Sustainability, Climate Change, Renewable Energy, Politics, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero · One Planet Podcast · Mia Funk

The Theory of Water with LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

·43 min·2 clips

Anishinaabe humility, Leanne Simpson says, means humans are collaborators with trees, birds, water, and soil.

David opens by introducing Leanne Bidas-Sumuse Simpson and her new book, *Theory of Water*. He frames it as a personal reflection on world-making and life-giving processes, with water as the idea that holds those threads together. The conversation treats water as something that moves through bodies and across the planet. That movement becomes a way to think about relation, responsibility, and the kinds of power that interrupt natural flow. Simpson's work is presented as collective rather than solitary. The episode keeps returning to listening and love as practices that can face dominance, enclosure, and containment without pretending those forces are small. David and Simpson also pause for a song from Simpson's album *Theory of Ice*. Simpson comments on that music and on the relationship between her sound work and her writing. The episode uses that exchange to show how the book and album speak to each other even though they were made in different moments. One of the conversation's strongest threads is the way waterways are altered by human attempts to control them. David and Simpson discuss canals, locks, dams, fish kills, and the consequences of treating nature as something to be managed into obedience. Simpson pushes back on the language of sustainability when it is used as a slogan rather than a way of living. She argues, in effect, that sustainability is not something to be imposed. It has to be listened to, or it is missed entirely. The episode also dwells on self-reflection. David asks about Simpson's writing on Rebecca Belmore's wooden megaphone and the way it asks a speaker to meet their own reflection. From there, the conversation turns to moments of disappointment, misrecognition, care, and the difficulty of responding to other people with the honesty one wants. Simpson describes writing much of the book after Doug Williams had died, and that loss gives her reflections an added weight. The closing movement returns to the planet as a guide rather than a target for control, and the conversation settles there with patience.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation about water, listening, and the politics of enclosure.

On Speaking Out of Place, Leanne Simpson talks through Theory of Water as a study of world-making and the work water does in bodies and across the planet.

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Why you'd press play

You want water treated as relation, not resource.

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