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.
Each of the 12 chapters completes the phrase “Water is…” with terms that evolve from science into philosophy and spirituality; terms such as “magic”, “life”, “motion”, “communication”, “memory”, “rhythm”, “vibration”, “beauty”, “story”, “wisdom”, “prayer”, and finally “joy”.
The 
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist 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 
To anyone but a Canadian, Trudeau’s remark would rankle, particularly in a time when many western countries are fearfully and angrily turning against immigration through nativism and exclusionary narratives. A time when the United States elected an authoritarian intent on making “America great again” by building walls. A time when populist right-wing political parties hostile to diversity are gaining momentum in other parts of the world. “Canada’s almost cheerful commitment to inclusion might at first appear almost naive,” writes Forman. It isn’t, he adds. There are practical reasons for keeping our doors open.
And that’s exactly what is happening. We are not a “melting pot” stew of mashed up cultures absorbed into a greater homogeneity of nationalism, no longer recognizable for their unique qualities. Canada isn’t trying to “make Canada great again.”
We are a northern country with a healthy awareness of our environment—our weather, climate and natural world. This awareness—
Canadians are writing more 
My short story “
Canadian writer and good friend Claudiu Murgan recently released his book “
She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.
Emilie Moorhouse of 
“…In an interesting scarcity future in which we follow the fate of a character abandoned by her mother, water itself becomes a character. In the second paragraph we’re told that “Water is a shape shifter,” and in the next page we encounter the following description: “Water was paradox. Aggressive yet yielding. Life-giving yet dangerous. Floods. Droughts. Mudslides. Tsunamis. Water cut recursive patterns of creative destruction through the landscape, an ouroboros remembering.” These descriptive musings cleverly turn out to be more than metaphors and tie in directly to the tale’s surprising ending.”—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, 
Water Is… The Meaning of Water
But Joshua is a spirited creek – in spite of all it has been through, Joshua Creek is among the top two urban creeks for healthy water quality, and is still inhabited by a variety of aquatic animals like small fish and insects. Joshua Creek is home to forests, wetlands and thickets with around 150 plant species, and provides an important natural habitat corridor for the movement of birds and other animals, including migratory species. Rather than exclusively shrinking, there are also areas of Joshua Creek that are actually in the middle of regrowing their forests, and in spite of everything, Joshua still retains some beautiful gems of natural areas.”
Saryn and Nina discuss some of water’s controversial properties and the claims about water and how geopolitics plays a role in this. She brings in her own career as a limnologist and how she broke away from her traditional role of scientist to create a biography of water that anyone can understand—at the risk of being ostracized by her own scientific community (just as Carl Sagan and David Suzuki were in the past).
Nina responded with, “The why of things and hence the subtitle: the Meaning of Water. What does it mean to you… That’s what’s missing a lot of the time. We are bombarded with information, knowledge and prescriptions but the subliminal argument underneath—the why—why should it matter to me—is often missing. That becomes the sub-text. And it’s nice when it comes to the surface.”
I started the talk by explaining that I’m a limnologist—someone who studies freshwater—and that water is still a mysterious substance, even for those who make it their profession to study. After informing them of water’s ubiquity in the universe—it’s virtually everywhere from quasars to planets in our solar system—I reminded them that the water that dinosaurs drank during the Paleozoic Era is the same water that you and I are drinking.
You can read so much more about water in my book 
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 
Reiterating Jim Tovey’s earlier comment on the water treatment plant as its own sculpture-art, Munteanu celebrated the location and the nature of the exhibit: “When technology, art and ecology are celebrated together, you get magic.”
“Water, Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity” (NYU Press) by Jeremy Schmidt is an intellectual history of America’s water management philosophy. Debates over how human impacts on the planet, writes 
“A River Captured: The Columbia River Treaty and Catastrophic Change” (RMB Books) By Eileen Delehanty Pearkes reviews key historical events that preceded the Treaty, including the Depression-era construction of Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington, a project that resulted in the extirpation of prolific runs of chinook, coho and sockeye into B.C. Prompted by concerns over the 1948 flood, American and Canadian political leaders began to focus their policy energy on governing the flow of the snow-charged Columbia to suit agricultural and industrial interests. 
“Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship” (University of Calgary Press), Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane, editors, explore and discuss Canada-U.S. governance. 
“New York 2140” (Orbit) by Kim Stanley Robinson is a novel set in New York City following major sea level rises due to climate change. 
“The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” (WW Norton & Company Inc. Press) by Dan Egan is a frank discussion of the threat under which the five Great Lakes currently suffer. This book, writes 
“Downstream: reimagining water” (Wilfred Laurier University Press) by Dorothy Christian & Rita Wong “brings together artists, writers, scientists, scholars, environmentalists, and activists who understand that our shared human need for clean water is crucial to building peace and good relationships with one another and the planet. This book explores the key roles that culture, arts, and the humanities play in supporting healthy water-based ecology and provides local, global, and Indigenous perspectives on water that help to guide our societies in a time of global warming. The contributions range from practical to visionary, and each of the four sections closes with a poem to encourage personal freedom along with collective care,” writes 
“
Water Canada
One of the lectures I give to my science fiction writing students is called “Ecology in Storytelling”. It’s usually well attended by writers hoping to gain better insight into world-building and how to master the layering-in of metaphoric connections between setting and character.1
for its larvae. They do this by secreting a chemical that mimics how ants communicate; the ants in turn adopt the newly hatched caterpillars for two years. There’s a terrible side to this story of deception. The Ichneumon wasp, upon finding an Alcon caterpillar inside an ant colony, secretes a pheromone that drives the ants into confused chaos; allowing it to slip through the confusion and lay its eggs inside the poor caterpillar. When the caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, the wasp eggs hatch and consume it from inside.
You can read more about this in my book “
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist 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 
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 