Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo and Blake Lavia: Returning to each other and the remembrance of “Water is Life” (Ep428)

Written By kamea chayne
“We’re all connected to water... So if water is sick, we’re all sick. Water permeates every living being on this planet... Water is life; water is us.”
— Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo

What does it mean to remember ourselves as representatives of our rivers, oceans, and other earthly bodies of water? Why is it vital to recognize the failed logic underpinning regulatory systems that take on an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to water pollution? And how can we leverage our tools as artists, storytellers, and creatives to co-create felt change?

In this episode, we dialogue with Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo and Blake Lavia of Talking Wings Collective for a synergistic conversation — where they invite us to think and dream with water.

Join us as the artist-activist duo expands on how the legal frameworks surrounding pollution often exist in “grey areas”; why we need to problematize such “bureaucracies of death” as maintaining worldviews of separation between people and our waterful world; and what it means to replace extractivist modes of relating with our ecosystems so that they better align with the Indigenous framing of “Water is Life.”

Tune in and subscribe to Green Dreamer via any podcast app, and join us on Patreon for the extended version of this episode.

 

About our guest:

Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo (both they/them) are two environmental storytellers from the Talking Wings Collective who reside in the Upper St. Lawrence River / Kaniatarowanénhne Watershed. They are currently collaborating with the organization Talking Rivers to educate communities about the Rights and Rites of Rivers and their ecosystems — using art, storytelling, and ecocentric conversations.

Artistic credits:

  • Song feature: “A call to the soul” by Marko Toba

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Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: In this society, at least from my perspective, I'm seeing us all bombarded by stories. Some stories are coming to us left and right. We are in some ways consumers of stories at a pace that has rarely been seen in history, at least as I know in the history of this human world. And in, realizing this, realizing that there are so many stories that are coming to us on so many different levels, it may sound shocking to some to say that there is a hegemony of storytelling.

And there is, even with the proliferation of stories that are being shared online, there are narratives that are being told that are in some ways governing the storytelling practices that we all are partaking in. This is not because the stories that most people are sharing or telling each other are not vital and real. But a lot of them are obscured or interpolated into this overarching system, this overarching hegemony in which they all function within these preset schemes, which are owned by gigantic corporations. And these corporations, basically because of all the agreements that we click without even reading them, have owned all our stories. They own all our stories and are using them to generate other stories.

They're used to kind of rip our stories apart, take them into different places, and then use them to write the scripts for Marvel movies or use them to write the scripts for future news articles. All of the stories that we're personally sharing, when we share online, stop becoming our own. And in that space in which we are all kind of victims to an overarching system, which we can't govern, it's not democratic.

When a larger narrative is shared throughout these methods, throughout these networks, that narrative dominates. If someone who has the power to share a narrative shares it and has the money to make sure that everyone listens to it, that one narrative can cover up many of the other multiple narratives and real narratives that people are sharing.

So in that space, we see things like the doomsday rhetoric in which we were told that there's nothing that can be done about the climate crisis. The climate crisis is real. The climate crisis is something that's affecting lots of people. But at the same time, this cynicism is exposed by many in which the act of actually taking a stand and doing something becomes almost like a joke in the eyes of certain people who share and expose these narratives. And at the same time in this space, it's vital to kind of take a step back.

I believe it's better to take a step back and share stories and keep on sharing stories, realizing that the system is rigged, realizing that no matter how many stories we share, we're not breaking through the barrier. We're just feeding into a system that is co-opting our stories.

It's vital to turn away from the screen and turn to your neighbor across the street — whether it be a human or whether it be a tree, and communicate and share.

If we only focus on the spectacular stories that are being bombarded at us and only feed into those spectacular stories, then in some ways we lose that connection to ourselves, the communities around us, and the world that sustains us.

Blake Lavia: And yes, following with what Tzintzun said, this kind of media making that is shaping, that has shaped, our society and that is framing how we see the world, it is making us blind to one another and to the world we live in. Because once we take a picture, we remember the picture of the subject, not the subject itself. Even our memory and our attention span have shrunk. People cannot read anymore. And even the quality of what we remember has gone down.

We live in a society with a huge attention deficit — a society that understands the world more and more through emojis and the spectacular images that are fed to us through social media and the various streaming channels that we have access to for very little money.

We have a societal crisis in which the bonds between families and other humans are fraying, not to mention the bonds we have with the world and the ecosystems that surround us.

It is a bit of a desperate situation and I often wonder how we will get back from this because our generations and the older generations still came from a world in which we were not constantly attached to phones or screens. But the question is: What's going to happen to those generations, the very young ones that grow up with this technology, and if they're not supervised, don't see anything else? So those are big questions.

And I do believe that there is a really deep need to go back to the human, to abandon the screens, as Tzintzun said, and to reconnect with our circumstantial reality, with our neighbors, and let go of what is told by the medium, by the social media, by everything that comes from the outside and refocus on what comes from inside, from inside ourselves, inside the community and re-understand our reality and our truth. Not the truth that is provided through the stories that we consume.

Kamea Chayne: It feels like all of these stories and messages are still all around, but now they've kind of become filtered through the corporate-dominated media landscape and also the power structure in media as well. And then, of course, all of this is similarly shaped by social media and the short-form type of content that everything is packaged into.

I resonate with this concern for the attention span and how that has broader implications in terms of our capacities to think deeply through big, immense issues that can be very overwhelming. Given that we have a limited capacity to listen, what does it mean that our attention has become disproportionately consumed by centralized media with more homogenized narratives as compared to listening to each other at a more human-to-human scale and even pausing to listen more to the diverse and place-based stories of our trees, the waterways, the land where we are, and so forth. I feel this very deeply.

And to move forward into water, this Indigenous-led framing of water as life is profound for me just because it's so true. Nobody, no matter our political orientation or worldview, can deny the fact that we need and want safe drinking water. We want unpolluted oceans and lakes and rivers to swim and play in. So perhaps it can be kind of like a more unifying concern. And also, beyond our human desires and needs, I kind of see our river networks, like the arteries of the earth that breathe and support life everywhere that they travel and also sustain life within their river and lake bodies as well.

So with this in mind, to help illustrate a picture of where we're currently at today, what do we know in regards to the plight of our waters and river ecosystems in terms of their states of well-being or pollutedness? And also because they are actively flowing networks that travel and traverse terrains, how has this already created ripple effects on the bodies of humans and other more-than-human beings?

Blake Lavia: So it is pretty dramatic what is happening to our rivers and our lakes and the water in general, from the increasing temperatures, the pollutants that are flowing into the waterways, due to industrial pollution, agricultural pollution, and also the microplastics.

We live in an area that has a lot of water. We’re currently in the watershed of the Great Lakes, which, as we know, have most of the fresh drinking water in the world. So we are in an area where we are not suffering from water shortages for now.

A lot of people have the illusion that since their rivers look clean and shiny everything is fine. It’s not fine.

We have local scientists from Clarkson University who are currently studying the microplastic content in the grass and racket rivers, two of which flow from the Adirondack Mountains to the St. Lawrence River, the Great River. And what these researchers have found is that there are a lot of microplastics. The amount of microplastics that are in these waters is higher than the safe level that the state has set. So the microplastics are dangerously high, which means that they're in all the beings that live in these waters.

Also what they have discovered is that the purification plants that purify the water that goes to households, for example, the town of Potsdam, take their drinking water from the river before the purification plan and afterwards there is the same amount of microplastics which means that everybody who drinks the water tap water from their homes is drinking the microplastics that are in the river because they're not removed. There is not yet technology or at least it's not applied to remove them, which means in general, we’re drinking a credit card's worth of plastic a week.

And it's still safer, ironically enough to drink from the tap water of our homes than buy bottled water in plastic because the microplastic in that water is even higher. And this is just one of the problems. Then we have the rising temperatures, which are a huge concern, particularly for the local lakes in the Adirondacks. The lakes need a certain kind of temperature to shift their water cycle. And if that doesn't happen, then the lakes begin to die.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: And all of these cases are examples of one region. And of course, what you just mentioned is that…

We're all connected to water. Water is the being that's inside all of us. It’s this one unified entity that governs the entire planet. And we are part of this being. So if water is sick, we’re all sick.

Water permeates every single living being on this planet. If there's no water, there's no life. Water is life, water is us. So if we're sick from the microplastics that inflame our bodies, or if we're sick from the pollution that is invading us from every single angle, then that is only because all the other living beings are also sick.

There's a division that people tend to put between us humans and everyone else, forgetting that human beings are ecosystems ourselves, we are ecosystems ourselves, and water is the entity that flows through all of us. So yes, the picture is not pretty, the entire planet is sick. Water is also not faring well and water is flowing through every single one of us. We're all connected. And what happens to someone in some place is happening to someone somewhere else. So it's important to remember that connection and to honor that connection.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thinking with water shows that all life is entangled and not separate. And I think the troubling reality is also that there are so many extended impacts of water pollution that we don't even fully understand or know yet because less research funding is going into finding out a lot of these things compared to research funding for other things that could become profitable for industry.

And also regulation can't keep up with constant innovation in terms of all the chemicals that we're using. So when a lot of new types of pesticides or agrochemicals keep being introduced, there's kind of an innocent until proven guilty approach where they might start being used at scale.

And then years or decades later, if it's proven that they've had devastating impacts on something, there's kind of a delay in the reassessment of whether there's a need to regulate them. But by then, it might be too late or have already caused irreversible harm. I'm curious if you've had experiences or have knowledge of how this has played out.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: So what you just mentioned illustrates perfectly the way the regulatory system—at least in the United States but also in many other countries— functions. So we have a system in which most of the chemicals that are released into the world every single day, every single year, aren't tested. They aren't tested by any of the agencies. They are just released. And then years later we discover that all of these things cause cancer, and all of these things poison ourselves and other modern human beings.

And inside, in this space in which we always act too late, I would say that it's not by chance that they are always catching up to the problem. We’re working in a system that regulates environmental exploitation.

What does it mean to regulate environmental exploitation?

It means that we set a safe standard for environmental exploitation. We are saying how much awful venom we can put in the ecosystem before the ecosystem dies. People are gambling with the lives of everyone and every living being on this planet. In that space, we need to remember that the bureaucracy that is supposedly protecting all of us — all those in governmental institutions that are supposedly protecting us, humans — is almost set up to hide the true cause of the problem, which is an economy of greed and an economy where the profit motive governs everything.

And I'm just going to ask or pose a question. What if we tried to regulate the polluters by saying ‘no’? There can be no possible pollution if it risks life?

Regulatory bodies permit a certain amount of venom, allowing a certain amount of people to die until we set this “cap”. Everything under that cap still produces harm. This system is a bureaucracy of death.

And if we said ‘no’ to this, we could put other options. Recently, the Constitutional Court in Ecuador ruled to block mining operations in Los Cedros National Park. Why? They ruled to block this mining in the Los Cedros National Park because it was going to poison and harm both human and natural communities. In 2008, Ecuador adopted a constitution that included the protection for the rights of Mother Earth—of Pachamama.

And this meant that they were protecting the rights of also the modern human beings that make up the world, that form the global community with us. And when the constitutional court blocked the mining operations in Los Cedros, they applied a precautionary measure. And this precautionary principle states that if any type of pollution could happen if any type of environmental destruction could happen to that project, that potential project will be blocked.

Instead of just permitting environmental exploitation, they were protecting ecosystems from environmental exploitation. The difference in the United States is that if a company wants to do some type of action, they get a permit that permits environmental violation. The actual violence is not blocked. It is just a certain amount of violence is permitted.

This type of laxity system in which you permit a certain type of violence while not considering the consequences of it, in my opinion, has led to the large-scale global destruction that we're seeing today. So everything that you just said, the system in which we are not stopping the violence, on humans and more-than-humans, but is instead just permitting a certain level of violence has led to the poisoning and destruction of water and all the living beings that are sustained by water.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so it's like the framework itself and the logic of the system itself. It goes beyond making small tweaks to what we already have. Also, different bodies have different levels of sensitivity to chemical toxins. So I feel like it is hard to set a sort of universalized limit that honors and respects all bodies at different scales.

Another thing that came up for me as you were speaking is the idea that problem creation and then problem-solving in this system is more profitable for the entire system as a whole than problem prevention altogether. Now there are a lot of companies and industries around water filter technologies and things necessary to clean up pollution. And all of that is very important, but that's also just trying to clean up the issue after the fact.

It's kind of like the innocent until proven guilty thing: we can only have filter technologies for chemicals and toxins that we already understand and know. So I feel like we should all be very concerned by the system where there are a lot of things polluting our waterways that we don't even understand yet. If we don't understand them, then companies that make filtration systems can't necessarily know how to filter those things out.

I would love to move on to one of the inspiring projects that you recently worked on, called Listening to the Water. This was an art exhibition I believe that happened in the fall of last year, 2023. And this year we've launched our imagination program, Alchemize. And one of the themes is ‘otherness’ where we invite people to speculatively imagine becoming another. One of whom is water, which is a creative practice that I contributed to. So this project of yours also really resonates and aligns.

The underlying premise of your exhibition is, ‘Have you ever wondered what water would say if they could speak with human words?’ What were you most moved by from this curation process? And what do you sense as the key messages and yearnings that water would want us to know right now?

Blake Lavia: To answer that question, because as we talked about before, we need another way to communicate that has not been co-opted by the big media. We need another way to understand the science that is telling us that there are problems—problems caused by the same science. But there are problems with how things are going, and we have a climate crisis. But it seems like numbers and even just the journalistic reports are not sticking. People are not hearing it. This is probably because everything is diluted or simply gets lost.

We believe that art can break through the numbness that this nihilistic society has created, and to speak and to allow the work to speak to things that people do not understand or do not want to hear.

This was the aim of the exhibit, to allow the water to talk through art. And we also had some art scientists collaborate. Some scientists were also artists, while some scientists collaborated with artists. And what we heard was a need from the artists themselves, and scientists, to communicate and share and commune with water and the ecosystem we all call home. And also from the public. We think we got the reaction we were hoping for.

We had people who appreciated the fact that we were communicating data and also allowing the waters to speak through art because it allowed them to listen and reconsider things that they had not thought about before or looked at through a specific lens.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: And just to add one little thing to that picture, it was very hard for the artists to step away from the human perspective. That was one thing that many of the artists struggled with, was realizing, okay, I don't need to share my human experience with water, but I need to share what I would imagine water would say at this given moment in time. And to do this, we try to give some guidance, we try to help guide the artists through that experience, even though it was a struggle.

The artists were not just conveying the words of water or conveying their perceptions of water. But it's hard because we live in a reality in which everyone says “me, me, me” and forgets that we are all water speaking.

Water is part of us. We are part of water. When we speak, water is speaking as well.

We just have to be aware, we have to acknowledge the fact that these big brains that we celebrate so highly, that we put on pedestals, are not the only sentient beings that are here in this space. And even sentience is a misconception. We're not the only other being that is speaking. We're not the only other being that's telling stories. Water is speaking through us. We just need to acknowledge water's presence.

Kamea Chayne: I love this acknowledgment that we are in a form of water speaking. So, thank you for that offering. What stands out to me about your work is this theme of weaving, whether through supporting community conversations, creating local partnerships of different forms, and networking with organizations at different scales from the local to the national and international.

And you also do this in multimedia formats in terms of art and storytelling. And before we kind of get into the how, I'd love to welcome you to share why you think weaving these connections is so vital during this time. What could the potential and power be in connecting struggles across place and time?

Blake Lavia: Well, in this hyper-connected world in which we live in the illusion that everything can happen instantaneously and we can communicate with people here and now at every point in the globe, people are more isolated than ever. The different struggles are more isolated than ever. Why is that? Because in this hyper-connected reality, we only are allowed to see what we are allowed to see. What does that mean?

It means that the people who are allowing the connections, the people who are allowing us to have news, and live news from everywhere in the world available, are deciding for us what we should know, how we should know it, and when and if we should know it.

This means that there are a lot of little struggles everywhere because an industry is coming and they want to create, they want to establish themselves and cut a huge water forest and then they will pollute the river or a new dam is going to be built or a pipeline is going to pass through a sacred site or a coral reef. And we don't know.

We don't know because the word is big and because essentially we are fed what we are supposed to know. Only a certain amount of news arrives in the big media and what's on the first page of the big newspapers, for example, is very limited and I think it's getting more and more limited and that's worrisome. So nowadays, more and more, I think we need to stretch ourselves through the barriers that are created by this hyper-connected society, which is kind of an oxymoron. It's kind of funny to say. And we need to connect with people at a personal level and say, ‘I hear what you're going through’.

And even if I might not be able to do something concrete, at least I'll try to tell your story and share it with others who are here with me so that we can support you emotionally. People find themselves fighting against these bureaucratic monsters (different companies and industries) that have all the power, while little communities, depending on where they are, have no power. Sometimes they even just need moral support.

We need to connect across borders and realize that if something happens to somebody somewhere else, it's happening to us too.

Because if the coral reef dies, that's disastrous. If oil spills in the ocean, that's disastrous for everybody. If a specific species that lives in a specific place dies, that's an enormous environmental loss.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: And just to add something very small to that answer: it's hard to network and navigate in a society in which we're using the same tools of the destroyers. To communicate with others, we use the internet and that allows us to communicate in ways we've never communicated before. But still, all of that makes networking harder on ourselves and our brains. But if we try to move past that, to acknowledge what does it mean to us? It means to bring someone or something or a concept closer to you. You're not just tying a knot. You're not just having something on a pedestal or a stage. You're bringing something inside of your framework and your reality. So in weaving, we hope we don't just create relationships that are built on admiration, on pedestals, built on screens.

You want to create a relationship that's built on shared experiences in which you acknowledge the other's place and bring them closer to your reality and your struggle.

And it's not easy, it's a complicated process. I'm still grappling with how to do it in this society and this age. But sometimes the direct result of that connection doesn't matter as much. As Blake mentioned, the energetical passage of thoughts and emotions from one person to another. And for them to realize that you are there, you're not just looking at your reflection and immediately actually looking past the mirror at that person and saying, I'm here too. We're all in this struggle together.

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate this recognition of this challenge that it is hard. And it is hard to find a purist exit given that so much of the world does exist and revolve around, for example, social media. And also sitting with how social media has helped to democratize narratives in various ways and help people to access citizen journalism and reporting, which would otherwise not be highlighted at all by corporate media.

And also Blake, I appreciated it earlier when you named the irony of the world being hyper-connected today but shaped by the power structures of the media landscape — at the same time, we're dealing with this loneliness epidemic and many people feel disconnected and ungrounded. So I love this invitation to question what forms of connection our hearts are more deeply yearning for.

A lot of our past episodes have focused on awareness philosophy and worldview shifts, much like some of our earlier discussions today. And while that can sometimes feel a bit abstract, I do think it's foundational to informing different ways of relating to the world. But here to offer our listeners some seeds of inspiration that they can sow wherever they are. I'd appreciate getting to learn more about what (in terms of your grassroots efforts) you've learned from building networks of partnerships.

How did you get started practically speaking and what are things you've had to be mindful of when trying to foster partnerships with organizations or people who you may not have had prior relationships with? I'm curious to hear about the how of weaving multidimensional and multiscale networks like you've been working on.

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: So I'm going to take off where I left off in my first answer. And that is with the movement that we're working on within this region where we are right now, in which we want to celebrate the voice of rivers, celebrate the work that rivers are doing to keep all of us alive, celebrate the being that rivers are, and also honor our responsibility to protect the water that protects us all.

And to do that we've been organizing events, but quickly saw that we wanted to step beyond just the act of having people come together and speak, which is very valuable. And the act of speaking is one of the most powerful things you can do in this day and age. But we wanted to see how this speaking could lead to more action.

In that same process, we came across the Rights of Nature movement and tried to bring people together into spaces in which they would consider how we would legally shift the frameworks that govern us now. And of course, Rights of Nature is a legal framework that works within the settler colonial legal system. It uses a concept of rights, which has been used for hundreds of years to harm populations and ecosystems.

It uses that same framework to acknowledge the rights of more than human beings, acknowledges the personhood of these more than human beings, which is a concept that is very troubling to many and is now coming under fire from different portions of the political reality that we all inhabit and live in.

A responsibility to the ecosystems that sustain us and to the communities, human communities, where we live, and also all across the world that make this society that we stand in possible. Not the destructive part of society, but this is what keeps all of us alive in very realistic and physical ways.

To acknowledge our responsibility, we have to realize that more-than-human beings, such trees, rivers, eels, and birds, all have a role like we have a role. We must honor that role.

We are all coming to a human organizing, human-to-human. And that is very much like the actual act of organizing. We're coming together in a room, we're seeing each other's perspective and we're saying this is what I need to do to change my reality but also change my community. And if we expand that concept of that human-to-human community to the more than human community, from our mind it only makes sense to acknowledge the rights of more than human beings but in a way that this, we don't just have to have another permit that permits even more destruction.

Saying that we protect the river means that we protect us as humans. So in the work that we do, we want to strive to advocate for the legal rights of all modern human beings but also invite others to consider how we act in respect to each other and with the world around us. And how do we honor the voice of water? How do we honor the voices of the other ecosystems? Listen to that voice.

Imagine what that voice is saying. Imagine the needs of the ecosystems and take action to make those needs, to take action to meet those needs. It's not easy to act and organize in [this] society and this world mostly because as we mentioned before, we live in a time in which everything that we can do is twisted within the settler colonial [framework].

We helped form a not-for-profit called Talking Rivers that advocates for the rights of other rivers and other more-than-human beings in our region. But that functions in the world of not-for-profits, which in some ways have also been created to take power away from the actual democratic citizen process here in the United States, and also around the world. So that itself is a complicated and grey area.

So we have to try to act in a way that is not within this grey area for all modern human beings. And actually what we're trying to do right now is to try to see how in our governance structure, how in our organization, we can switch things around and create a system that speaks for modern human beings. How can we act with respect for all humans and non-human beings in this ecosystem? So it's a complicated space, it's a grey space. Other not-for-profits, or other organizations, are also struggling to find their way to navigate this reality.

And many times, because we're all dependent on the money that's destroying us there are always these rifts between organizations, whether it's between people in the rights of nature movement, or in the environmental movement in general. There are always these rifts that are tearing people apart because the world is consumed by spectacle, greed, or money. This serves as a divider and doesn't serve as a connector.

It's complicated to weave communities together and stand in a space in which you can bring people together when everything is tearing people apart.

Blake Lavia: And to add to that just briefly, we also are acting in a society that is highly divided politically and in which the environmental discourse has been for the most part politicized. And in our area, it's a very conservative area. So we have had to find the balance in how we talk about water and the importance of water and realize that we all need water to survive without getting mired in the political discourse that is highly destructive and divisive.

So we have had to juggle that but generally what we have found is that even in more conservative situations or town politics, when we talk about the river as a living being and as an integral part of each community that needs to be protected (because we have water here and in a world that's becoming drier and drier), what does that mean for the future to have water here?

That makes people think. Even people that I would not have thought would respond seeing their political spectrum. But it's heartening to see that there is a connecting point. If we just go back to humanity, if we just go back to ourselves and to the world that surrounds us—essentially at the basic level when we don't involve politics or money—we all care for [water]. So that has been a little bit of our experience more locally.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Tzintzun and Blake, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and for all that you do and inspire. As we close off, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo: Don't listen to the news. Listen to the trees.

Blake Lavia: Every action has a consequence, whether good or bad. Sometimes we just don't know, and we need to be mindful of that.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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