ABSTRACT
The sea may be a saline disinfector, or the ‘great sink’ into which the human spirit dissolves, and the re-emergence of water from the earth may be a rebirth of ‘living water’, or ‘simply natural’, but there is no real dissonance between these ideas. People transpose hydrological principles of order to describe internal and external cycles of change. The wider ecosystem is similarly conceived as a series of interactive cycles and processes: rainfall and runoff, flows and flood events, hydration, hydrodynamics, hydraulics and hydrology. A material ecosystem is imagined as an intensely busy set of processes, moving and changing continuously, with plants and organisms living and dying, and matter transforming from state to another. Like the religious cosmologies, secular models make use of images that maintain homologous links between the individual and the ecosystem. Such scheme transfers recur in everyday discourses about water: leakage from supply pipes ‘haemorrhages’ and ‘bleeds’, echoing other ideas about a loss of ‘vital’ substance.
