Provisioning, protection, and porous bodies: Water practices and human-environmental health in rural Belize

What political and ethical dilemmas and possibilities emerge through practices of water protection and provision, enacted in pursuit of biodiversity conservation and/or environmental justice? This paper draws on ethnographic research with community groups and village residents in southern Belize who are negotiating waters as requirements for human biophysical health, sustainers of more-than-human ecologies, resources for rural livelihoods, channels of transportation, bearers of nutrients/contaminants, geological forces shaping landscapes, markers of place and identity, cosmological features and enactments of life force, and augurs of climate change, among other affordances. In the context of intersecting public health interventions (water system developments) and conservation initiatives (protected areas), riparian communities are negotiating multiple ways of knowing and valuing water and conceiving of human-environment relationships. These include: multi-sensory encounters associated with health and harm; quality monitoring via technical devices/standards; accounts of unruly water behaviour and moral ecologies; and relational practices including protection and provisioning. Negotiating water knowledge and practice here emerges as a way of doing politics through which people theorise, enact and challenge notions of place, sovereignty and responsibility amid socio-ecological change. This is often a labour-intensive work involving maintenance, translation and transformation of materials and meanings. This paper engages affective political ecologies in attending to the work of perceiving and maintaining ‘environmental health’ amid socio-ecological uncertainty, to explore water/health/environment relationships as place-based yet not geographically determined, considering the implications of waters’ / airs’ material and mediative capacities as both situated and highly (though unevenly) distributed.