Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behaviour.

The Wonder of Water explores how human experience – including our cultural paradigms, value systems, and personal biases – impacts decisions around water. In many ways, the volume expands on the growing field of water ethics to include questions around environmental aesthetics, psychology, and ontology. And yet this book is not simply for philosophers. On the contrary, a specific aim is to explore how more informed philosophical dialogue will lead to more insightful public policies and practices.

Case studies describe specific architectural and planning decisions, fisheries policies, urban ecological restorations, and more. The overarching phenomenological perspective, however, means that these discussions emerge within a sensibility that recognizes the foundational significance of human embodiment, culture, language, worldviews, and, ultimately, moral attunement to place.

Ingrid Leman Stefanovic is Dean of the Faculty of Environment and professor in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University. She is also a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

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"The twelve chapters of The Wonder of Water pin-point Stefanovic’s ethical and moral concerns in relation to water, the landscapes of water, and places associated with water, whether river, bay, sea, or otherwise. As editor, her aim is to incorporate thinking that highlights ‘the genuine meaning of water in its visceral quality, its vitality and its primordiality.’"

<em>Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology</em>

"It is no accident that The Wonder of Water starts and ends with poetry. While it is an academic and rigorous compilation, most of its contributors infuse their prose with expressive admiration of water’s foundational and life-affirming properties in a way that’s wonder inducing indeed."

Foreword Reviews, January/February 2020