By: James Aitchison

Water: colourless, slippery, life-giving, eternal.  Deserts: dry, gritty, hostile, awesome.  Both the blue and desert humanities have diverse, textured relationships with humans.  Why are we so drawn to both?

From vast, turbulent oceans to the local fountain in the neighbourhood park, water captures the human psyche.  We build cities, even entire civilisations, around water.  We holiday by water.   We go cruising on it.  Our most expensive real estate hugs its shores.  We can’t get enough of the stuff — except when it floods or engulfs us, tsunami-style.

Ask Lawrence of Arabia about deserts; he’ll tell you.  Desert spaces humble us, inspire us, nurture our creativity.  Desolation thrills us, challenges us, strikes fear into us.  The bowl of night, studded with millions of stars, bestowed ancient desert cultures with creation myths.

Today, waterscapes and desertscapes have become new intellectual fields of study. 

The Blue Humanities explore how we humans engage with oceans, reefs, lakes, rivers and creeks.  What enduring physical properties of water have fuelled our literary, cultural, historical and theoretical connections?

Oceans cover 70 per cent of the earth’s surface; ironically, the seabed remains largely unexplored.  We know that around 60 per cent of an adult human body is water.  Without water, we can’t survive more than a handful of days.  No wonder we revere it.  In fact, a 2013 research paper revealed that humans prefer glossy visuals and shiny textures because they remind us of water.  Glossy handbags and jewellery, it seems, have an interesting relationship with evolutionary psychology!

In Australia, known as “the thirstiest continent on earth”, watery spaces and shades of blue offer a beguiling contrast to the nation’s harsh red interior.  Water is a political football.  Should great rivers be tapped for irrigation, or allow to flow unimpeded and nourish the natural environment?  The jury is out.

In coming years, some nations could go to war over water.  In the Pacific, island nations could well be swallowed by it.

Take the priceless resources of the Mekong.  From its source in the Tibetan highlands, it flows through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam then out into the South China Sea.  It provides one quarter of the world’s freshwater fish, which in turns provides an income for more than sixty million people, not to mention the crops grown on its banks and tributaries.  When China started damming the Mekong, land-locked Laos wanted to build nine dams as well; Cambodia and Vietnam both have similar plans.  Disrupting the flow of the Mekong would lead to human disaster on an incalculable scale. 

Hydroelectricity is another water resource.  Laos exports close to one billion dollars in hydroelectricity.  Hydropower delivers almost 20 per cent of the world’s electricity.  Paraguay, Nepal, Norway and the Democratic Republic of Congo all rely on hydroelectricity.

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Compared with water, deserts are often perceived as empty, dead and valueless.  They are not.  When geology and philosophy are blended, deserts offer meaningful connections.  The eighteenth-century British philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that deserts are both sublime and beautiful.  He associated the sublime with feelings such as terror, fear and awe, whereas “the beautiful relates to experiences of harmony, pleasure and elegance”.

The Desert Humanities are complex.  According to the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, deserts embody a singularity and a multiplicity at once.  Deserts demand “multidisciplinary perspectives … many depictions of deserts encode racism and histories of colonial violence.”  The Centre seeks to “interrogate and challenge these stories of the desert while exploring alternative traditions in order to shed light on the multitudinous possibilities of what desert places are and can be.”

Too often, indigenous desert people have been conquered, exploited and marginalised.  In 2023, Arizona State University, itself situated on the ancestral lands of twenty-three native nations, embarked on projects to explore how indigenous people interact with land and place.  Meanwhile in Australia, authorities now consult First Nations people in forest management and bushfire preparedness.

Melting icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels, and maritime pollution make the Blue Humanities compelling.  Meanwhile, the Desert Humanities invite us to critically engage with food, energy and water security in an age of extreme weather and climate change.