Minni Jain and Philip Franses are co-founders of The Flow Partnership, and they are co-authors of the new book, The Language of Water: Ancient Techniques and Community Stories for a Water Secure Future. For decades they have been working to help communities regenerate their landscapes, using traditional methods that can be implemented and maintained by the communities themselves. The book, recently published by by Synergetic Press, tells the stories of people around the world whose land and ways of life have been upended by colonialism and industrialization––and the processes by which they reclaim not only land health but also their own sense of agency, meaning, and story-telling about their place.
The book is available at bookstores, where you can order it if they don’t have it in stock. To get a 15% discount on the book, go to synergeticpress.com and enter DTE15 at checkout.
TIMELINE
2’29 finding the work of Rajendra Singh and community work in India based on local wisdom
3’30 doing the work instead of just talking about it
4’33 the gap between the academic/political world and local communities
5’00 language barriers of various kinds–communities don’t necessarily speak the language of science and research, while the language of water is universal
7’03 comparing low tech methods to industrial engineering solutions–there’s room for both
8’38 big engineering works in a different way, with a different kind of local participation
9’42 the warming happening because of the disruption of the water cycle
12’02 water as the basis for carbon sequestration
12’39 the problem of heat islands in cities
13’02 the importance of looking at both local and planetary water cycles
14’12 looking at the whole system together, what that looks like on the village level
16’15 indigenous communities are naturally holistic thinkers
17’41 looting, exploiting, extracting are in opposition to holistic thinking
19’14 community building is part of the skill set needed to restore the water cycle
21’48 colonization in Africa destroyed not only ecosystem features but people’s spirituality and identity–it overwrote local stories with their own
23’55 control vs. respect for nature. recovering from colonial stories and mentality is difficult because the old stories are too fragmented to bring the community back together–so now it’s about building new stories
26’36 local ceremony for rain
28’11 reductionism connected to a crisis of meaning
29’06 a holistic view is possible and necessary within a scientific view
30’57 the importance of prevention of disasters as well as mitigating disasters when they happen
33’12 what happens when a village is unified in its aspiration–time stops being an abstraction
34’51 how the flow partnership process works, examples from Ireland, India
36’29 the process of reforesting a cheetah refuge in India: working with local orgs and working with villagers so that they feel that they have ownership. No top-down projects. They like it when they’re asked to leave.
38’30 Flow Partnership brings “landscape level vast thinking”
40’32 Flow Partnership: water literacy, and taking action. They have “water schools” in communities and online. Communities bring their success stories and teach people. Then they bring funding and resources to those communities to hold water on the ground, and create a web on the ground.
42’58 how is the work different in industrialized counties from developing countries
44’14 example of project from Colombia–they immediately understood what they were doing in India
45’35 how to scale this work up…it has to do with storytelling as well as project work
47’11 forming a web, but spreading wisdom from one community to the next–a decentralized vision
49’00 this work is so inexpensive and lasts longer because the villagers maintain it
50’37 how stories create our reality
52’02 you need stories, imagination, and then action
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