Temporary Waters

Nadia Ahmed

Related terms: wetlands, water, temporality, ecocritical time studies, water humanities, ecopoetics

Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.

Temporary waters are waters that come and go. Unlike lakes, rivers and oceans, temporary waters experience intermittent drought and inundation phases. For ecologists and hydrologists, temporary waters can be either saltwater or freshwater, still or flowing, and human- or non-human-made (Williams 1). They are habitats for life that might die after one day or persist in dormancy after the departure of water. Temporary waters may form in empty bomb craters that fill with rainwater and fish after the blast of invasion (Vad 253). They can be found in tree holes and empty snail shells, hosting vectors for human diseases like mosquitoes and parasites. Human-made water caches, rain pools, and the footprints of coyotes and foxes also serve as ephemeral yet vital sites of survival for effective border crossing among migrants. Temporary waters are both bodies and processes, hosts of both life and death. Their capacity to contain means that they are punished for their inability to conform to capitalist logic. They disappear without a trace.

In the field of hydrology, temporary waters can be ephemeral, intermittent, episodic, seasonal, or near-permanent (Williams 4). They exist in different climates and environments, but what they have to share with us as a category is that they are transient. Rain and groundwater fill shallow pools, which may support life for a while and then dry up, transforming into hosts for detritus, dormant life, and their corresponding new communities. The very fact of temporary waters’ impermanence is used against them by governments and extractive industries, making the case for temporary waters’ inconsistency, and thus, their suitability for more standardizable development and agricultural projects. Because of the temporary water’s elusiveness, temporary water eradications are difficult to track. They have long posed challenges to mapping, management, and protection measures. Yet, the Ramsar Convention, an international wetland protection agreement, states that 64% of wetlands worldwide have been eradicated since 1900, with loss rates only accelerating (Matthews 12). One can imagine that temporary waters with their periods of dry and arable land are some of the first wetlands to go. The fact that the United States’ Clean Water Act excludes protections for temporary waters because they do not connect to larger bodies of water and thus do not contribute to the flow of commerce reflects a vision of water that prioritises permanence (“Revised Definition of ‘Waters of the United States’” 2023).

Focusing on deep time ethics and environmentalism, recent work in the environmental humanities attends to much older archives, lodged in rock formations and temporally distant from current realities of global capitalism. After the popularisation of the term ‘Anthropocene’ in the sciences and humanities over the past ten years, a surge of work on geologic time made its way into the environmental humanities, offering articulations of water that assist deep time thinking and ethics. Paul Huebener (2018) and other writers in the environmental humanities contribute to the field of ecocritical time studies, where time serves as a form of power within issues of socio-environmental concern. Huebener surveys the most prevalent temporal concepts pervading the environmental humanities today, which include ‘slowness,’ ‘natural time’, and ‘ecocritical time studies.’ Considerations of slowness, glaciality, and depth pervade discourses within all three categories. Temporary waters instead ask us to consider ecopoetics of ephemerality -- the study of the language of ephemerality across poetry, prose, and other media -- identifying a method of interpreting environmental, social, and political imaginaries that shape environmental protection and systems of military and industrial power.

While the origin of ephemerality as a temporal concept can be traced to the Greek “ephemeros,” meaning to last one day, biology considers ephemeral waters as relatively short-lived but as lasting longer than one day. They remind us that ephemerality is an illusion; a whimsical word that, like ‘temporary,’ necessitates an acceptance of imprecise mutability on the part of its speakers or writers. While ‘temporary’ indicates impermanence, ‘ephemeral’ suggests rapidly fleeting impermanence. Figurative and hyperbolic, ephemerality evokes a sense of unexpected brevity that may have little to do with whether or not an entity lasts roughly one day. Because of this, one might take a closer look at ephemerality’s usage across fields to better understand how invocations of ephemerality clarify and obscure various material and symbolic realities.

George Crabbe’s poem “The Newspaper” (1785) compares the ephemeral lives of mayflies in shallow pools to newspapers. To Crabbe, while newspapers are ephemera, they cement ways of reading and engaging information that extend far beyond a day. However, mayflies may only live a day or two. They belong to the order Ephemeroptera, and often choose the detritus of temporary waters as their habitats. Mayflies hold ancestral traits that date back to the first flying insects. Their transient existence over hundreds of millions of years complicates visions of ephemeral life as negligible. Crabbe calls the insects, “[B]ase ephemera, so born/To die before the next revolving morn.” Articulated as born to die in “The Newspaper,” mayflies promptly transform into food sources and decomposed nutrients, enriching their watery ecosystems. However, newspaper ephemera, he writes, are different: “No changing season makes their number less,/Nor Sunday shines a sabbath on the press!” (Crabbe, lines 69-76). Newspapers swarm with an insect-like fervour, evoking the relentless social and material reach of the printing press, yet Crabbe indicates key differences between the afterlives of natural ephemeral forms and ephemera, disposable written documents that came out of the printing revolution. Ephemera take much longer to break down and digest, transforming planetary, social, economic, and political relations of production, consumption and destruction. With the rise in disposable commodities in the centuries to come, writers continue to associate ephemerality with the social, economic, and environmental wastefulness that constitute the modern and contemporary world.

Ephemerality was described by theorists and writers like Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Charles Baudelaire as the temporality of modernity (Vila-Cabanes 11). In a time characterised by rapid transformation of natural resources, trend-based aesthetics, and the clock as a symbol of social progress, ‘ephemerality’ seemingly marked the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, ephemeral ecologies like temporary waters in which water comes and goes were deemed spaces of disposability in these economic systems relying on the consistent and rapid supplies of disposable goods and services (Mollinga). The inconsistency and unpredictability of temporary waters fail to land them solidly within models of extraction and production, historically leading to their drainage to create consistently arable land (Viney 17). Thus, the rapid material and social changes that came with the industrial production of commodities depended on consistent and unchangeable lands and waters from which to source and produce materials. One might consider ephemerality as the illusion of modernity rather than modernity’s temporal reality when commodities made for single-use far surpass that initial use in their material and social impact. Moreover, ephemeral environments like temporary waters have been cast as capricious liabilities, nuisances to efficiency and measurable objectives within large-scale models of extraction and production. 

Within the humanities, little has been published on ephemerality as a consistent temporality that exists outside the orbit of industrial time. Environmental humanities scholars Michelle Bastian and Rowan Bayliss Hawitt state that while environmental humanities scholars have made the case that climate change is partially “a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed,” there has been little to no engagement with the field of phenology, “the study of life-cycle timing across species, including plants, animals and insects” (Bastian 1). The phenological cycles of biota within temporary waters and their relation to the ecopoetics of narrative omission are particularly relevant to challenging engagements with temporary waters as wasted spaces. To assume that no life exists in a temporary water when it lacks water would be to incorrectly infer absence rather than dormancy. What is omitted is different from what is absent. An ellipsis is that which is left out and concealed, an invitation to imaginatively represent what is omitted from a story. Ellipsis as a rhetorical figure reminds us of the life that remains in temporary waters during times of drought. Dry temporary waters are elliptical, providing opportunities for listening, speculating, and being attentive to human and nonhuman connections to these ephemeral landscapes. As biologist Don Swann writes of temporary waters in the Sonoran Desert:

After it is gone, ephemeral desert water leaves itself behind in new toads and the green leaves of riparian trees. I’d like to think that the words that describe, illustrate, and re-create the Sonoran Desert plants and animals in these pages will also leave themselves behind in us, as we grow and learn and become, ourselves, part of the biodiversity of this place (Cokinos xii). 

Swann’s ecopoetics of temporary waters in the Sonoran Desert poses an alternative to normative notions of presence and sustainability. This alternative ecopoetic engagement serves as a threshold, wherein, to proceed, one must accept the knowledge that drought and death have to offer. To acknowledge the right to the existence of temporary waters, one must first accept the transformational work of death, a state highly threatening to perpetual accumulation of capital that relies on stable and reliable means of production. Thus, temporary waters have lessons to teach about how dominant conceptions of time pervade material and symbolic realities. In teaching those lessons, they induce the disorganisation of the material, social, and psychic structures of accumulation and normative notions of sustainability. In addition to inviting considerations of how lives are shaped by and adapt to rapidly changing conditions, temporary waters engage in practices beyond both acceleration and fragmentation, as well as deep-time salves. Instead, an ecopoetics of temporary waters challenges conventional notions of ephemerality, turning our attention to what remains in decay and dormancy, or what Anna Tsing refers to as the terrain that the ‘anthropo-’ refuses to acknowledge.

References

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