What Is the Meaning of Water?

What is the meaning of water? That is one question that circulates many and how does water fit into the spectrum of modern water discourses within Canada? Perhaps water as being the symbolism of a universal undertone of purity and fertility as Professor Janine MacLeod once define water as often being viewed as the source of life itself as we see evidence in countless creation myths in which life emerges from primordial water going all the way back from the ancient era (MacLeod, Lecture 2 on Water of the Past). Furthermore, as a student I fully understand the importance of fresh water as a major resource which connects to the environment and society as a whole in addition a critical component of ecological cycles.

Due to the importance of water, humans have tried to control water resources in a variety of ways from the past, present and moving towards the future which came the emergence of contemporary water discourses in Canada. In reference to the work of Jamie Linton, who explored every water issue as a social issue is one way of having optimistic thoughts about the future and how we as individuals continue to connect with this ideology. Nevertheless, Jamie Linton stresses that water includes a history of conceptualizing water that predominated in the twentieth century (Linton, 75 From Premodern Waters to Modern) as my response to this particular agenda is the way in which I question how scientific practice, technology, and politics produced an idea of water that has helped permit its manipulation and control on a vast scale with effects on human society. To the contemporary works of water today, water is mainly all of us as Noam Chomsky (2011, The Dominion News from Grassroots) once said: