Ethical Water Stewardship

By Ingrid Leman Stefanovic

This interdisciplinary book brings philosophers and non-philosophers to the table to address questions of water ethics, specifically in terms of how moral questions inform decision making around water security at local, national, and international scales.

Water security, which pertains to the experience of assured access to clean water, is a broad concept that intersects human rights, politics, economics, law, legislation, public health, trade, agriculture, and energy. Decisions made at each of these intersection points have ramifications for human well being, especially for the populations that are marginalized in a societal and political sense. In this book, the ethical dimensions of decision-making at those intersection points are explored, and real-world examples are used to tease out some key insights. It charts how ethical consideration can help shape a future in which everyone will be water secure.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030495404

Book preview

Part I

Understanding Water Ethics

As we move into the United Nations’ International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development, there is growing concern that a 40 percent shortfall in freshwater resources by 2030, coupled with a burgeoning world population … has the world careening towards a global water crisis (United Nations 2019). To avert such a crisis, the objectives of the decade are to

1.

advance sustainable development,

2.

energize implementation of existing programs and projects, and

3.

mobilize action to achieve the 2030 Agenda (United Nations 2019).

There is growing awareness that to accomplish these objectives means more than only advancing technological innovations, as vital as they are to achieving progress. Human factors influence how strategic priorities are defined; understanding value systems helps to resolve conflicting judgment calls.

For this reason, progress during the water decade and beyond requires a better understanding and articulation of the field of water ethics.

Part I of this book provides some introductory readings in this field of growing importance.

In Chap. 1, Valuing Water, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and Clifford Atleo present some common Western moral theories, from utilitarianism to deontology, as well as Indigenous and less traditional postmodern and ecofeminist approaches to water ethics, drawing an example from boil water advisories in Canada. The chapter aims both to introduce some fundamental approaches to water ethics and to show how these approaches might be reconciled when it comes to decision making around issues of water policies and practices.

In Chap. 2, Water and Ecological Ethics in the Anthropocene, Bruce Jennings and Kathryn Gwiazd similarly present a relational approach to water ethics. They argue that it makes no sense to consider water merely as physical matter, or as a resource to be commodified in market exchanges. Instead, recognizing that human beings exist always in relation to the world in which they are ontologically implaced, the chapter suggests that a relational ethics of interdependence is essential to developing global governance principles and water trusteeship.

In Chap. 3, Contextualizing a Human Rights Perspective for Water Ethics, Alex Wellington provides a compelling description of the pros and cons of two prevalent approaches to water: one that defines water as humanity’s common heritage, and another that views water as a market commodity and a subject of economic concern. Arguing that neither approach is optimal, Wellington speaks instead in favor of a third alternative, grounded in a human rights perspective. The chapter closes with a practical discussion of how such a framework is helpful in informing water governance and policy decisions.

Chapter 4 addresses the topic of Uses of Feminist Eco-criticism for Water Policy. Annette Louise Bickford presents an ecofeminist critique of our political economy, focusing on issues of water privatization and the impact of the meat industry on the politics of water and land use. Ecofeminism expands moral considerability beyond narrow human concerns and traditional, dualistic paradigms, questioning a logic of domination to focus instead on fundamental interrelationships between humans, animals, and the world in which we are implaced.

Finally, in Chap. 5, philosopher Bruce Morito explores how stakeholder values shape decision making around environmental and water issues. Rather than arguing for a particular water ethic, Morito’s interest is in deciphering both explicit and implicit moral assumptions that shape communities’ engagement in policy development and actual practices. Drawing upon research that investigated the 2001–2002 drought in Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Morito and his team conducted a values analysis, identifying what mattered to stakeholders, subsequently leading a process of justifying moral beliefs to generate mutual understanding across communities. Distinguishing between core and negotiable values, the aim was to uncover an ethic of attunement by generating mutually acceptable ways forward among apparently incommensurable value systems of diverse stakeholders.

Morito’s chapter offers a useful transition to Part II: Place-based Challenges, as it casts the philosopher in the engaged role of values interpreter, rather than simply moral theoretician. After all, while the field of water ethics is certainly of growing interest to the philosophical community, ultimately, any discussion of moral tenets must aim to impact changing values, policies, and wiser decisions around water use as implaced locally, as well as within the broader global community.

Reference

United Nations (2019) Sustainable development goals: water action decade. https://​www.​un.​org/​sustainabledevel​opment/​water-action-decade. Accessed 13 Dec 2019

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

I. L. Stefanovic, Z. Adeel (eds.)Ethical Water Stewardship Water Security in a New Worldhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49540-4_1

1. Valuing Water

Ingrid Leman Stefanovic¹   and Clifford Atleo²  

(1)

Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

(2)

School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

Ingrid Leman Stefanovic

Email: [e-mail]

Clifford Atleo (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Ensuring that everyone has the clean water they need to live and thrive has to be a high priority for all of us.

Hillary Rodman Clinton, US Secretary of State, World Water Day 2012

Abstract

This chapter presents some central moral theories and differing worldviews as they relate to a particular case study in the authors’ home country – Canada’s boil water advisories. It may appear shocking to readers that a highly developed country still supports communities that rely on unsafe water that must be boiled before use. The chapter describes how this is the case and presents multiple perspectives – including the utilitarian, deontological, Indigenous, postmodern, and ecofeminist – relating to the ethics of boil water advisories. The argument is made that environmental decision making proceeds on the strength of both explicit as well as implicit value judgments. A new role for philosophers is proposed, requiring them to work in interdisciplinary settings with multiple communities as the water crisis advances and as conflicting, taken-for-granted assumptions and moral values require resolution.

Keywords

Water ethicsIndigenous boil water advisoriesDecision making

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 297,000 children under 5 years of age die every year from diarrheal diseases emerging from poor sanitation or unsafe drinking water (WHO 2019). While solutions demand financial commitments, the suffering and death of vulnerable children remind us that water holds more than simply market value. One need not be a formally trained ethicist to feel the full moral weight and existential value of water to each and every innocent child.

That said, moral controversies around water security abound. Is safe, clean water for all best distributed according to utilitarian calculations of maximizing benefits at minimal costs? Does the human right to water mean that such calculations are secondary to other sorts of principled arguments? Is water not only a biological need but an ontological good, or even a spiritual good? These kinds of questions are more than theoretically significant. Answers will drive decision making and influence lives, even when value judgments only implicitly frame public policies and priorities.

This chapter aims to introduce the growing field of water ethics, arguing that its relevance must extend beyond the narrowly academic to include the complexities of lived experience. By way of illustration, we focus on a problem of critical proportion in Canada, relating to the inaccessibility of safe water on First Nations reserves. Two-thirds of this nation’s Indigenous communities have been under at least one drinking water advisory between 2004 and 2014 (Levasseur and Marcoux 2015). In 2016, the federal government committed almost $2 billion over 5 years, funded by Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, to end such drinking water advisories on all reserves by March 2021.¹ In the 2018 federal budget, an additional $172.6 million over 3 years was proposed to improve access to clean, safe drinking water on reserves and to support more speedy and efficient construction and renovation of water systems (Indigenous Services Canada 2019). At the time of writing of this chapter, 56 long-term boil water advisories remained in effect.²

Drawing from this example, the first part of this chapter illustrates how traditional, anthropocentric ethical theories, such as utilitarianism and deontology, might weigh in on such boil water advisories. Many aspects of environmental decision making in Western societies are driven by these traditional moral value systems, as will become evident in our discussion. The second part of the chapter presents a markedly different Indigenous worldview. As life-giving and indeed as sacred in itself, water is far more than a singular tangible moral commodity or resource holding anthropocentric value. The final part of the chapter builds on this broader conversation around the meaning of water to explore how multiple narratives might inform the growing field of water ethics. The fact is that from ecofeminism to postmodernism, philosophers are aiming to disrupt top-down theoretical models and introduce complexities of power struggles and local narratives in describing the lived experience of water ethics. A new role for water ethicists as interpreters and mediators is suggested, for cases where moral frameworks conflict. Overall, the chapter shows that the role of ethics and taken-for-granted value judgments is central, albeit inadequately acknowledged, in the stewardship and secure provisioning of water.

1.1 Anthropocentric Ethics: From Theory to Application

In Canada, drinking water advisories are public health statements issued to communities to inform them about actual or possible health risks in their drinking water. The advisories are meant to be precautionary, ideally issuing notice before significant water quality issues arise (ECCC 2018). Three types of drinking water advisories exist: a do not consume notification, a do not use and boil water notification, and boil water advisories – the most common type of advisory, constituting 98% of those issued (ECCC 2018). Communities notified of a boil water advisory are instructed to bring their tap water to a rolling boil for at least one minute before drinking it or using it for other purposes, such as cooking, washing fruits and vegetables, or bathing infants (Health Canada 2018).³

In 2017, 77% of boil water advisories in Canada were issued to communities of 500 people or fewer (ECCC 2018). Despite the enactment of the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act in 2013, 56 First Nations reserves are currently subject to drinking water advisories, with water quality affected by a range of issues, from inadequate binding regulations on reserves to persistent underfunding of water system operations and maintenance, poor conditions of source water, and lack of support for water operators.

That said, the recent commitments by the federal government to eliminate long-term boil water advisories on First Nations reserves is not the first time Canada has sought to address these challenges. A 1995 assessment revealed that one in four First Nations water systems posed significant risks to human health (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008). By 2002, a follow-up assessment showed increasing deterioration, despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, with approximately one third of on-reserve drinking water systems, and one sixth of their wastewater systems, posing high risks to water quality and human health (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008).

Given those conditions, the First Nations Water Management Strategy was developed in 2003 by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and Health Canada. It provided a plan to upgrade and build water and wastewater facilities; introduce a water quality operation, monitoring, and maintenance program; offer training and management protocols; and increase public awareness and new policies through a multi-barrier approach (Indigenous Affairs Canada 2010).

By 2007, a summative report was prepared to evaluate the Strategy’s success. The purpose was to assess the relevance and appropriateness of its approach, as well as to evaluate progress made in providing safe drinking water and wastewater treatment on reserves from 2003, when the Strategy was developed. It is significant to note some of the language used in that report. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was interest in assessing value for money, where the cost-effectiveness of financial investments in the upgrading of water systems and the monitoring of drinking water quality were investigated (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 75.) As will become clear, a strongly utilitarian moral system underlies much of this language.

Several key factors were found to affect the cost of building and operating First Nations communities’ water and wastewater systems. Predictably, it was noted that the relatively small size and remote location of many First Nations communities serve to increase costs (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 79). In fact, a related study found that the price of providing and maintaining water infrastructure in remote or isolated communities is up to three to four times higher than in more densely populated areas (Anderson 2007). More specifically, in an urban community, simply providing piping to service a household was estimated a decade ago to be $9,000 for a five-person family, whereas in a rural community, an additional $36,000 was estimated. For remote and isolated communities, the costs could easily reach $144,000 per connection (Anderson 2007). The reality is that economies of scale exist for providing water and wastewater facilities in terms of provision, operations, and maintenance.

Why are these figures important? To be sure, the Liberal government said in the reconciliation statement in its 2018 budget that it is unacceptable that any person living in Canada should be unable to safely drink the water that comes out of their taps. That said, providing safe water – building the infrastructure, operating it, and properly maintaining it – comes at a significant cost. For this reason, governments often assess value based on three essential criteria: economy (i.e. appropriate qualities and quantities of resources are obtained at the lowest cost); efficiency (i.e. a given amount of resources produces optimum outputs); and cost-effectiveness (i.e. the unit costs of outcomes are minimized) (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 80).

Such language – drawing on concepts of optimal efficiencies and outputs or minimizing costs while maximizing benefits to human societies – is clearly rooted in anthropocentric, utilitarian moral frameworks (which are themselves arguably often embedded in racist, colonial attitudes toward Indigenous communities). An anthropocentric approach means that what is morally right is evaluated from the perspective of what is good for humans first and foremost. In fact, quantifying that value often means assessing it from the point of view of economic efficiency and cost-effectiveness to society, precisely as noted above.

The language used in the report similarly draws centrally from a common version of anthropocentric ethics: utilitarianism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014) calls utilitarianism one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Indeed, it is arguably the most prevalent moral theory underlying most instances of professed rational decision making in modern Western society. While some have extended the theory to include sentient non-human animals within the sphere of moral considerability, human interests typically dominate conversations around utilitarianism. Even when the theory is extended to animals, it is often their ability to experience pleasure and pain, similarly to humans, that is seen to justify including animals within the utilitarian framework (Singer 1975). John Stuart Mill and his predecessor Jeremy Bentham are the classical philosophers credited with developing utilitarian theory (Mill 2007). The fundamental axiom of their approach defined the measure of right and wrong action to be evaluated in terms of the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Burns and Hart 1977: 393). In the case of Mill, that happiness was defined in terms of maximizing overall pleasure over pain.

Those who support utilitarianism note that, as an approach to rational decision making, it is arguably impartial, privileging no particular set of citizens over others. In that sense, it aims at neutrality and lack of bias in assessing the value of providing a particular resource, such as clean, safe water. Utilitarianism is widely accepted in Western secular society, as it seeks to remain uninfluenced by arbitrary cultural or religious preferences. As a version of philosophical consequentialism, it focuses on a commonsense view that consequences of one’s actions matter in moral decision making. Applying the principle of utility allows for quantification of positive and negative effects, precisely in the way in which cost-benefit analyses are conducted in a variety of management scenarios.

Drawing on our case of boil water advisories in Canada specifically, there simply are significant economic realities associated with providing infrastructure for clean water to remote Indigenous communities. Quantifiable, utilitarian assessments may provide legitimate data to inform decision making in that regard, as noted in the First Nations Water Management Strategy summative evaluation, discussed earlier. Moreover, there are opportunity costs in delivering water to remote communities, if one compares how one might use those same financial resources in other apparently more fiscally efficient ways. Incorporating those opportunity costs in a utilitarian assessment ensures a broad-based, robust evaluation of costs and benefits overall.

While utilitarian arguments often prevail in discussions of water policy, critics raise multiple objections to such consequentialist approaches to moral reflection. One might ask: In theory and in practice, is it ethically justifiable that smaller remote communities do not have access to safe drinking water while urbanites perceive that they have water to waste? Is it truly possible to impartially calculate all consequences of our actions when the future is essentially unknown? What happens in cases of unequal distribution in a utilitarian calculus, where one suffers while many benefit? Do we never have special obligations to particular persons? Where and how do non-utilitarian judgment calls enter into these equations? If a building is burning or a water system is contaminated, is one ever justified in saving one’s family first? And do the ends always justify the means? If I kill one person to save five others, am I justified in killing anyone at all, even if from a strict, quantificational perspective the overall benefit is maximized? Finally, how accurately do we assign value to notions of happiness or pleasure when these are qualitative rather than quantitative notions?

Interestingly, while on the one hand, the First Nations Water Management Strategy summative evaluation refers to utilitarian value for money, it also acknowledges the limits to narrow utilitarian assessments of cost-effectiveness as such a measure of moral worth. The report notes that there are a number of outcomes or benefits [of water and sanitation improvements] which cannot be measured in terms of cost, such as existence value (people value the fact that the environmental good exists) and bequest value (people want future generations to be able to enjoy it) (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 84). The report similarly acknowledges that Aboriginal witnesses repeatedly testified to the cultural value of water and the holistic role it plays in their societies (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 84). Overall, the report briefly concludes that there might indeed be additional outcomes with inherent, non-monetary value when it comes to evaluating water and sanitation improvements, both nationally and globally (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada 2007–2008: 84).

How does one begin to assess these questions from other than a utilitarian perspective? The most common approach in Western societies is to turn to deontological, principled approaches to decision making. Deontology is a theory that assesses the moral value of a decision – not on the basis of consequences, but on the strength of the actions themselves. In the case of boil water advisories in remote communities, deontologists argue that decision making should not be based simply on cost-benefit analysis; rather, we should be guided by a moral intuition of our duties and responsibilities, proper actions, social and environmental justice, as well as basic human rights.

Human Rights Watch (2016) has declared, for instance, that in Canada, a "broader systemic crisis … leaves many First Nations persons facing daily challenges just to access safe water for drinking and hygiene – a fundamental human right easily enjoyed by most Canadians (italics mine). Irrespective of costs and benefits, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized in 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the human right to water and sanitation, acknowledging that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights (United Nations 2014). More recently, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development presents 17 goals to achieve a more sustainable future. Goal 6 relates to water and sanitation, and here again, it is clearly stipulated that [a]ccess to water, sanitation and hygiene is a human right" (United Nations 2016).

Such rights-based language around water security reflects deontological, principlist values. Decisions are seen to be morally justifiable – not simply in terms of the nature of the consequences and overall benefits of an action, but rather on the basis of rational assessments of one’s own responsibilities and fundamental duties to others. The classic proponent of deontological ethics is Immanuel Kant, who made it clear that "an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined" (2009: 59). Rather than by calculating maximum beneficial consequences, right actions are guided by a categorical imperative that demands that I act "only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law" (Kant 2009: 60).

Applying a deontological ethic to the issue of boil water advisories results in a very different language than the utilitarian. Rather than balancing economic costs and benefits, notions of a human right to water and our duties and responsibilities to deliver clean water to remote communities becomes the norm. In Kant’s classical reflections, such rights could be extended properly only to humans, although more recently, philosophers such as Tom Regan have extended similar moral considerability to animals. Mammals themselves hold rights because they are subjects-of-a-life, meaning that they hold beliefs and desires, perceptions, memories, emotions, preferences, and a sense of the future, and they are able to experience pleasure and pain (Regan 1983: 243). As a result, sentient non-human animals arguably also have a right to safe, clean water within our ecosystems.

Some have accorded rights not only to non-human animals but also to natural systems such as rivers and waterways. In 2017, the Whangunui River, considered sacred by the Indigenous Maori people, was defined as a living entity with full legal rights in New Zealand, almost at the same time that a court in northern India ordered that the Ganges and a main tributary, the Yamuna River, be granted the same legal rights as human beings (Safi 2017). The Indian judges declared that the river and its tributaries would be legal and living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities (Safi 2017). In New Zealand, tribal representatives similarly declared that treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management (Safi 2017).

Extending the anthropocentric language of rights to non-human entities, while sometimes awkward, signals the growing need to afford value to water differently than through narrow, utilitarian, calculative moral paradigms. While to some extent such ethical extensionism is a new move in environmental philosophy, according meaning and value to water in a more holistic fashion has arguably long been embedded within historical Indigenous worldviews. The Assembly of First Nations suggests that one key operative element and preliminary concept in providing safe drinking water requires recognition of First Nations Values, Culture, Knowledge and Relationships to Water (2018). In the next section, we explore what such a recognition might mean.

1.2 Shifting Paradigms: Lessons from Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Water and Indigenous communities have been in the news frequently, mostly due to an appalling lack of safe drinking water and ongoing threats to water and land by large-scale oil and gas extraction, processing, and transportation projects. From widespread Indigenous opposition to these projects, we have heard rhetoric likening the earth to that of Mother and water to the blood of her veins, with slogans emerging to remind us that water is life.⁴ Passionate appeals to protect water have arisen out of the practical necessity of clean drinking water as well as from the growing recognition of a duty to protect that which is sacred. In the words of Anishinaabeg scholar Deborah McGregor, water quality is not just an environmental or ecological issue … all aspects of Creation are inter-related and therefore deserving of respect (2012: 10).

The fact is that diverse Indigenous perspectives on water often run counter to anthropocentric Western views. While admittedly there is no single Western culture, there are normative similarities within Western (and northern) neoliberal capitalist democracies that merit analysis here. Additionally, there is no single Indigenous culture. There are many Indigenous cultures. That said, it is possible to identify some common currents among various Indigenous peoples, worldviews, and cultures, while remaining mindful of specific Indigenous communities to illustrate our points.

Many Indigenous peoples strongly identify with water. Cutcha Risling Baldy, an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California, unequivocally writes, [w]e are the water and the water is us (2017: 14). Of the Ojibwe people who live among the Great Lakes, Melissa Nelson reflects how Anishinaabeg people are water people (2013: 215). Many Indigenous peoples navigated their territories via water and had strong canoeing cultures. Food as varied as fish, shellfish, whales, rice, and seaweed are harvested from traditional Indigenous waterscapes. An affinity with water is not limited to fresh water. Indigenous peoples on the coast of British Columbia have often referred to themselves as salt water people, confirming their strong attachments to the water that sustains their lives and livelihoods (Atleo 2018). Beyond the not-insubstantial physical practicalities, McGregor writes, Water is alive. It is a being with its own spirit (2012: 10).

There are two issues that we wish to expand on here. The first is the belief that water is alive, endowed with spirit and agency; we consider how this conviction impacts Indigenous water views (Yazzie and Baldy 2018). The second issue is that of water as a relative and the ethical implications that flow from this realization. Both issues significantly influence Indigenous water ethics.

1.2.1 Water with Spirit

Yazzie and Baldy state that water is an ancestor and relative with agency … who deserves respect, care and protection (2018: 1). Anishinaabe/Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts adds that habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements … (2013: 23). Many Indigenous peoples believe that they come from a common source of all creation. Nelson writes, the Ojibwe people trace the original clans to a story that says they came out of the sea, and so our very social organization with the clan systems has its origins in water (2013: 218). She adds that there are many practical connections to water as well, including the reliance upon waterways for transport, and the fact that manomin (wild rice), a beloved staple of Ojibwe people, is the food that grows on water (Nelson 2013: 218).

Nelson points out that these relations have been reciprocal, but that somewhere along the journey of assimilation, many of us stopped feeding the land and water (2013: 228). Many stopped reciprocating. Some Indigenous peoples conducted ceremonies and observed protocols as ways of showing their respect to the land and water. Tongva and Acjachemen scholar Charles Sepulveda states, [i]n a Native spiritual perception of reality, human beings have a sacred responsibility to the earth (2018: 43). This responsibility includes recognizing water’s spiritual essence by giving thanks and not acting in ways that would threaten the health of our water.

How else do Indigenous people engage with their water relations? Many regard their lands and waters as teachers and actively learn from them. In the words of Nehiyaw scholar Shawn Wilson, [k]nowledge itself is held in the relationships and connections formed with the environment that surrounds us … there is no distinction made between relationships that are made with other people and those that are made with our environment (2008: 87). This notion of relationality with water, which is recognized as a spiritual force with agency, is meant to guide ethical behavior. Anishinaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson similarly notes that Our knowledge comes from the land, and the destruction of the environment is a colonial manifestation and a direct attack on Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous nationhood (2004: 377). Finally, Anishinaabeg novelist Louise Erdrich adds, you could think of the lakes as libraries (Nelson 2013: 215). Indigenous knowledges are enriched from deep relational connections to lands and waters that nonetheless remain precariously under threat.

Frequently, Indigenous people enact relations with water through ceremonial practices. Baldy writes how [m]any of our ceremonies give us an intimate connection to the river, they remind us that we are responsible for our river, our environment. These ceremonies teach us that our well-being is tied to our environment and our community. They teach us that we are intertwined with our world, not separate, not dominant (2017: 15). Such practices emphasize the inseparability of Indigenous peoples and their terrestrial and aquatic territories. In a Nuu-chah-nulth context, cold-water bathing is an important aspect of spiritual preparation for feats great and small. On young Indigenous women’s coming of age preparation ceremonies, Yazzie and Baldy write, [b]athing helps the young woman to become intimately tied to the river, and by extension the land and her community (2018: 14). These ceremonies are thus vital, cultivating and maintaining connections not only to territories, but also to Indigenous cultures and ways of being.

1.2.2 On Water Relationality

A common Indigenous refrain is all my relations, acknowledging not only interconnectivity but close relationships among all creation. Citing Maori scholar Shane Edwards, Ahenakew et al. write, "the Earth is my Mother, the Sky is my Father, I am a younger sibling of all my relations on Earth" (2014: 221; emphasis in original). The human positioning here is noteworthy, for Edwards is saying that we are not only related to all creation, but we are the younger sibling. This stands in contrast to the conventional anthropocentric point of view that places humanity in a hierarchically superior position over everything on earth. It is within this context of relationality that many Indigenous people also understand their interactions with water.

For instance, McGregor writes, [w]ater is a relative … One speaks to water as one would a relative, with caring and compassion. Water is not a commodity to be bought and sold. It is to be revered and treated with respect and dignity (2012: 10–11). It might go without saying, but McGregor is stressing that one should be a good relative to water, not a negligent one. Yazzie and Baldy confirm that [t]o be a water protector is to be a good relative. To be a land defender is to be a good relative. To struggle together is to be a good relative … We will have no future if we are bad relatives (2018: 16). In positioning oneself and one’s community to be closely related to water, with the expectation of being a good relative, many Indigenous people draw clear ethical implications from this relationality. Some go so far as to suggest that to be Indigenous is to be a good relative (Deloria 1998: xxxiv). Yazzie and Baldy reiterate that

Within this framework of relationality, water is not seen as a resource to be weaponized for the interests of capital by corporations that harness, obstruct, pollute, and discipline water through infrastructure projects like dams and pipelines to boost the capitalist economies of settler nation-states. No, within an Indigenous feminist framework, water is a relative with whom we engage in social (and political) relations premised on interdependency and respect. (2018: 3)

McGregor concisely adds, Appropriate water use is about appropriate relationships … based on respect and the recognition that water is a living spiritual force (2012: 11).

Central to many Indigenous worldviews is the concept of oneness. The Nuu-chah-nulth people say, Hishuukish tsa’walk, or everything is one. Umeek writes that this concept goes beyond the earthly realm: "Heshook-ish tsawalk is a Nuu-chah-nulth perspective that is inclusive of all reality, both physical and metaphysical" (2004: 20–21). In this regard, it can be difficult to find Indigenous people speaking or writing about water exclusive of other interrelated entities. This is nicely captured by the Cree word aski, which, as Cree scholar Michelle Daigle explains, encompasses land and water … It is a concept that expresses the holistic relationship of land and water, and which does not set up a binary between land and water (2018b: 160). If the earth is our mother and the water is her veins, then we can appreciate that damage to one often damages the other. Indigenous people have long struggled to get Settler governments and corporations to understand this in the contexts of mining, oil and gas extraction, and forestry.

1.2.3 Water Threatened

Indigenous lands and waters remain under threat of colonial capitalist resource exploitation worldwide (Daigle 2018b: 160). And despite international efforts to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental crises through initiatives like the Paris Climate Agreement or the United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, the threat to Canadian waters has only intensified in recent years. Although physical protests and legal challenges have somewhat slowed the construction of oil and gas transportation infrastructure, Canada remains committed to the fossil fuel economy. In April 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared, We are going to get the [Trans Mountain] pipeline built. It is a project in the national interest … this project will go ahead (Snyder 2018). One month later, the government of Canada paid $4.5 billion to buy the pipeline from the original project proponent, Kinder Morgan. Despite some rhetoric to the contrary, this move is not necessarily surprising. Governing parties of all political stripes are seemingly unable to chart an aggressive new course toward that sustainable clean energy that scientists say is absolutely required; instead, governments appear to remain committed to smoothing the way for ongoing resource extraction that threatens our waterways. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, enacted a law – Bill C45 – in 2012 that included amendments to the Navigable Waters Act, removing protection for thousands of lakes, rivers, and streams (Daigle 2018b: 166). This was also the piece of legislation that sparked Idle No More, an unprecedented Indigenous protest movement that managed to garner significant sympathy and solidarity from non-Indigenous Canadians and supporters worldwide.

It is also worth noting that water threats can be seen to have genuine, direct consequences to the well-being and health of remote Indigenous communities. High social costs, such as elevated youth suicide rates in these communities, arguably are not unrelated to a sense of desperation and frustration that emerges when one is unable to conduct daily activities due to the lack of access to abundant and safe water. The health outcomes, such as higher rates of cancers and diabetes, are also quite real and non-trivial (Waldner et al. 2017; Human Rights Watch 2016).

1.2.4 Indigenous Resurgence and Water Defenders

Indigenous people continue to protest threats to their waters and lands. Members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation and their supporters continue an annual 1700 km walk from their homelands to the Ontario provincial legislature as well as pursuing legal remedies/restitution. Wet’suwet’un land and water defenders continue to physically oppose natural gas pipeline incursions into their territories. The Heiltsuk First Nation is taking the Kirby Corporation and the federal government to court over a catastrophic diesel oil spill in their territories. Scores of Indigenous communities are carrying out myriad efforts to protect their lands and waters. While these are often reactionary measures, they are not solely reactionary. According to the Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, when Indigenous communities say no to destructive development, their decisions "also have ingrained within them a resounding ‘yes’: they are the affirmative enactment of another modality of being, a different way of relating to and with the world" (2014: 169; emphasis in original). When Indigenous people say no to Settler development, they are often also saying yes to their own laws and priorities, which they have often not forsaken or surrendered.

Not all Indigenous people are resisting these extractive projects. It has been reported that with respect to the Trans Mountain pipeline, Kinder Morgan had signed 43 mutual benefit agreements with Indigenous groups in Alberta and British Columbia (Bailey 2018). With Canada having purchased the pipeline, there has even been talk of an Indigenous ownership stake in the project. This does not mean that those communities are not feeling ambivalent, nor have they completely abrogated their duties to protect their lands and waters. Cheam First Nation chief Ernie Crey states, The pipeline goes through our territories. Our job is to look after our territories and make sure things of value in those territories are taken care of. To do that, we need to be more than advisers (Bailey 2018).

That said, many Indigenous leaders remain torn on the issue. Chief Ken Hansen of the Yale First Nation, who signed a mutual-benefit agreement with Kinder Morgan, has said, When I signed this deal, I felt a lot of shame (Paling 2018). Clearly, many Indigenous leaders and communities are faced with difficult existential decisions. We would argue that the nature of many of those decisions are unjust, but our addiction to fossil fuel extraction and the constraints of our neoliberal capitalist economy leave few with any genuine options.

Indigenous peoples are also doing more than just trying to resist or adapt to Canada’s carbon economy. Indigenous people across the land are resurging and reconnecting with their territories. Daigle reports that members from her community have sought to rebuild relations with aski, and specifically with Mushkegowuk waterways, through extended paddles on Kishiichiwan with the intention of connecting youth with Knowledge Holders and Elders in the community (2018b: 168). The Hooksum School on Vancouver Island and Dechinta program in the Northwest Territories are only two examples of several programs that focus on land-based education, combining traditional Indigenous knowledge and critical anti-colonial theory. These initiatives aim to reconnect Indigenous youth with their territories and encourage them to become land defenders and water protectors. McGregor favors these Indigenous-centric efforts, adding that [i]t is felt that current mainstream processes for protecting water are misguided, limited, and too dependent on the compartmentalized approach of science and technology (2012: 12). Yazzie and Baldy also introduce the idea of radical relationality, which brings together multiple strands of materiality, kinship, corporeality, affect, land/body connection, and multidimensional connectivity … (2018: 2).

Although most of these efforts derive their authority from their own Indigenous laws, they are also affirmed by international convention. Article 25 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (2007) states: Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard. Prime Minister Trudeau has promised to enact reconciliation in the form of nation-to-nation relationships and fully implement the UNDRIP into Canadian law. For him to do this in good faith, he must recognize and truly respect Indigenous rights to self-determination and avoid threatening the lifeblood of Indigenous territories. That unsafe water and boil water advisories exist in Indigenous communities across the country reflects a failure by Canada to acknowledge the reality that Indigenous worldviews hold land and water to be sacred. Any genuinely informed water ethic must respect this fact.

1.3 Navigating among Plural Moral Perspectives

Certainly, boil water advisories across the country are not all the direct result of resource extraction. As the Government of Canada points out, 83% of them are a result of equipment and process-related problems, admittedly exacerbated by the fact that many communities do not have sufficiently trained individuals who can ensure continuous, sustainable operation of these treatment systems (ECCC 2018: 5). But no matter the cause of environmental degradation, the Indigenous way reminds us that all waterways in Canada deserve to be safe and secure, revered as the source of all life and well-being that they are. Indigenous insights remind us that, given that water is life itself, providing water security means more than simple financial investments in water infrastructure, essential though such investments may be. More to the point, Indigenous peoples "understand struggles for water, in all its complexity, as embedded in the historical and ongoing rupture of [their] self-determination, including our political and legal relationships with nipi [water in Cree]" (Daigle 2018a: 6). Safe water means not simply providing potable water but holistically preserving waterways as well as interconnected, relational ecologies and healthy, respectful ways of life. The ethical provision of safe water means more than providing temporary technological fixes: it requires a long-term commitment to protecting the social, cultural, and economic well-being of all communities.

As policymakers grapple with the ethics of water security, these Indigenous voices – especially given the proliferation of boil water advisories within Indigenous communities in Canada – certainly must be heard in a genuine, respectful way. But if environmental decision making requires dialogue among a diversity of moral perspectives, as is arguably the case, the question arises as to how to reconcile competing claims. How, if at all, does the policymaker acknowledge the Indigenous perspective regarding the sacredness of water together with the utilitarian calculations and high costs of delivering efficient infrastructure to remote communities? And whose rights among which communities, from taxpayers to rural dwellers, are to have precedence in solving problems of boil water advisories and the provision of safe water?

The questions become even more challenging when one recognizes that the Western history of ethics is certainly far richer than a conversation between only utilitarian and deontological theoretical perspectives. Natural law theory, for instance, saw Thomas Aquinas build on the teleological aspects of Aristotle’s thought by arguing that the purpose of nature – its telos – is understood specifically in terms of God’s divine law. Since the activities of natural objects were derived from God’s plan and purpose, the natural order and the moral order were one and the same. Universal and objective moral laws themselves were discoverable through human reason and divine revelation. Aquinas argued that the Great Chain of Being means that there is a hierarchy among living entities, with plants, animals, humans, angels, and God ranked in ascending categories of perfection. Such a hierarchy was confirmed in the Bible through Genesis 1:28-29, where it is written that God created humans in his own image to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky and every living thing that moves upon the earth.

Both the hierarchical priority and logic of domination of humans over other living beings, and the notion of a divine ordering of the natural world, are sometimes called into question by contemporary theorists (Warren 1987). Nonetheless, one might argue that an underlying paradigm of human superiority, integral to natural law theory, drives policies that privilege technological, controlling, engineering solutions over more modest preservationist approaches to environmental problems. On such a reading, solving the problem of boil water advisories might simply be a matter of providing technical infrastructure to Indigenous communities, rather than dealing with more complex issues, such as enabling social justice or seeking to extend empathy and care to those lacking safe water.

On the other hand, the philosopher John Rawls is a classic example of someone who argues for the primacy of social justice as fairness in policy making. According to Rawls, principles of social justice provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and define the appropriate distribution of benefits and burdens of social co-operation (Rawls 1971: 4). While also certainly interested in advancing fair and just solutions, ecofeminists like Karen Warren believe that speculative moral abstractions, espoused by traditional moral theorists like Rawls, are less important than advancing an ethic of care. By developing an environmental ethic that takes seriously connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature, Warren argues in favor of values of care, appropriate trust, kinship, friendship – values that are often lost or underplayed in mainstream ethics (1999: 541, 547.) She and other ecofeminists express concern about implicit dualisms that privilege reason over emotion, men over women, humans over nature, the technical over the social. In place of such dualistic paradigms, ecofeminist perspectives consider how the relational attitudes of humans to others – humans as well as nonhumans – sculpt both what it is to be human and the nature and ground of human responsibilities to the nonhuman environment (Warren 1999: 551). More important than what is related is the relations themselves among humans and their engagement with the natural world around them.

We might easily continue to enumerate other ethical theories, from virtue ethics to postmodern moral reflections. For the purposes of this chapter, however, while acknowledging that the field of ethics – and, indeed, water ethics – is rich with theoretical debates, the question that policymakers will want to ask is this: How do these theoretical approaches best inform policy when there is little consensus or few universal rules that emerge among them? To be sure, some ethicists do believe in a top-down model of moral justification, arguing that ethics involves applying a general rule or principle to a particular case. However, if applied ethics is simply a matter of applying the right theory to a particular problem, and no consensus emerges among philosophers as to what that right theory could be, then how, if at all, is ethical deliberation useful to advise policy decisions?

Perhaps the relation between ethics and environmental decision making is better understood not as a top-down application of theory to praxis but rather a bottom-up – or, even better, an iterative – process of uncovering implicit values that underlie particular practical problems while collectively generating with key stakeholders guiding moral principles to inform solutions to those problems (Beauchamp 2005: 7). In that case, moral rules and principles would be derived from the complex variabilities of each specific case, rather than being resolved in advance of evaluating the ethics of a decision.

In his classic article entitled Before Environmental Ethics, environmental pragmatist Anthony Weston points out that ethical ideas are deeply interwoven with and dependent upon multiple contexts: other prevailing ideas and values, cultural institutions and practices, a vast range of experiences and natural settings as well (1999: 597). If Weston is right, then to assume that philosophers can simply theorize optimal, universal ethical norms, irrespective of the vagaries of each individual situation, may be naive. Ethics may be better understood as implaced in a complex context of social, cultural, regulatory, technological, economic, geographical, temporal, and ecological settings. So, it may be more realistic to suggest that an alternative sociological or ‘evolutionary’ view of values is not somehow the death knell of ethics. Instead, such a view seems to be almost an enabling condition of modern philosophical ethics (Weston 1999: 601).

Weston is not the only one who argues for a different meta-ethical perspective: one that is messier than the traditional view of applied philosophy as a process of inventing a plausible theory and then simply applying it to public policy and practices in a neat, linear, top-down fashion. He is joined by philosopher Robert Frodeman, who argues that the role for his colleagues is twofold: first, we must provide an account of the specifically philosophical aspects of our environmental problems; and second, the role of the philosopher is to help to navigate an interdisciplinary dialogue, developing a synopsis of how the various disciplines relate within a given problem (Frodeman 2003: 20). More integrative thinkers than lofty, abstract metaphysicians, philosophers are invited to engage directly in the complexities of lived environmental problems to help synthesize conflicting perspectives and uncover a moral pathway forward.

The renowned German philosopher and critical theorist Jürgen Habermas suggests that the role for ethicists, then, is less one of remaining aloof and fashioning speculative theories than to serve as stand-in interpreters, assisting communities to develop moral insights and universal obligations by uncovering a communicative rationality among committed stakeholders (1990). The role of philosophers is one of helping to decipher what are a community’s core values, and which ones are negotiable. It is a matter of inserting oneself into the process of environmental decision making and helping to elucidate a wise way forward that respects both practical realities of an environmental challenge while also