Foundering in the face of depth and complexity

After yet another week of examining in-depth our failures, this time with regard to the global water challenge, it was oddly relieving to have Ken Conca actually articulate the options for responses in our current circumstances: "When confronted with the more fundamental problem of protecting the planet's places...the regime approach leaves us with unpalatable choices: to deny the existence of those struggles, to seek to impose neat resolutions upon them, or to founder in the face of their depth and complexity" (23).  It seems that just about every reading and topic we have covered thus far, from climate change to food, falls into one of these three choices unless the author is a proponent of ripping the entire system down.  By now, I am exhausted and tend to fall squarely into the foundering territory.  It doesn't seem impossible to move out of this, but I've got to break down big issues so I can wrap my head around them and make them resonate and inspire effective analysis and ideas.

In the Nicholson and Wapner chapter, Maude Barlow describes our species' "collective capacity for destruction" (61) and our propensity for this with regard to our freshwater sources.  Different perspectives frame the water problem as one of scarcity or one of inequality in distribution and sanitation, but Barlow describes these as "twin crises" to a massive threat that hasn't received much attention.  Conca delves further into the root causes of the water crisis and how to reconcile the need for governance in the global, transboundary nature of water issues with its local manifestations.  I have never lived in a water-stressed area and have only experienced one or two local droughts requiring water rationing in my lifetime, so even with the understanding that the responsibility lies on a larger scale it was easy to see the problems as, for example, California's or China's problem to fix.

I like the way that Conca changed this framing; these may look like local issues but they have global implications.  In Conca's first chapter, Wendell Berry changes the question to "not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods" (2) which shows the interconnectedness without absolving responsibility to a vague and massive scale.  The current regime approach, as Conca argues, misses this question and responds ineffectively (if at all) due to the way the state system interprets knowledge, territory, and authority (21).  Just as the Westphalian system has failed in other global issues that transcend borders, it does the same with water in its outdated notions of these three elements.  As the case study on large dams shows, traditional state responsibilities have shifted away from the arena of the state.  Once again we must take a hard look at our system and if our responses should be to maintain, reform, or transform it - this time in the context of water.  I'm still grappling with my own conceptualization of the issue so I may have to founder a bit more.