2. Earth stewardship

Scientific disclosures of planetary challenges have ethical dimensions. For instance, Oreskes (Reference Oreskes2020) describes the ‘duty to warn’ that arises from specialist knowledge that obliges climate scientists to articulate otherwise unknowable risks. It isn't all smooth sailing. Social pressures within scientific communities can inhibit value discussions owing to concerns regarding objectivity (Oppenheimer et al., Reference Oppenheimer, Oreskes, Jamieson, Brysse, O'Reilly, Shindell and Wazeck2019). In other words, the ethos of scientific praxis bears on the relations of science, ethics, and values. This ethos is part of what made Lubchenco's (Reference Lubchenco1998) call for a new social contract for science a powerful statement at the turn of the millennium. Importantly, Lubchenco's call emerged from an ecology of practices oriented to stewardship: the Ecological Society of America's Sustainable Biosphere Initiative (Lubchenco et al., Reference Lubchenco, Olson, Brubaker, Carpenter, Holland, Hubbel, Levin, MacMahon, Matson, Melillo, Mooney, Peterson, Pulliam, Real, Regal and Risser1991). That earlier initiative also provided a reference point for Chapin et al.'s (Reference Chapin, Pickett, Power, Jackson, Carter and Duke2011a) arguments for Earth stewardship. So too did avoiding what Hardin (Reference Hardin1968) termed the tragedy of the commons, which was to be achieved through ‘effective management by an informed and interactive community’ that constituted ‘the ideal that forms part of the foundation of Earth Stewardship’ (Chapin et al., Reference Chapin, Pickett, Power, Jackson, Carter and Duke2011a, p. 46). This section examines this ideal in terms of changing relations of science and ethics.

Rozzi et al. (Reference Rozzi, Chapin, Callicott, Pickett, Power, Armesto and May2015) situate Earth stewardship at the intersection of two gaps: geographical gaps in coverage of social–ecological systems by long-term environmental research networks and gaps among those networks on matters of epistemology, politics, and ethics. These ‘gaps’ present divergent ecologies of practices – networks of knowledge production that attend to different matters of concern (Stengers, Reference Stengers2011). However, ‘gaps’ in dominant knowledge frameworks often indicate failures to appreciate other forms of expertise, such as Indigenous sciences (Liboiron, Reference Liboiron2021). Further, scientific resources often reflect colonial power relations, such as global plant specimens overwhelmingly located in colonial collections and not local herbariums (Park et al., Reference Park, Feng, Akiyama, Ardivani, Avendaño, Barina, Bärtschi, Belgrano, Betancur, Bijmoer, Boggaerts, Cano, Danihelka, Garg, Giblin, Gogoi, Guggisberg, Hyvärinen, James and Davis2023). Moreover, ‘gaps’ are not neutral. For instance, sampling biases in biodiversity sciences issue from colonial and economic histories that obscure understandings of deep-time changes to the biosphere (Raja et al., Reference Raja, Dunne, Matiwane, Khan, Nätscher, Ghilardi and Chattopadhyay2022). Other challenges arise within scientific networks. For instance, incorporating ecology into scientific programs like the International Geosphere–Biosphere Program (IGBP) faced hurdles owing to the specificity of ecological knowledge in contrast to the ‘global’ scale required to treat Earth as a single, integrated system (Kwa, Reference Kwa2005). These limits, occlusions, and oppressive practices demand attention. They also make Chapin et al.'s (Reference Chapin, Pickett, Power, Jackson, Carter and Duke2011a, Reference Chapin, Power, Pickett, Freitag, Reynolds, Jackson, Lodge, Duke, Collins, Power and Bartuska2011b) definitions of Earth stewardship provocative because it uses science to actively shape trajectories of social–ecological systems across scales.

This emphasis on ‘active science’ – sciences that actively seek to shape the trajectories of social–ecological relations – lies adjacent to the ‘use inspired’ sciences that Lubchenco and Rapley (Reference Lubchenco and Rapley2020, p. 3) identify as driven by the pursuit of ‘fundamental knowledge to solve problems that are immediately relevant to societal needs’. Although distinct, both reflect important shifts. First, in the history of how scientific objectivity has evolved (Daston & Galison, Reference Daston and Galison2010; Porter, Reference Porter1995), they exchange dispositions toward science as value-neutral for actively aligning science and values. This is more than a prima facie shift given how Cold War geopolitics shaped objectivity in the international networks that anticipated Earth system science (Reisch, Reference Reisch2005; Wolfe, Reference Wolfe2018). For instance, the Cold War shaped how contemporary notions of ‘systems thinking’ developed through scientific collaborations at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which became a blueprint for the IGBP. Like objectivity, thinking in systems has a longer scientific and philosophical tenure (Midgley, Reference Midgley2003; Siskin, Reference Siskin2016). A key part of that story for Earth system sciences is how, at the IIASA, contemporary notions of ‘systems thinking’ incorporated cybernetics and ecology into a powerful framework for disclosing planetary phenomena (Duller, Reference Duller2016; Rindzevičiūtė, Reference Rindzevičiūtė2016). It was the IIASA, for instance, that published the landmark work Sustainable Development of the Biosphere in which Crutzen and others outlined key concerns regarding human–Earth relations, and where Holling expanded ideas of ecological resilience through the notions of thresholds and tipping points (Clark & Munn, Reference Clark and Munn1986). The launch of the IGBP in 1987 was a fillip for Earth system science, especially when the end of the Cold War expedited knowledge transfer in international networks (Uhrqvist & Lövbrand, Reference Uhrqvist and Lövbrand2014). These histories matter because the sciences employed to actively shape social–ecological trajectories don't operate at remove from their social and political contexts; those contexts are influential in ways recognized by scientific networks themselves (see Seitzinger et al., Reference Seitzinger, Gaffney, Brasseur, Broadgate, Ciais, Claassen, Erisman, Kiefer, Lancelot, Monks, Smyth, Syvitski and Uematsu2015).

Another aspect of Earth stewardship is avoiding Hardin's tragedy of the commons. There is a large literature modifying Hardin's inadequate account of the commons. Often overlooked, however, are the ethical deficiencies in his account, particularly his derivation of moral ‘oughts’ from facts about what is – what philosophers call the naturalistic fallacy. Moore (Reference Moore1922) argued this fallacy arises when what is morally good is defined in terms of the properties of what is being described. A clear example besets Hardin's 1968 essay. There, alongside his xenophobia and stance against human rights (Janssen et al., Reference Janssen, Smith-Heisters, Aggarwall and Schoon2019), Hardin (Reference Hardin1968, p. 1245, original emphasis) states: ‘the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed’. Here, Hardin conflates the state of the system with whether an act is ethical or not. Two problems arise. First, Hardin assumes the state of a system could be sufficiently known to make these such judgments. This doesn't hold given the uncertainty and partial perspectives characteristic of scientific accounts. Kay (Reference Kay, Jørgensen and Müller2000) incisively showed how uncertainty and complexity positions scientists as narrators that connect what is disclosed by complexity sciences to the ‘trade-offs’ and alternate futures different actions entail.

A second concern with evoking Hardin is that resilience is not the ‘state’ of a system; it is a way of disclosing capacities to respond to disturbance. For instance, in Steffen et al.'s (Reference Steffen, Rockström, Richardson, Lenton, Folke, Liverman, Summerhayes, Barnosky, Cornell, Crucifix, Donges, Fetzer, Lade, Scheffer, Winkelmann and Schellnhuber2018) account of ‘hothouse Earth’ the current social–ecological system is near the edge of its capacity to adapt to increased greenhouse gases. Connolly (Reference Connolly2013) flips the idea around to consider how the political and economic systems driving planetary forcing are resilient in a way capacious enough to keep them in place despite the harms they generate. These different uses of resilience turn on different ecologies of practice that affect what scientists and political theorists, respectively, pay attention to. Resilience can also be used to describe ethical affordances. Homer-Dixon et al. (Reference Homer-Dixon, Walker, Biggs, Crepin, Folke, Lambin, Peterson, Rockström, Scheffer, Steffen and Troell2015) describe these as the ‘coping capacity’ of actors to respond to stress and crises. Here, specialized knowledge of Earth system science anchors a capacity – recall Oreskes's duty to warn – connecting value transformations to shifts in human–Earth relationships that seek to maintain the ‘resilience of the Earth system or large portions of it’ (Steffen et al., Reference Steffen, Persson, Deutsch, Zalasiewicz, Williams, Richardson, Crumley, Crutzen, Folke, Gordon, Molina, Ramanathan, Rockström, Scheffer, Schellnhuber and Svedin2011, p. 748).

Does Earth stewardship's effort to maintain planetary resilience commit the naturalistic fallacy by assuming Holocene conditions provide for ‘the good’ while others, such as Anthropocene conditions, on balance will not? This question lies at the heart of debates over a ‘good Anthropocene’ versus one destined for planetary denudation. As Daston (Reference Daston2014) shows, several potential responses reveal how the naturalistic fallacy carries its own history of modernist distinctions among facts, values, and ‘nature’. Osorio (Reference Osorio2017), for instance, rejects Moore's argument that the naturalistic fallacy is a logical error and argues that sciences, including those of resilience, make both descriptive and evaluative propositions. This bears resemblance to Norton's (Reference Norton2005) account of how resilience, and adaptive management, orient social learning to the science and ethics of complex systems. Norton, following Williams (Reference Williams1985), rejects the fact-value distinction – the bugbear at the heart of deriving any ‘ought’ from facts about what is – since it depends on applying some specialized theory to parse overlapping aspects of ordinary language and scientific explanations. So, there are defensible positions for Earth stewardship that link resilience to values, but treating Hardin as an ideal isn't among them.

Understanding resilience in terms of ethical affordances positions Earth sciences in key roles when possibilities for value transformation are narrated in response to crises (Folke et al., Reference Folke, Carpenter, Walker, Scheffer, Chapin and Rockström2010). Increasingly, the language of ‘transformation’ operates as the point of conjuncture linking sustainability sciences to the normative and policy ethos of Earth stewardship (Chapin et al., Reference Chapin, Weber, Bennett, Biggs, van den Bergh, Adger, Crépin, Polasky, Folke, Scheffer, Segerson, Anderies, Barrett, Cardenas, Carpenter, Fischer, Kautsky, Levin, Shogren and Zeew2022). In Earth stewardship, the possibilities for transformation are informed by and often grounded through Earth system sciences, but nevertheless depend on social values. To paraphrase Bateson, these values do not come from without, but reflect societies-in-Anthropocene environments. In the case of water, accounts of these values highlight their coevolution with hydrological systems now under immense anthropogenic pressure (Falkenmark & Folke, Reference Falkenmark and Folke2002; Vörösmarty et al., Reference Vörösmarty, Meybeck and Pastore2015; Wang-Erlandsson et al., Reference Wang-Erlandsson, Tobian, van der Ent, Fetzer, Wierik, Porkka, Staal, Jaramillo, Dahlmann, Singh, Greve, Gerten, Keys, Gleeson, Cornell, Steffen, Bai and Rockström2022). The normative upshot is that water's limiting role for social–ecological systems and processes become what Boltz et al. (Reference Boltz, Poff, Folke, Kete, Brown, Freeman, Matthews, Martinez and Rockström2019) term a ‘master variable’ in determinations of how to achieve water resilience in the Anthropocene. Critically, however, the values that could be said to have ‘coevolved’ with water are manifold, plural, and not always commensurate with one another – many have been explicitly oppressed (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2023). That only some values guide narratives linking uncertainties, crises, and trade-offs is a challenge not because ethics derive from the ‘state of the system’. Rather, it is because the ethical affordances of Earth stewardship are scoped to those values that are commensurate with the sciences through which it seeks to actively shape the trajectory of the Earth system.

Finally, Earth stewardship counters a virtual axiom of Anthropocene theorists who interpret the epoch in terms of incommensurability between accounts of anthropogenic impacts on the planet and existing normative resources. Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Gemenne and Bonneuil2015) argued there is nothing in the evolutionary or cultural heritage of humankind to deal ethically with the scale of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2009, p. 221, original emphasis) claims climate change presents a universal challenge to the condition of human life yet asserts that ‘we can never understand this universal’. These concerns recall Kuhn's (Reference Kuhn1996) argument regarding the incommensurability of scientific paradigms. Yet claims of incommensurability in the Anthropocene are difficult to defend because they make one socially situated notion of time the scale for all humanity (Coen, Reference Coen2016). As I've shown elsewhere, incommensurability is also inadequate owing to how geological reasoning made commensurate early 20th-century hydrology, social sciences, and forms of water management that treat water as a resource (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2017a) – a view still at the normative center of global water governance.

Depictions of the ‘human’ in Earth system science, and hence of Earth stewardship, insufficiently reflect the diverse ways of knowing and relating to the planet (Castree, Reference Castree2017; Lövbrand et al., Reference Lövbrand, Beck, Chilvers, Forsyth, Hedren, Hulme, Lidskog and Vasileiadou2015). Further, the Christian heritage of Earth ‘stewardship’ is often noted (Chapin, Reference Chapin2020; Rozzi et al., Reference Rozzi, Chapin, Callicott, Pickett, Power, Armesto and May2015; West et al., Reference West, Haider, Masterson, Enqvist, Svedin and Tengö2018) yet tends to be quickly scrolled past even though Eurocentric forms of ‘stewardship’ animated colonial and settler-colonial environmental practices (Stoll, Reference Stoll2015). Failing to account for gendered, racialized, ethnic, caste, class, and colonial oppression is worsened by not reckoning with the diverse and plural actors, relations, and futures of communities for whom environmental apocalypse is already lived reality (Davis & Todd, Reference Davis and Todd2017; Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2016). Purifoy (Reference Purifoy2021, p. 830) argues, for instance, ‘Black places are the parables that anticipated climate change, which now threatens the total ecosystem of the Earth and our collective ability to live on it’. Norms and practices sustained by communities long-forced to environmental margins present important alternative pathways that Earth stewardship must not make inexplicable through the ‘active sciences’ it enrolls.

3. Water, resilience, and critique

Resilience has many meanings in ordinary language, and in technical conceptualizations of social–ecological and hydrological sciences (Falkenmark et al., Reference Falkenmark, Wang-Erlandsson and Rockström2019; Folke, Reference Folke2003). It is a concept widely yet inconsistently used in water policy, where meanings often split across notions of planning and engineering versus the integrated dynamics of social–ecological systems (Rodina, Reference Rodina2019). In this section, I'm concerned with social–ecological approaches to resilience, especially two critiques that cannot be dismissed in Earth stewardship proposals owing to the central role of water in proposals to actively shape Earth's trajectory. The ethical stakes are high; water injustices affecting Black, Indigenous, and other oppressed communities span the Global South and the Global North (e.g. Curley, Reference Curley2019; Pauli, Reference Pauli2019; Ranganathan & Balazs, Reference Ranganathan and Balazs2015).

One critique of resilience identifies its scientific ethos with neoliberalism and the steady creep of capitalist logics into explanations of social and ecological relations (cf. Brown, Reference Brown2015). Walker and Cooper (Reference Walker and Cooper2011), for instance, argue that Holling's ecological critique of command-and-control governance finds a strong counterpart in Friedrich Hayek's neoliberal critique of the state. Both Holling and Hayek, for instance, mobilize complexity sciences to argue that the state has insufficient knowledge to plan or manage complex systems. Further, on this critique, Holling's (Reference Holling2001, p. 394) description of resilience as ‘accumulated ecological, economic, social and cultural capital’ was one metaphor too far in tipping resilience towards a neoliberal ethos in which all relations are rendered in economic terms. Over time, critics argue, a conceptual alliance of resilience with neoliberal critiques of the state transformed the concept from its original, critical orientation to collusion with prevailing power structures. Cooper (Reference Cooper2011), for instance, argues that resilience gained enhanced prominence after the 2008 financial crisis owing to its capacity to order economic and ecological crises in ways that would maintain the status quo of capital accumulation. There are ready examples in the water sector; Schmidt and Matthews (Reference Schmidt and Matthews2018) tracked how networks of global financial actors, like the World Economic Forum, directly influenced the conjunctive rise of economic tropes, resilience, and ‘systems thinking’ in water security discourse.

A second critique argues resilience is inherently conservative. Mackinnon and Derickson (Reference MacKinnon and Derickson2013, p. 254) claim resilience intrinsically ‘privileges established social structures’ that are often products and producers of inequality. Largely in agreement with Connolly's (Reference Connolly2013) diagnosis (see above), they argue capitalism operates by producing inequality and so aligning resilience with its economic logics conserves those forms of inequality (cf. Piketty, Reference Piketty2017). Others make similar critiques. Nadasdy (Reference Nadasdy, Armitage, Berkes and Doubleday2007, p. 215) argues that ecologists and theorists ‘necessarily valorize one particular set of social–ecological relations’ when they laud resilience. This comes at the expense of asking what kind of resilience should be sought and for whom. Nadasdy's (Reference Nadasdy, Armitage, Berkes and Doubleday2007) target is the pursuit of resilient agricultural landscapes that are themselves premised on Indigenous dispossession. In such cases, the choice of which relations matter in a social–ecological system is also an ethical choice of whose relations matter. Similar concerns hold for racialized assumptions by colonialists and early 20th-century scientists who blamed desertification in the Sahel on local African communities in ways that continue to influence narratives of desertification in climate change policies at the expense of understanding local, Black practices of resilience (Benjaminsen & Hiernaux, Reference Benjaminsen and Hiernaux2019; Meché, Reference Meché2022).

The critiques above overlap in arguing that resilience is not neutral. It isn't new to note the partiality of knowledge, but it is important to note that how partiality is addressed can come at a cost to particular ways of knowing. Indigenous sciences, for instance, are empirical in ways that do not reduce ecological relations to impersonal causes that characterize the feedback loops of complex systems. Rather, Indigenous sciences explain relations to nonhuman species and processes through kinship (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Scott, Reference Scott and Nader1996). This includes reciprocal relations and obligations to rivers, lakes, and glaciers (Cruikshank, Reference Cruikshank2005; Daigle, Reference Daigle2018; Leonard et al., Reference Leonard, David-Chavez, Smiles, Jennings, Alegado, Tsinnajinnie, Manitowabi, Arsenault, Begay, Kagawa-Viviani, Davis, van Uitregt, Pichette, Liboiron, Moggridge, Carrol, Tsosie and Gomez2023; Wilson and Inkster, Reference Wilson and Inkster2018). To riff on Bateson's phrasing of a body-in-the-environment, Indigenous peoples have different ecologies of practices through which knowledge and ethos co-constitute accounts of kinship-with-their-relations. Moreover, it is not sufficient to defend resilience by claiming it can form the basis for Earth stewardship to the extent that it aligns with Indigenous understandings because that is not what Earth stewardship claims to be doing in claims to use science to actively shape social–ecological trajectories. Rather, something more striking is afoot: Earth stewardship deploys resilience not to isolate elements in different knowledge pathways, but to translate them into its own ecology of practices.

4. Earth stewardship and water resilience

Earth stewardship is an ecology of practices in which science actively shapes planetary trajectories to achieve resilience. The values it draws on are neither complete nor uniform but patchwork (Bennett et al., Reference Bennett, Biggs, Peterson and Gordon2021; Leach et al., Reference Leach, Reyers, Bai, Brondizio, Cook, Díaz, Espindola, Scobie, Stafford-Smith and Subramanian2018). Within Earth stewardship, resilience functions not to isolate different pathways of knowing, but to translate multiple pathways into its own framework. Owing to water's role in multiple Earth system processes, the shift in the relation of ethics and science entailed by Earth stewardship directly affects water resilience in the Anthropocene. It reveals the limits of the ‘impair-then-repair’ ethos through which 20th-century management practices created unethical impacts on societies at the scale of the global water system (Vörösmarty et al., Reference Vörösmarty, Meybeck and Pastore2015). As one further example, so much groundwater was pumped between 1993 and 2010 that it tilted Earth's pole nearly 80 cm (Seo et al., Reference Seo, Ryu, Eom, Jeon, Kim, Youm, Chen and Wilson2023). Additionally, the ‘active science’ of Earth stewardship mobilizes the specialized knowledge of hydrologists and Earth system scientists to address otherwise unknowable, planetary risks. Those sciences cannot be done without in efforts to understand planetary challenges since they are the very means of disclosing them. But Earth stewardship does not stop there; it must also appraise different future trajectories. This raises the question: Earth stewardship – water resilience – for whose future?

Earth stewardship took shape around degradation to the nonhuman world, as have new scientific tools and vocabularies seeking to address anthropogenic impacts on the global water system. But other pathways have also emerged. Water scholars describe these in terms Bateson would have approved of: ‘“river-as-ecosociety”, “river-as-territory”, “river-as-subject”, and “river-as-movement”’ (Boelens et al., Reference Boelens, Escobar, Bakker, Hommes, Swyngedouw, Hogenboom, Huijbens, Jackson, Vos, Harris, Joy, Castro, Duarte-Abadía, Souza, Lotz-Sisitka, Hernández-Mora, Martínez-Alier, Roca-Servat, Perreault and Wantzen2023, p. 1). Importantly, these pathways are often anchored in epistemological, ethical, and ontological orientations to water that entail distinct social worlds (Yates et al., Reference Yates, Harris and Wilson2017). For instance, relating to water as kin entails a different world of praxis than does systems thinking. In this context, the pursuit of water resilience raises new ethical concerns. To paraphrase Bateson, the nonsense question would be to isolate where ethical changes across different ways of knowing arise: With water users? Where infrastructure meets hydrology? With different governance practices? Rather, what needs to be examined is the role of resilience in translating different pathways of knowing water into Earth stewardship's framework.

Translation is no simple affair. Quine (Reference Quine1960) argued translation was beset by indeterminacy owing to how social and physical phenomena exceed techniques of observing and knowing them. Quine's (Reference Quine1987) influential thesis didn't reject the fact of translation but highlighted how indeterminacy meant that multiple translations of phenomena are always possible. Importantly, Quine focused on radical cases where translation couldn't rely on mediators with even partial knowledge. Indeterminacy arose not because translations are impossible – indeterminacy was not necessarily incommensurability – but because multiple translations could fit the facts and there was no way to settle disputes between competing interpretations (cf. Sankey, Reference Sankey1993). Quine's philosophical inquiry presents a hard case not too distant from debates among social scientists about different ontological worlds and ways of knowing (see de la Cadena & Blaser, Reference de la Cadena and Blaser2018). For instance, harms from water pollution can affect Indigenous communities in ways unknowable to others owing to the specificity of relations among place, water, and knowledge (Dotson & Whyte, Reference Dotson and Whyte2013). In other cases, Indigenous sciences orient knowledge, obligations, and relations towards the pursuit of specific futures (Daigle, Reference Daigle2018; Leonard et al., Reference Leonard, David-Chavez, Smiles, Jennings, Alegado, Tsinnajinnie, Manitowabi, Arsenault, Begay, Kagawa-Viviani, Davis, van Uitregt, Pichette, Liboiron, Moggridge, Carrol, Tsosie and Gomez2023; Todd, Reference Todd2017; Watt-Cloutier, Reference Watt-Cloutier2018). These are nontrivial concerns because the norms and practices of communities long forced to environmental margins matter for just trajectories and futures. Further, what counts as a viable future under climate change scenarios is not an objective exercise but one that actively co-produces value judgments in the language of trade-offs (Poprocki, Reference Poprocki2022). Likewise for water resilience, which must translate ecological and relational practices across social worlds if their futures are to be considered candidates for applying the kinds of active science pursued by Earth stewardship.

Mobilizing resilience to translate multiple ecologies of practice into the framework of Earth stewardship, however, runs counter to the ethics of retaining the explicability of different pathways of knowing on their own terms. Indeed, the social science corollary to scientific practices that respond to environmental degradation is to identify how alternate narratives and relations to water make visible what formerly went unconsidered. In the context of Earth stewardship, this means rejecting ex ante uses of Earth system sciences that premediate the spectrum of values for scoping future trajectories. The challenge for Earth stewardship is that ex post explanations cannot be guaranteed either owing to how the Anthropocene complicates social learning (Schill et al., Reference Schill, Anderies, Lindahl, Folke, Polasky, Juan Camilo, Crépin, Janssen, Norberg and Schlüter2019; Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2017b). What then for water resilience?

Meisch (Reference Meisch2019) argues that a narrative ethic for water departs from abstract theorizing to focus on the combination of experience with judgments that depend on lives lived with water. This view places a special burden on ethics not to translate concrete relations with water into abstract concepts. It also leaves room for how water resilience might provide a scientific ethos in which knowledge of water is connected to the Earth system. But narratives are not neutral either: the colonial narratives that filled gaps in early sediment science fostered laws in the Bengal Delta that reverberate inequalities into the present (Bhattacharyya, Reference Bhattacharyya2021); telling the story of phosphorous in relation to water, planetary processes, or Indigenous dispossession draws out different moral concerns (Elser & Haygarth, Reference Elser and Haygarth2021; Teaiwa, Reference Teaiwa2014). Acts of translation, then, do not reduce in a tidy way to the framework of Earth stewardship. Instead of unproblematic translation there is a need to articulate an ethic in which specialized knowledges of water risks arise from plural ecologies of practice and combine in a duty of care and reparation.