Lowell Duckert’s new book For All Waters brings water to the forefront of early modern ecostudies by producing a series of spellbinding, ecomaterialist readings of The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and travel writing by a dozen authors, including Walter Ralegh, George Best, and John Ovington. Presented as a nonhuman manifesto of water, Duckert’s book charts new ground through its focus on water rather than animals or plants, and by its treatment of travel writing alongside literature. Chapters on rivers, glaciers, monsoons, and swamps reveal how early modern travelers and writers encountered the freshwater around them.
Duckert’s mission early in the book is to justify his elemental ecocritical methodology, a new critical approach to early modern texts. Several felicitous outcomes of isolating a single element across disparate phenomena emerge, and Duckert presents the reader with networks of human/nonhuman interdependencies. Duckert draws heavily from Michel Serres and Bruno Latour to argue that traditional ontological and epistemic distinctions fail to represent existence. Rather, they are part of an ecoimperialist project that began to dominate thought during the Enlightenment. Throughout the book, Duckert argues that we should reject human sovereignty and the salvific impulse to save the world since both approaches suggest we are other than the world. Instead, Duckert posits an appreciation for sticky attachments, cross-kind alliances, and elemental interdependence to imagine alternative forms of environmental justice, although he never entirely clarifies what he means by this. In the process of advocating that we dismantle the nature-culture divide, Duckert asks his readers to dramatically reshape nearly everything they think they know about existence, water, composition, and nature. The book’s use of theory is ambitious, and will appeal to scholars of early modern ecostudies, as well as historians and philosophers of science.
For All Waters also maintains that writers transform through material interactions with liquid; in the book, staying dry is a cardinal sin. Dryness becomes a metaphor for oppressing others, being asocial, denying one’s body or mortality, and (as Olivia warns Feste) producing dry wit. Still, Duckert does not romanticize water completely. One of his book’s greatest strengths is its insistence on identifying the political, economic, and social dimensions of his subject. Each chapter addresses this in a different way. Topics include everyday access to clean drinking water, environmental refugees who suffer severe drought or flooding, and misguided projects to drain or reclaim wetlands. I particularly appreciated how each chapter folds its study of an early modern text (scientific or literary) into a contemporary account of the same water-related phenomena, an important move to argue for the relevance of early modern ecostudies. Where other scholars assert the importance and relevance of early modernity, Duckert proves.
In the introduction, “Enter, Wet,” Duckert lays out his argument for materialist ecocriticism, focusing on the wet bodies of the actors in The Tempest. Chapter 1, “Becoming Wa/l/ter,” stresses Ralegh’s pleasure while immersed in waterfalls and rivers in the Discoverie of Guiana (1596), while the second chapter, “Going Glacial,” captures small moments of ice enchantment among sailors and explorers who venture north. Both chapters historicize these encounters, noting how empirical knowledge and science accompany conquest and colonization, especially as it pertains to native bodies. In chapter 3, “Making (It) Rain,” Duckert offers a series of insights and investigations of rain, leading to a discussion of India’s monsoons. The chapter strings together Feste’s closing song, meteorological treatises, disaster pamphlets, and travel accounts to find small moments in otherwise Eurocentric reports that fully embrace horizontal relations between all things. Chapter 4, “Mucking Up,” explores transatlantic swamp ecology through the discourse of colonial planting and histories of war with indigenous people. Duckert offers ecomaterialist readings of Samuel Hartlib’s 1655 Legacy of Husbandry and William Hubbard’s 1677 A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England.
Duckert’s trademark wordplay did leave me exhausted, and often the book’s form aspires to personal essay. But this is a small price to pay for a fascinating and creative book tasked with bridging early modernity and today’s global ecological crises in a sound, ethical, and philosophically responsible way. Duckert and his generation of scholar-activists are long overdue in the academy.
