Language of Water

For more than 30 years, Minni Jain has been working with communities to regenerate their lives and landscapes. As Co-founder and Operations Director of the Flow Partnership, she works on spreading community-led, simple, successful, low-cost, traditional wisdom and methods of holding water and managing floods and droughts. To share and make available these community methods of landscape water resilience at a ground level, she has helped set up practical Water Schools in Africa, India, and Europe both as online forums as well as on ground community Water Hubs. To enable communities worldwide to resource their water projects, she has helped co-found the One Pond Fund. Minni was born and brought up in the Himalayas in India and now lives in the UK.Philip Franses has always wanted to bridge the gap between theory and actual on-the-ground projects capable of restoring the vital water cycle. Philip is the Strategy and Innovations Director at the Flow Partnership—an NGO that works with partners to rejuvenate landscapes and counter the increasing threat of floods, droughts, soil erosion, and habitat loss at their source—which he co-founded in 2012. Encouraged by the transformative success of community projects, Philip applied skills from an earlier fifteen year software career to help create the Water Schools platform for water literacy and supporting community actions. Through the multiple projects he is engaged in, he is also pursuing ways to make wealth a community and ecological currency. Philip studied mathematics at New College, Oxford, UK and teaches Holistic Science—the science of inherent interconnectedness allowing intersectional qualities to become manifest and expressed in practice. His book, Time, Light and the Dice of Creation (Floris Books, 2015), focuses on rediscovering this balance in the weighing of experience, understanding, and action.

"Aided by well-chosen pictures and diagrams, the authors convey their ideas in lucid prose and intuitive metaphors… The result is a stimulating, hopeful take on humble but profound environmental innovations.... A revelatory treatise on human-scale water management, full of fascinating information and inspiring insights." – Kirkus Reviews"...offers insights into how we might achieve a more equable distribution of a resource as necessary to life as sunlight.... The Language of Water is an exemplary project of an art/science/art-based research inquiry.... The creative solutions to complex problems that [this] collection of stories reveal provide practical examples that avoid the academic figure skating and strident shroud waving that is not unusual in this sort of literature." —Michael Punt, Leonardo Reviews“‘Water’ and ‘survival’ are pretty much the same thing, so it's no wonder that local communities, facing record drought and heat, are taking matters into their own hands. These are stirring stories of the recovery of time-honored techniques that will be desperately important as the climate crisis keeps building.” —Bill McKibben, Author of The End of Nature“The Language of Water is a love story about humans and water, and the ways in which we are learning to keep this relationship healthy for the sake of future generations, reminding us that it takes people in our local communities and those at the macro level in cooperation to help care for Mother Earth’s waters. With cases from around the world as evidence, Minni Jain and Philip Franses show us that for the sake of Mother Earth’s future, community-led initiatives and traditional wisdom partnered with earth-based scientific practices and research are the path of hope. Sustainable relationship with the waters around us is essential if we are going to act in order to give future generations a chance—it’s all connected through kinship, community, action and care. Read this book as a reminder of the love story that is always unfolding, and the important part we have to play in it.”  —Kaitlin B. Curtice, Potawatomi poet-storyteller and award-winning author of Native and Living Resistance“The Language of Water is an important, inspiring and visionary book that offers great hope and far-reaching implications for the future. At its heart is the much-needed transformation of our relationship with nature and particularly the water cycles of the planet we all share. The authors share astonishing stories of transformation, and common-sense solutions that have grown out of the deep wisdom of learning from time-honored traditional solutions, of listening to the land, and valuing the people who have a long-standing relationship with their land. The book demonstrates how small-scale community actions have far reaching consequences, both within the communities themselves and as part of the bigger picture as we shift our awareness towards an understanding of the deep-rooted interconnectivity of nature's cycles. It is an uplifting read for all those who are intimately connected to the land.” —Glennie Kindred, Author of Walking with Trees“The Language of Water opens our eyes to the longstanding interplay between humanity and the Earth’s water cycle. Authors Minni Jain and Philip Franses examine low-tech water-management techniques, some in continuous use for millennia, others rediscovered only recently following disastrous industrial interludes. In their on-the-scene reporting from the UK to India to Zimbabwe to China to Colombia and beyond, we see communities preventing floods, reading the desert landscape to locate groundwater, reversing colonial-era land and water abuse, maintaining a 2,500-year-old irrigation system, or rescuing a vital water source ruined decades ago by deforestation. They even drop in on a sophisticated water-management project carried out entirely by beavers. In all of this, Jain and Franses show us how our communities can avoid treating nature as ‘a passive receptacle of already structured solutions’ and instead let nature be our teacher and partner as we learn once again to speak the language of water."—Stan Cox, Author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can   “A vital book for people and policymakers alike. Jain and Franses remind us that our intimate connection to the water cycle is, and always has been, hyper-local. The days of big, concrete, centralized systems are over - we need to think locally, capturing and storing rainfall and stormwater where it falls, with nature-based solutions. Through years of on-the-ground projects across several continents, Jain and Franses give us the examples we need - from rural Rajasthan to cities in Slovakia - to secure our water future, and gain cooler, greener local climates at the same time. The example of two Indian villages 30 km apart, one 5-6 degrees cooler than the other just through good water capture and conservation practices, will blow your mind! This is the phrasebook we all need for climate adaptation and water security - the good news is it is a common language we all once knew, and can easily relearn.” —Tim Smedley, Author of The Last Drop: Solving the World's Water Crisis "The Language of Water opens our eyes to the longstanding interplay between humanity and the Earth’s water cycle. Authors Minni Jain and Philip Franses examine low-tech water-management techniques, some in continuous use for millennia, others rediscovered only recently following disastrous industrial interludes. In their on-the-scene reporting from the UK to India to Zimbabwe to China to Colombia and beyond, we see communities preventing floods, reading the desert landscape to locate groundwater, reversing colonial-era land and water abuse, maintaining a 2,500-year-old irrigation system, or rescuing a vital water source ruined decades ago by deforestation. They even drop in on a sophisticated water-management project carried out entirely by beavers. In all of this, Jain and Franses show us how our communities can avoid treating nature as 'a passive receptacle of already structured solutions' and instead let nature be our teacher and partner as we learn once again to speak the language of water."—Stan Cox, Research Fellow for Ecosphere Studies, the Land Institute     “The Language of Water is a very important and inspiring book. It is filled with examples around the world where people take responsibility for healing their landscapes and improving their lives. They use a wide variety of solutions, guided by the imperative to hold the rains from washing away, enabling the water to rehydrate the earth, reviving soils, even springs and rivers. In some places, traditional techniques which had fallen in disuse were revived; in others, new solutions are found. Everywhere these communities work from their specific ecological contexts, reversing desertification and the poverty it engenders. Sometimes, it is the women who take the lead, since they are the ones who suffer most from lack of water resources. In the process, they redress gender inequalities while enriching their villages and regions. The authors argue passionately and persuasively that meeting climate change challenges and positively charting the future starts from and depends on grassroots action. The Language of Water is an empowering book – a clarion call for taking the actions to heal our lives and our world, starting with respecting and honoring water and its power to nurture life.” —Mark Nelson, Ph.D., Chairman, Institute of Ecotechnics, Author of The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One Flush at a Time & Life Under Glass: Crucial Lessons in Planetary Stewardship from Two Years In Biosphere“The Language of Water is an amazing book filled with examples of traditional water management from many parts of the world that demonstrate solutions to our drought and flood-prone landscapes. The inspiring stories of communities making water containment structures and taking other measures into their own hands show us that despite slow action from ‘the powers that be’, we can all be involved in the restoration of a healthy water cycle and all that flows from it.” —Martin Crawford, Author of Shrubs for Gardens, Agroforestry and Permaculture & Founder & Director of The Agroforestry Research Trust