The flooding of the floodplain represents the lungs of a river—in a literal sense, the condition of its vitality and that of the creatures who depend upon it.

Flood is a scare word, and is so deeply anthropocentric that I want to ban its use.

It’s just the river breathing deeply, as it must.

On this view, we would understand a flooding of settlements near the river to be the crime of trespass against the river.

The periodic flooding of the floodplains is the lifeworld and the condition of existence of all the species that inhabit the river or who dwell along it.

James Scott, In Praise Of Floods

The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors.

And, where possible, to arrange the structure and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.

Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems

Prior to European settlement, the lower reaches of the Mississippi were marked by natural embankments of sediment about three feet high—levees—deposited on either side of the waterway.

The levees usually served to contain the river, though sometimes it would overflow them and inundate an enormous floodplain.

It appears that the human inhabitants could live with that—the Native Americans would simply move to higher ground when the river overflowed and move back later.

We could speak of a simple and even graceful dance of agency between the river and the human population.

The aim was not an imposition of the human will on the river but rather a gearing together of human and nonhuman performances, a choreography of agency.

Nomadism was thus a poetic stance of acting with, rather than on, Nature.

Andrew Pickering, Acting With World

Information contained in Nature allows us a partial reconstruction of the past.

The development of the meanders in a river, the increasing complexity of Earth’s crust, are information-storing devices in the same manner that genetic systems are.

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

Ramon Margalef, Perspectives In Ecological Theory

We have multitudes of symbols—eagle and deer, rainbow and fire, river and storm cloud.

The design of plants, of all living things.

Symbols whose secret meanings are only secret because they are within and cannot be easily expressed.

Popovi Da, San Ildefonso Pueblo

Variety—the recognition of multitudes—lies at the root of the notion of information.

Klaus Krippendorff,
An Epistemological Foundation For Communication

I’m not a materialist or a deist or anything else.

I’m a man who one day opened the window and discovered this crucial thing: Nature exists.

I saw that the trees, the rivers and the stones are things that truly exist.

No one had ever thought about this.

I don’t pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world.

I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children.

I noticed the Universe.

Alberto Caeiro

We humans eat the ocean every day.

The sodium bustling about in your synapses right now, sending signals around your body . . . it came from the sea.

The chloride that helps your body regulate blood pressure and control the gateway between the inside and outside of your cells . . . that came from the sea too.

When a drop of sweat or a tear falls on to your tongue and you taste the salt, you’re tasting the ocean.

Helen Czerski, Blue Machine

River, take me along
In your sunshine, sing me your song

Ever moving, and winding and free
You rolling old river, you changing old river

Is that you in me, river?
That floods out when I pee . . .

Bill Staines, River (Prof Pee-Mix)