“We Must Build with Others the Future We Need”

During an interview about her book Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, Nancy Koehn was asked about lessons learned in her life from the converging crises of cancer, divorce, and lost loved ones. “I wish I had spent less time asking Why? and arrived more quickly at What now?” Koehn reflected. 

Her pragmatic “What Now?” applies to our embattled planetary conditions. Extreme costs, not ideological or scientific climate debates, will move people to action. 

Integral ecology reminds us that humans are at their best when they understand their home and care for it.

Water will create the cultural forces for humans to understand the practical necessity of holistic reform and respect for wise infrastructure—a return home to the interconnection of all life. Homecoming, not new frontiers, is the redirect.

A New War Raging

Water crises and emergencies now approach the destructive scale of war. The Climate War has replaced the Cold War as the defining contention of human existence. Water is the source of life and now the source of conflict. Famine and thirst, sanitation and disease, industrial agriculture’s aquifer depletions are all global disruptions related to fresh-water scarcity and its opposite, extreme storms. In the United States, forest fires, hurricanes, and floods continue to escalate municipal costs. Homeowner insurance premiums, in some states like Louisiana, are rising 25 percent per year. Food and healthcare costs, public safety, and migration cannot be solved with safety nets, walls, ICE, stock markets, or interest rates. We need to focus on the water conditions determining all of them.

According to the World Economic Forum, 2030 global freshwater demand will outpace supply by 40 percent. Currently, 9 out of 10 climate events are water-related. Eighty percent of industry wastewater is discharged without treatment.[1] AI Data Centers, especially those running off fossil fuels, need disproportionate amounts of water to stay cool. 

Water, Water Everywhere

Water depletion and vulnerability, more than energy demands, change human behavior. Civilizations depend on water systems. Urban density intensifies pressures on water use and sanitation—from household waste and industrial pollution to stormwater drainage. Coastal cities especially know they must constantly adapt, invent, and redevelop. As centers of finance, education, or culture, cities are potentially great teachers for improving public works, community life, private development, equity, and justice. But there’s work to be done: New York City, for example, still has nearly 60,000 residents with no running water. Sea level rise caused by global greenhouse gases could displace 2.5 million people in Miami, where 94 percent of habitable land could be submerged by 2100.[2] Poorer communities are often at greater risk of floods in low-level areas, but the wealthiest residents also live close to the water and must contend with the effects of maintaining valuable and vulnerable real estate around severe weather. What such cities learn and how they respond in this era of rapidly rising sea levels can be leveraged for others.[3]  

Infrastructure is often unseen, neglected, and devalued—until it fails. Water is vital to the civil infrastructure for food and agriculture, public health, fire safety, energy, manufacturing, and commerce—and to every living Earth system. (Household plumbing is one of the best ways to understand infrastructure.) When systems falter, municipal renewal and repair require careful intergovernmental planning, patience, financing, and the endurance of generations of citizens impacted. The Flint water crisis in Michigan began through a municipal financial crisis in 2014, when the city began to source water from the Flint River rather than pay to use the Detroit water and sewerage system tied to Lake Huron. Immediately, residents complained about changes in their water. Bacterial outbreaks created pneumonia-like symptoms and the spread of Legionnaires Disease. Thousands of children were exposed to drinking water with high levels of lead, a cause for neurological impacts on mental health, intellectual development, and increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Ten years later in 2024, Lead and Copper Rule Improvements were drawn up by the EPA, requiring mandatory water pipe replacement nationally by 2030 to ensure clean water for schools and homes.  

A Communion of Subjects

Water is key to understanding Thomas Berry’s contribution to the contemporary framework known as integral ecology—the insight that our Earth home is a “communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Integral ecological solutions depend on realizing the interconnectedness of our planet, a corrective to the harm caused by the siloed practices of our economic, intellectual, and spiritual lives. As a systematic theologian at Yale Divinity School, Willie James Jennings examines the fraught condition of a social fabric and built environment tainted by entrenched habits and divisions that diminish mutual flourishing and belonging. “We live in a defeated conceptual moment when so many have surrendered their imaginations to working inside the ideas of race, religion, and nation,” he declares in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. 

Similarly, as a pastor building integrated justice movements, William Barber II of YDS uplifts the needs and integrity of poor people to overcome American cultural diseases, divisions, and myths with moral fusion and political theology. “We are not a nation divided by racial identity and political ideology. We are, instead, a people who have been pitted against one another by politicians and billionaires who depend on the poorest among us not being seen,” he writes in White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. Echoing the spirit of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, he declares, “The good news is that poor and rejected people have always shown us the way.” 

Beneath a City Upon a Hill

Boston, where I live, built the first public water works in the country almost 400 years ago. As a place where fresh and salt water meet, the city has been shaped by pollution and sanitation issues for centuries. Puritan John Winthrop called it a City Upon a Hill, which replaced the Indigenous cultures and came to define the ideals of America in the mythology of colonial ships, Christian values, early New England communitarian ethics, and even revolutionary liberty.

As the Puritans set out to control the new environment, their separatist fears, magnified by their traumatic journey at sea and strained further on land, became warped justification for invasive displacement. They destabilized natural systems and Indigenous infrastructures with the values of commerce and property they brought from England. The ideals embodied in Winthrop’s City Upon a Hill vision—a phrase borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount—show how the narratives we magnify and build upon can also perpetuate violence, privilege, and hubris at a cost to all. One conspicuous result was the notion of Manifest Destiny, which would justify political rhetoric that combines racism, religion, and nationalism. God became a tool of legitimation rather than a sustaining guide for faithful creation care. 

Yet in Boston in the early 20^th century, this narrative was interrupted when archeologists unearthed an older ecological infrastructure, exposing what was lost when European colonists made contact with Indigenous populations. 

Back Bay Discovery

In 1913, Boston builders discovered remnants of an ancient fishweir thirty feet underground in the Back Bay. Subsequent discoveries in the 1940s revealed a large engineering structure consisting of 65,000 sticks designed to catch fish in tidal flats. By the 1980s, new analysis and methods disclosed that it was not one massive structure but a series of many smaller structures maintained over 1,500 years (longer than the Roman Empire). The oldest structures are 5,300 years old, forming a durable infrastructure and ecological practice that ended when sea levels rose, long before colonial contact.

Sassafras, hickory, dogwood, white ash, maple, and birch were used to create structures for small clans or intergenerational family systems consisting of 30-50 people. These Indigenous ancestors of the Massachusett tribe returned to the coastal waters in the spring season, the start of their year when the fish were spawning and planting began. They brought rolls of sticks collected through the winter and possibly used for firewood. They would work within the tides to catch small fish by placing sticks in the clay and building fence-like structures, without need for stones or hammers. Few traces of fish bones or mound waste exist near these structures, likely because these native people used the bones for needlework and leftover catch as fertilizer for their spring planting. They worked with their hands outside, and women and children likely did much of the work. These communities were matriarchal, not patriarchal. They moved seasonally. Each year, they repaired and mended the broken sections of the weir. The idea may have come from seeing small fish pooled in rock puddles at low tide.

The stick placement moved as the shoreline changed, and scientists can see that sea level rose 10 feet over the course of 6,000 years. Today it is predicted that the sea level will likely rise 3-4 feet by 2070, exposing up to 30 percent of Boston land to coastal flooding. The ancient fishweir reveals a sustainable ethos and ecosystem that flourished for generations: it was infrastructure that provided the requirements for shared human life, not institutions or industries.

Coming Home

Integral ecology reminds us that humans are at their best when they understand their home and care for it. The fishweir legacy lightens and liberates our moral imagination around neighborly relationships and seasonal integrity, day by day, year by year. These Indigenous ancestors bear witness to an expansive and intimate sense of place and proportion. We need not assume that a reliance on massive capitalization and political power is the only way to live.[4]

When we live in community, we realize we are already home: we must build with others the future we need. We can’t let ideologues steal our shared sense of agency or responsibility. Our era is not a liminal space but a series of overlapping crises, where people attempting to seize power in periods of disruption attack our stabilizing truths. 

And So “What Now?”

We need courage and communion, especially in the culture’s safest, most privileged, and most intellectual pools of thought. We find clear, constructive ways forward when we get into the water, on the edges of land, in the mud. By rediscovering the spiritual force of water, Christian rhetoric and action today could become more courageous about healing and defending the people and places that have been othered too long. As Jesus concludes in the Sermon on the Mount, with the Lord’s Prayer and renewal of Jewish laws, the wise and foolish builders will be revealed when rains come, streams rise, and winds blow the homes built on solid foundations versus shifting sands (Matt 7:24-29). 

So we come back to the question, “What now?” Become involved in neighborhood improvement projects. Simplify—do fewer things better. Build and repair. Invent and integrate around ecological systems. Talk to people face to face, spend time outside, and rely less on artificial information screens. Practice ecologically based reverence and rituals. Fitness is the key to survival, not dominance or detachment. Sometimes it requires some digging, sometimes it requires water pressure or sea changes. But it’s as necessary and basic as our daily need for water. Our responsibility on this blue planet requires the best in all of us. It leads us home. It sustains us for homecoming.

James Jenkins ’15 M.Div. works in downtown Boston at New England’s largest day shelter, St. Francis House, which annually serves more than 10,000 individuals experiencing homelessness. He has a B.A. from Davidson College and an M.A, from Middlebury College, and lives in Milton, Mass., near the Neponset River and Blue Hills Reservation.