aqua-cultures and consumptions

The floodgates amass

as soon as the idea is submerged

but only Long Enough, 
so you need to come up for air
The trickle-down becomes a stream-of-consciousness

“The World is a Flood 
Soon I will become One with the Mud”

Oddly as soon as I get lyrical about the basic compound of water, good ol' H-two-O, Biblical themes emerge. And it seems appropriate, as David Suzuki lambasted Shell Petroleum Executive V-P, water is not a resource for this misnomer conceals its sacredness like air, earth and fire. Rather water--which we use for oil/tar-sand tailing ponds, to wash our cars, and to make our stuff--is a source of life, a life-source.

To ackwardly quote a one-hit-wonder rock-band in my free verse is to draw attention to the ever-present flood motif.

Contrary to the loss of life and breadbasket terrain like currently ongoing in Northern Pakistan, floods speak to the archetypal yearning for starting over like the Torah's Noah's Ark (or more recently Margaret Atwood's bioengineering dystopia Oryx and Crake ).

While natural disasters shake up notions of fragility, human-induced climate change and skyrocketing settlement patterns speak to the inability of the biosphere to absorb carbon and short-sighted notions of sustainability. An unconsciousness of humanity's connection to the bio-sphere exacerbates cycles of flood/drought, landslide/earthquake, pestilence/disease. 

If there were a sardonic "punch line" regarding ecological illiteracy it would be:


we have no clue what are the outcomes 


This is no knock against the bio-sciences for it is their data that reinforces humility in the manner we interact, extract and dispose.  Nor for that matter do I hearken to romanticized notions of pre-industrial lifeways.  We need not only cross-disciplinary answers, but rather "two-eyed seeing"--integrating modes of knowledge from indigenous, traditional and bio-scientific sources.

Perhaps like how Deep Ecology suggests, the stakeholders are every “person” across lines of species (this is “pan-species person-hood” that Colin Scott coined in Naked Science).


In a concerted manner, I feel collectively we need the BP (big picture) spelled out simply without causing a disservice to interconnected complexity.  (Check out the other BP--British Petroleum, whose oil plume will stay in the Gulf for a generation.)

As an educator my concern is re-presenting various sources of information with co-learners. However as an organizer for civic responsibility I feel discussion and research barely breaks the surface.

In the following meditations called Eau [pronounced Oh, water in French]-me, H20 My  my focus is

to traverse with lowly droplets in their pathways through sentient beings and landscapes, production loops & flows, and spilling through consumers' hands. 

I argue in the following action/research posts that water needs to be re-conceptualized as one of the Earth's greatest luxuries and thereby respected.


Environmental justice is inseparable from the social: the manner we alter our aqua-cultures must be seeped in empowerment.


The following blog entries will 

1. articulate possibilities with classroom learners;
2. hyperlink to a variety of approaches, articles and actions ;
3. trace my stream of reflection and praxis

so to embody respect and understanding around water as a life-source.

Enjoy,

Monsieur B.