Protecting Water in the Anthropocene: River Spirits and Political Struggles in Detroit, Standing Rock, and the Bible

Protecting Water in the Anthropocene: River Spirits and Political Struggles in Detroit, Standing Rock, and the Bible James W. Perkinson On an early May morning in 2014, Food Justice and Water activist Charity Hicks ran out of her inner city Detroit home barefoot and bombastic, to confront the Homrich Wrecking Co employee who was preparing to begin Water shutoffs up and down her block. After rousing neighbors to collect Water in whatever pot or pan was available, Hicks challenged the employee to produce a written shutoff order for her home, and when he was unable to do so, called the police. A few minutes later, excoriated as an “uppity black woman who needed to be taught a lesson,” Hicks was carted off to jail and “disappeared” for two days. A few days after release, at a gathering of activists in a small west side Episcopal Church, Hicks threw down a gauntlet to ecclesial apathy, calling on believers and hip‐hop heads, community organizers, and concerned citizens alike to “Wage Love,” to engage a war of loving militancy against the Emergency Manager‐initiated campaign of shutoffs targeting largely African American neighborhoods of poverty. Less than one month later, Hicks lay comatose in a New York hospital, victim of a hit‐and‐run “accident” while at a bus stop, on her way to give a talk on the Detroit water struggle. She died within a month. Now, two years later, the “Water fight” she so fiercely embodied and adroitly named has gained national prominence in the Emergency Manager‐championed criminality unleashed in Flint. The reflections to follow here will take their urgency from that continuing and ever‐broadening struggle, to map the way Water seizures in Detroit and Flint have provoked Christian activists in the mix, to reconstruct 1st century Palestinian “Water politics” as part of their efforts to awaken spiritual response to the battles already begun in this century of emerging “Water wars.” The work on sacred texts useful to animate Christian response has focused on the baptismal movement of John and the occupation movement of Jesus. Indeed, such new thinking about the theological vision of Water on the Detroit/Flint scene is camped out on a ten‐year US/Canadian effort to re‐cover a bioregional perspective in theology, going loosely by the name of Watershed Discipleship. In part the brain‐child of scholar‐activist Ched Myers, the retrieval effort has many authors and innovators (Myers , a, Myers ). Its leitmotif is the tsunami of interlocking crises rolling in from the horizon of climate change, seeking deeply to name the “signs of the times” as “apocalyptic omens” underscoring the Age as incorrigibly “Anthropocene,” as some current geologists would insist. “Watershed thinking” names the focus: a re‐constructing of human “being” on a bioregional scale, taking its horizons of concern and parameters of effort from the way Water defines locale and convenes life anywhere. The awareness self‐consciously invokes indigenous precedent and wisdom, recognizes settler pretension and colonial violence as the most immediate obstacle to viability, and works to articulate embodiment as a function of symbiotic sustainability and just co‐habitation. Revolutionary love in the Anthropocene? But just here, there is already a dilemma. The newly coined moniker “Anthropocene,” styled to sound alarm and name the agency provoking the epochal emergency can also subtly reinforce the problematic supremacy. The crisis is not simply that provoked by humanity at large, but by a particular version of human social organization that began to emerge more than 5,000 years ago. The advent of settled mono‐crop agricultural societies in the Fertile Crescent, centering decision‐making in urbanized ruling classes, coercively began to re‐engineer watersheds into large‐scale irrigation systems supporting an aggressive lifestyle. Labor forces were effectively enslaved to do the work, and ideological productions and ceremonial elaborations re‐orientated to articulate our species (or at least the elites thereof) as supreme over other life forms (Perkinson, , 17–19; Jensen, , 15–25). This represented an increasingly radical departure from all previous human engagement with local ecosystems. More indigenously rooted hunter‐gatherer, subsistence agriculture, and reindeer nomad communities traditionally mediated their commensal and “utilitarian” interaction with plant and animal communities—as indeed with soils...

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