Nina on Ladner pier
For several years I’ve been returning from Toronto—where I teach at The University of Toronto and George Brown College—to Ladner, BC to spend my summers.
I cherish the time as a chance to see family and friends and to enjoy a different pace of life—one I enjoyed when I used to live and work here and where I brought up my family. We lived in a comfortable house on a quiet street and our back yard faced one of Ladner’s sloughs and beyond that a vast tract of farmland, most often scored with rows of potato plants. My son Kevin had grown up swimming in the slough and jumping off the rope swing his dad had constructed. Pilgrims from close and far came to use that swing and enjoy the murky waters of our back slough.
Kevin on the rope swing
Parties at our place always involved water and getting wet. We even had a fleet of kayaks and canoes that we took on paddling adventures through farmland and under highways, with the occasional siting of muskrat, carp, heron, or eagle. Coyotes whined and barked at night as bats dipped through the night air, foraging for food. My female cat poised for the hunt and sometimes brought in her “catch of the day.”
Cathleen and Nina at Stir
This summer, good friend and writer Cathleen Chance Vecchiato decided I should give a talk to my old community on Water Is… my recent bestselling book on water. With that, she immediately made it happen. The venue was already decided: the best café in Ladner, Stir Coffee House. I’d taken Cathleen there the previous year as part of a tour of the old farming and fishing village. Cathleen was charmed by the village atmosphere.
Stir Coffee House was happy to host a talk and Robert and Cathleen proceeded to plan it. Ian Jacques at The Delta Optimist wrote a wonderful piece on my journey, the talk and the book.
On the evening of August 16th a growing crowd of people, eager for more on this precious substance flowed into the café until there was hardly a seat left in the cozy venue. I recognized some locals as well as colleagues from my environmental consulting days in Vancouver. It was a good crowd.
Water Is… snug against an iced latte
I shared the story of how I came to write this book—not a limnology book for non-scientists, as I thought I was going to write—but something that was more than science. Something that encompassed so much more about water: what it means to each of us and how we still don’t understand its many magical anomalous properties. I confided my discovery that the synchronicity of important moments in my life were all connected to water, which compelled the book to evolve into a study of “what water means to us.” Good friend Emmi Itäranta, author of Memory of Water, called Water Is… a biography of water.
Travelling the world has helped me realize that I was blessed with an abundance of water. I lived my entire life in a country of plentiful and healthy water. And for most of that time I didn’t even realize it. Canada holds one fifth of the world’s fresh water in lakes, rivers, and wetlands, as well as in our underground aquifers and glaciers. Canada’s wetlands, which cover more than 1.2 million square kilometres, makes Canada the largest wetland area in the world.
Nina with hosts Hope and Trevor
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Canada is steward of the world’s largest wetlands. Wetlands include marshes, swamps, fens, and bogs, all irreplaceable habitat for a huge diversity of nesting, feeding and staging waterfowl, reptiles, amphibians and mammals—many at risk. Wetlands provide a major filtration system, removing contaminants, improving water quality and renewing water’s vitality; wetlands serve as reservoirs, controlling and reducing flooding toward a more balanced hydrological cycle. Wetlands are a source of oxygen and water vapour, serving a vital role in our global atmospheric and climatic cycles. As ecotones— transitional areas—wetlands protect coasts from erosion and provide exceptional opportunity for boundary interaction and the emergence of vitality. Like a good metaphor, wetlands “recognize” and encompass similarities between dissimilarities. Wetlands powerfully connect. Canada’s strong multi-cultural policies and its open tolerance in embracing and celebrating diversity makes it the “wetland” of the world.
When I turn on the water tap in my house in Canada, it is pure drinking water. I don’t need to boil it or filter it or test it for impurities and toxins. I am confident that it will nourish and hydrate me like water should. I can bathe without restriction. I can play with it.
My water hasn’t changed; but I have. I do not take it for granted. I know that I am blessed.
I am home and I am so grateful.
Part of this article is an excerpt from Nina Munteanu’s “Coming Home to Water” first published in “In the Moment” (A Hopeful Sign) edited by Gary Doi, September 2016; reprinted in “The Earth We Love” (Mississauga Writers) edited by Elizabeth Banfalvi, September 2018; and “The Literary Connection IV: Then and Now” (IOWI) edited by Cheryl Antao Xavier, upcoming 2018.
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist, limnologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books.
Every year, near Christmas, 
Margaret Atwood is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature as well as the Booker Prize (several times) and the Governor General’s Award. Animals and the environment feature in many of her books, particularly her speculative fiction, which reflects a strong view on environmental issues.
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“The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries From a Secret World” (Greystone Books) by Peter Wohlleben. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group. Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.
“Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants” (Ecco) by Richard Mabey. “They’re better for you than you think,” says Atwood. “They hold the waste spaces of the world in place, and you can eat some of them.” Ever since the first human settlements 10,000 years ago, weeds have dogged our footsteps. They are there as the punishment of ‘thorns and thistles’ in Genesis and , two millennia later, as a symbol of Flanders Field. They are civilisations’ familiars, invading farmland and building-sites, war-zones and flower-beds across the globe. Yet living so intimately with us, they have been a blessing too. Weeds were the first crops, the first medicines. Burdock was the inspiration for Velcro. Cow parsley has become the fashionable adornment of Spring weddings. Weaving together the insights of botanists, gardeners, artists and poets with his own life-long fascination, Richard Mabey examines how we have tried to define them, explain their persistence, and draw moral lessons from them. One persons weed is another’s wild beauty.
“Birds and People” (Jonathan Cape) by Mark Cocker. “Vast, historical, contemporary, many-levelled,” says Atwood. “We’ve been inseparable from birds for millenniums. They’re crucial to our imaginative life and our human heritage, and part of our economic realities.” Vast in both scope and scale, the book draws upon Mark Cocker’s forty years of observing and thinking about birds. Part natural history and part cultural study, it describes and maps the entire spectrum of our engagements with birds, drawing in themes of history, literature, art, cuisine, language, lore, politics and the environment. In the end, this is a book as much about us as it is about birds.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 