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Ann Raiho surveying the horizon. Image courtesy of Natalie Warren.

Introduction to Issue 21

We refer to the issue as “Women & Water: Calling” because collectively these articles demonstrate the ways that water calls to people, drawing women into connection and commitment to the material world and to each other.

Low clouds in Glen Forsa on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, UK. Image by Jill Dimond on Unsplash.

Introduction to Issue Twenty

Over two years ago, before the global pandemic upended our lives, Open Rivers started talking with Professor Mary Modeen, an artist, academic, and convener based at the University of Dundee in Scotland whose work, creativity, and generosity have created an international network of collaborators doing place-based work. For this issue of Open Rivers, Modeen stretches the journal toward international perspectives on the meaning of rivers. This collection of artwork and reflections, place-based engagements and community-driven actions demonstrates exactly that—the meaning of rivers to so many people in so many different places—through stunning exhibits and galleries, lyrical prose, and reflections on waters in place…

Fig 1: Detail. The River Ericht, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, Scotland, 2020. Image courtesy of Mary Modeen.

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Twenty: Rivers and Meaning

Firstly, a welcome to you readers, traditional style. Just because we are many, sitting in many places gathered in “internet land” does not mean that I cannot welcome you as a virtual visitor to my place and to what we may imagine as our campfire. Here, 200 meters from the banks, I share with you the River Ericht and speak to you with the sounds of water flowing across rocks and swirling in the currents.

I welcome you to the hills and forests, the local berry fields of Scotland, perched on the divide between the Lowlands and the Highlands and the farmlands growing potatoes, beans, brassicas, and barley. You too, in my imagination, have your places to share—your rivers and lakes, your coastal beaches and mountains. We are first and ever in the world by the time we come to know where we are. As we come together, what we share here are stories from places and people across the world showing and telling and singing songs that reveal more than one place, more than one story…

Santa Monica Pier by Omar Prestwich.

Introduction to Issue Nineteen

The articles for this issue started to come together in the midst of the global pandemic, as our usual practices were upended, our concerns reprioritized, our social lives reorganized and often curtailed, our lives—both private and public—in a tumult. Even now, as we’ve moved past the initial phases of crisis and more of us have moved back into shared workspaces and participated in social gatherings, many uncertainties remain. As I read the early drafts of these thoughtful articles, I found them pulling me into a space for reflection…

Introduction to Issue Eighteen

On local and global scales, concerns about our water systems emerge from many directions. We read stories of contaminants compromising hydrologies and water ecologies, of farm runoff in the Midwest creating an expansive hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We view shocking images of the effects of a decades-long drought diminishing the flow of the Colorado River. Hazardous drinking water conditions and deteriorating infrastructures like those in Flint, Michigan inspire distrust in resource management methods and make evident how inequalities and injustices are part of everyday entanglements with water. The present conditions of water—and our relationships to it—provoke an endless set of questions about what our future with water may look like…

Prairie and spiderweb. Image courtesy of Jan Huber.

Introduction to Issue Seventeen

In recent years, the practice of land acknowledgements—making statements to acknowledge that white settlers to Turtle Island (what we now know as North America) are all on lands unethically, unconscionably, taken from Indigenous peoples who lived and thrived here long before settlers—has become common.

Intersections of roads, railroads, drainage, and river. Image courtesy of Sergio Souza.

Introduction to Issue Sixteen

There’s a saying among water professionals that the public only cares about water when there is too much or too little, when there is a flood or a drought…

People moving through the We Are Water MN exhibit.

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Issue Fifteen: We Are Water MN

Water can be described as a molecule, a solvent, a relative, a healer, and a force that both gives and takes life. Reader, what is water to you? If any article in this issue brings you into deeper understanding of the answer to this question, then we have succeeded. Like the We Are Water MN project as a whole, the goal of this issue is to share multiple ways of knowing water and to deepen your relationship with and responsibility to water.

The opening ceremony for the We Are Water MN exhibit at the University of Minnesota.

Introduction to Issue Fifteen

A couple of summers ago, the University hosted an international graduate student workshop on the environmental humanities, that is, interdisciplinary examination of environmental questions from scholars of literature, philosophy, language disciplines, and the like. Not surprisingly, the group wanted to take a Mississippi River boat tour and I was invited along as the University’s resident “river guy.”

A few old houses sit on a rocky shore. The settlement of Kangeq in Southwest Greenland was abandoned in the 1970s. The site has been occupied for thousands of years.

Introduction to Issue Fourteen

Climate change has virtually exploded as a subject of news reports, scientific analysis, and advocacy attention in the past six months. In November, the United States Global Change Research Program released its Fourth National Climate Assessment.  Longstanding debates about the relative importance of mitigation and adaptation have further receded in urgency as this spring’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) finding that a million species are threatened with extinction have grabbed headlines worldwide.