ABSTRACT
This book has focused on the importance of rivers by seeking a range of cultural, economic, and natural environmental discourses from a select group of commentators highly qualified to draw the connections we desired when first planning this project. These authors describe various river aspects such as their description by artists, their expression in landscapes, community perceptions of rivers as one of the physical sources of water for a myriad of uses including leisure (tourism) activities, indigenous and customary practices, transport, drinking water, and so on. No one aspect is more important than any of the others, but all these approaches combine to understand a river’s existence in society, and how a society chooses to use (or misuse) a river. Here, we identify five key points that emerge from this volume as key messages to any society that lives with rivers. These five aspects are not independent of each other, and they are five subsets of the same thinking: integrating rivers and society.
