The River is an Island: (Re)imagining a More-than-human Future for the Waimatā Catchment
摘要
The emergence of an era of more-than-human relations in the academy marks a response to contestations around human-centric assertations of the Anthropocene. More-than-humanism extends beyond the dichotomy of ‘humans vs Nature’, encompassing a spectrum of relationships between the human and non-human. This chapter gazes through a more-than-human lens in seeking to understand riverscapes, focusing upon the Waimatā River in Gisborne, Aotearoa New Zealand, from the perspective of the river itself. Our approach interprets two representations—geomorphic evolution and ecopoetics—of this riverscape, demonstrating the multiple ways riverscapes, their stories, and in this case, a ‘mountains to the sea’ lens, can be expressed. Art, culture, and science come together as storied knowledge through the disciplinary vehicle of geography—in particular geoethics and geographies of affect. While this approach may be viewed as divisive in some circles, we feel that a radical reorganisation of process is required to keep up with the radical reorganisation of landscapes currently occurring across the globe, including in the Waimatā catchment.