Rivers are just as alive as you and me. They have a body called the catchment, the mouth and the delta; cells of water molecules; organs of wetlands and riparian zones; and like us, a circulatory system. We're inseparable from the waters of the world. We rely on these living bodies for our very survival. We're inseparable from the waters of the world.
A River's Heartbeat: Understanding the Stories Told by Flowing Waters | Basia Irland
Basia Irland is an environmental artist, author, and activist whose work bridges the intersection of art, ecology, and community engagement. Deeply connected to water, her lifelong passion for rivers stems from growing up along Boulder Creek in Colorado, where she found solace in the flowing currents. Based in New Mexico, she explores the fragility and resilience of waterways through large-scale, collaborative projects that emphasize ecological stewardship. Through storytelling, indigenous knowledge integration, and scientific collaboration, her work serves as both a poetic and urgent call to action for global water conservation.
Her latest book, What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways, offers a profound and poetic exploration of rivers as living beings, with each of the 25 essays written in the first person from the perspective of the water itself. This unique narrative reveals how rivers are just as alive as we are, with bodies shaped by catchments, mouths that open into vast deltas, and circulatory systems that connect them to the waters of the world. By amplifying the voices of these vital waterways, we are urged to acknowledge our deep reliance on them for ecosystem and planetary well-being.
Your work has a deep connection to water. Has this interest and passion for watersheds been shaped by growing up or living close to bodies of water?
Yes. As you mentioned in your introduction, I grew up in Colorado where my dad was a math professor at the University of Colorado. Directly behind our house was a horse pasture, and below that pasture was a stream. I grew up along Boulder Creek that provided comfort, and I’d often go down there after school. It calmed me and was a place of quiet solitude. I hadn’t realized how much that had impacted me until moving to the American Southwest high desert. I am a water person living in an arid region. For almost 20 years I taught at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, where my son, Derek, was born. He grew up in a canoe on the northern Ontario lakes in Algonquin Park. I love being in a boat where it’s an extension of your own body, like in a kayak or a canoe when you’re paddling, and you become one in the water. When I moved here to New Mexico, a group of us decided to paddle the Río Grande at night during the full moon. We had so much fun, laughing our heads off as we paddled downstream in our flotilla of kayaks, rafts, and canoes.
Entire river lengths were traced and navigated during ‘A Gathering of Waters’ projects involving local communities. How do you integrate local, indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge into the research and narratives of the work you create?
There are times now when the Río Grande goes totally dry because the river is primarily fed by snowmelt. There are springs upstream, but if we don’t have snow in the wintertime, due to climate disruption, the waterway suffers and becomes nothing but a river of sand.
What prompted the five-year-long “Gathering of Waters, Río Grande, Source to Sea” project, was going to river meetings and the group would talk about the river as if it were a slice of the pie — as if the only part of the river was here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There was no discussion about upstream or downstream. I had this audacious idea that I wanted to connect people along the entire Río Grande, which is almost 2000 miles long. It starts in southern Colorado, flows through New Mexico, and becomes the border between Texas and Mexico until it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve traveled the entire length of the river twice. The first time I visited, the mouth had a lot of flow, and the water reached the Gulf, but the second time, several years later, it was totally dry, and you could walk right up to people who were on the Mexican side of the river. (This was before the border wall extended all the way out into the water and was heavily guarded on both sides.)
A current problem is that SpaceX is located right along the Gulf now, and every time a rocket goes off, the debris and pollution fall onto the river and the Gulf shoreline, creating an environmental hazard.
For “A Gathering of Waters” along the Río Grande, I started at the headwaters with a canteen and Logbook. People would log in when they were physically at the river. You could not participate from a classroom, a boardroom, or your house. The Logbook and canteen were then passed to somebody else downstream.
There are 19 Native American Pueblos along the Río Grande, and many of them initiated events to participate in the Gathering. Pueblo runners carried a small amount of water from the sacred Blue Lake of Taos Pueblo in a relay over two days, escorted by Tribal Police until they reached the Pueblo of Isleta. I started the project, but it was no longer mine. It traveled by horseback, canoe, kayak, bus, and even a hot-air balloon. My name and phone number were in the Logbook and attached to the canteen so participants could contact me with questions. I had a call from somebody down at Big Bend National Park in Texas to say they had received the canteen and Logbook by bus and were taking it on to Mexico for the day for an educational excursion. So many amazing stories were generated from this project, and it was described in numerous newspaper and magazine articles.
Part of the way through that project, there was so much water data, old maps, clay samples and art objects accumulating that I decided to make a portable, wearable Backpack/Repository to hold all of this. It was the very first Repository that I created. The book Basia Irland, Repositories; Portable Sculptures for Waterway Journeys, by Patricia Watts and published by ecoartspace last year, is about 25 of my international Repositories. After I did the Río Grande project, I started being invited to other places around the world, so there have been numerous other “Gathering of Waters” Projects and they all have in common that the emphasis is on process—grassroots, collaborative, and locally community-based actions.
I believe strongly in reciprocity with all my projects, and I create gifts for the participants, who have given their time, experience, and I’ve learned from them. For this first “Gathering” project I collected shore-line clay and made small canteens with a tiny cork to seal in a drop of river water. Each time the gifts are different and reflect the specific community where I have been invited to work. For Boulder Creek we constructed small containers out of bike innertubes, since that is the preferred means of transportation around the city of Boulder. For others, we have used native riparian seeds with watershed maps placed into glassine envelopes so the planting can occur after I have left.
These collaborative community projects bring visibility to river systems and ecological issues. How do you ensure that the impact of your projects continues within the communities after your involvement ends?
That’s a hard one for me to answer, because I’m never quite sure. Sometimes after I leave a place, I will receive an email or a phone call from somebody, and they’ll say, ‘we now are doing ‘this’ because of your visit.’ And as mentioned above, I often give gift packets of native riparian seeds specific to the region so that participants can continue the planting after I have left. With the Gathering of Waters projects, there are long-term connections that make a difference along the entire length of rivers, which is one of the primary purposes, to create connections. For instance, with the Ice Books projects, people often write and ask if their community can create their own frozen ephemeral sculptures. Just recently a high school teacher wrote and asked if she could have her senior ecological class make Ice Books. I have explicit directions for those who are interested. The instructor sent me pictures of the students while they were doing the carving, and then how they snowshoed into their local river in the wintertime to launch the sculptures. Ice is not an easy medium; you must have a teacher who can supervise closely. During Covid I worked virtually with people around the world who wanted to carve their own sculptures, and the results were amazing! Each person sent me photographs of their frozen Books in the water and these images were then displayed as part of my participation when I represented the US in the Ecuador Biennale.
I’ve also recently been devising ways that classes can work with river clay. Last year when I was having an exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, high school students made a variety of river creatures, frogs and fish and snails and turtles out of clay that had been dug from one of the pueblos. The creatures weren’t fired — they were ephemeral gifts to the water and were placed into the Santa Fe River at the same time as 15 Ice Books with the help of over a hundred participants.
With climate change leading to more extreme weather patterns including droughts, floods, and pollution, water scarcity and new waterborne diseases, how do you see the role of art and storytelling in fostering resilience and advocacy for water protection?
There are so many ways that artists can become advocates for water and sometimes it involves making visible what is usually invisible to the human eye. My projects focus on the importance of waterborne diseases that can only be seen through a microscope and how we can educate people to prevent the spread of these deadly pathogens.
I had a Senior Research Fulbright Grant in Indonesia where I became sick with giardia that was hard to diagnose when I came home. Once I was well, I began researching at the University of New Mexico medical school where they had large atlases of waterborne pathogens. I then met the chair of biology, Dr. Sam Loker, whose specialty was schistosomiasis, commonly known as bilharzia or snail fever. He applied for a grant for me to travel to Ethiopia, Egypt, and Nepal, to film and produce a video documentary about schistosomiasis in those countries. My partner and I traveled to the source of the Blue Nile, Lake Tana, Ethiopia, then to Egypt and on to Nepal where I collaborated with epidemiologists as we studied elephant dung from these magnificent large mammals who were infected.
I draw, paint or use enlarged photographs of the various pathogens such as E. coli, giardia, and campylobacter, which are then transferred onto silk scrolls. Silk is used because in some countries, including India, rural women will fold their saris and use these to filter polluted water. The American Microbiology Society Archives has just acquired 16 of my waterborne disease Scrolls. The scientists at the Archives have never worked with an artist before, so we are having discussions about how to use the scrolls for educational purposes.
Another form of advocacy that I have utilized, in addition to creating video documentaries about important water issues and having exhibitions, is to write books and articles (and interviews, such as this one) that focus on necessary topics. In several of my publications, I advocate for removing dams and allowing rivers to flood, which is a natural part of their hydrologic cycle. In our hubris, humans build in flood zones and then get angry when water levels rise and destroy property, but if people simply considered the nature of waterways and constructed buildings far from riverbanks, it would save a lot of suffering.
Most of your projects are ephemeral in nature, such as the “Ice Receding/Books Reseeding” series. Has this been a conscious decision to create works that leave little or no trace and exist in documentation?
Yes, the notion of ephemerality has always been important to my ecological practice. In 2007 I was invited to be in the exhibition, “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” curated by Lucy R. Lippard in Boulder, Colorado. I was paired with a scientist for the show who was studying fish mutations in Boulder Creek. I had grown up along Boulder Creek, but it had been a long time since I returned since my parents no longer lived there and I looked forward to visiting my old watery friend. While researching, I learned that this creek is primarily fed by Arapaho Glacier in the mountains. That glacier is melting drastically, as are glaciers around the world. When it does melt, from where will the town of Boulder get its drinking water? I wanted to do some kind of artwork that made that visible, so I started working with ice for the first time since I left Canada. I hand-carved a huge, 300-pound block of ice into the form of an open book. There is so much negativity around the notion of climate disruption, and I wanted to embed something positive within the ice. I worked with a local botanist and stream ecologist to learn what seeds for this specific riparian zone would work the best and then these seeds were embedded into the ice as a kind of ecological text. The local community, including musicians, helped to launch the huge frozen sculpture into the creek. As an educator, it was a way for me to talk about how important plants are and the roles that they play in riparian zones. Plants sequester carbon, mitigate floods and drought, pollinate other plants, disperse seeds, create soil regeneration and preservation, act as filters for pollutants and debris, supply leaf-litter (for food and habitat), promote aesthetic pleasure, hold the banks in place (to slow erosion), and provide shelter/shade for riverside organisms including humans. I certainly did not know at that time that decades and hundreds of Ice Books later I would still be invited to create these sculptures.
What was interesting, as with A Gathering of Waters, people learned about this project, and I started being invited to different places to do similar things. I’ve completed hundreds of these all over the world and every time they’re very different, because every river is distinct. During the COVID years, I started inviting friends and people around the world to create their own ice books. It was a way for them to delve into their particular ecological problems on their local river, stream or creek. I set very explicit directions about how to do this, making sure to work with a botanist or a stream ecologist to make certain they were not introducing any plants that shouldn’t go into the ecosystem there at the river. People did the most amazing projects all over the world. A professor in Australia did a piece where he put mangrove seedlings into the book, which was perfect because mangrove areas hold banks in place. A poet in England put bones of endangered frogs in the ice that were very poetic. A Navajo man added three kinds of sacred corn as his ‘text.’ I learned a lot from every single person who did their projects.
Ephemerality and the idea of letting go is important to me. Our own lives are ephemeral; absolutely nothing lasts forever. Large steel sculptures eventually corrode and collapse; everything goes back into the earth. With ephemeral projects the documentation is necessary, because it is a record of the event. The object may be gone but the documentation is still there, whether through video documentaries, photographs, or written text. Ha, and those too will eventually disappear.
One of the exciting things that I’m doing currently is working on tracking the Ice Books with a wonderful team of four civil engineers at the University of Nebraska, to be able to trace the sculptures as they float downstream. The engineers are devising various instruments that are embedded in the ice, with data recording, GPS system, and small camera. Before sending the tracking devices downstream in the nearby river, the team, in kayaks, took an Ice Book out into a lake to test the data and the photographic images taken at water level are amazingly detailed.
The movement to grant legal personhood to rivers is gaining traction worldwide, recognizing them as living entities with rights rather than mere resources. In What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways, you explore this idea by personifying rivers and narrating their stories. How do you view this shift in public perception, and how did you approach giving voice to rivers while honoring their ecological, cultural, and historical significance?
Among ways of caring is the growing movement recognizing the rights of rivers. The Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua) in New Zealand, home to Māori tribes for centuries, was the first to be legally recognized as a living whole in the Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017. Most Western legal systems place humans above all other life-forms but giving rivers legal status as living entities is catching on around the world and having important impacts that can be enforced in a court of law.
I was the only artist amongst many scientists invited to write a blog for National Geographic by a Fellow at National Geographic. When the blog concluded, I was so enthralled with this process of writing in the first person about waterways that I just kept going. Wherever I was invited, I would always stay for an extra few weeks to meet with local scientists and go out onto those rivers.
What prompted the very first essay was when I was at the North Fork of the Virgin River in Zion National Park with my son. I had just bought an underwater camera, and we were taking pictures under the water and under the ice looking up at the high canyon walls.
What was this ancient river thinking as it flowed past such natural beauty? Every river is different with their own personalities.
I have often collaborated with tribal communities and learned about their relationship to their sacred local waterway. In India, I was giving a series of lectures in Jaipur and Rajasthan. After one of the lectures a reporter from The Times of India asked about the Narmada River, which is the second most sacred river after the Ganges. Her dad worked on the Sardar Sarovar Dam (the largest in India), and she asked if I wanted to visit this dam. She hired a driver, and the two of us drove down to the site of this huge, enormous dam, where we talked about the cultural significance of this river. At dawn we walked down to the river and there was a group of pilgrims wearing white and carrying all their possessions for two years as they circumnavigated the length of the Narmada River. I get chills thinking that we were able to witness this.
Oral storytelling is a powerful way to preserve ecological knowledge across generations and cultures. What methods did you use to authentically include traditional ecological knowledge?
Throughout the years many scientists have dismissed traditional ecological knowledge or TEK. Now it is important that so much of this traditional knowledge is being accepted in scientific circles. In my most recent book, “What Rivers Know,” I present examples of tribal relationships to their rivers. Here is the first sentence about the Yaqui River in the book: “My struggle as a river is interconnected with the struggle of my people, the Yaqui Nation of Mexico, as I try to provide the ancestral source of water for drinking, everyday use, irrigation, and ceremonial purposes.” In Mexico, I went with a Yaqui elder who took me to his villages and talked about the problems they have faced for decades due to so many mining companies that want to come onto their land and use their water. The problems have been so fierce that several Yaqui activists have been killed because of that fight.
Another important form of storytelling for me is through video documentaries, which I enjoy filming and producing. Colleen Thurston directed a beautiful 2025 film called ‘Drowned Land’ about the Kiamichi River within the Choctaw Nation in southeastern Oklahoma and a Texas company that wants to put a dam on their sacred land. This film is one way to fight back. When it premiered recently in Santa Fe, I was invited, along with two Pueblo women, to be on a panel following the film. I have many friends on the Pueblos, including Dr. Greg Cajete, who was the chair of Native American Studies at UNM, with whom I team-taught several courses.
Your work often emphasizes the idea that “We are water”, highlighting the deep interconnection between human life and global waterways. How does this perspective influence the way we should approach water conservation, climate resilience, and our relationship with rivers?
As previously mentioned, What Rivers Know, is written in the first person from the perspective of the water.
Rivers are just as alive as you and me. They have a body called the catchment, the mouth and the delta, cells of water molecules, organs of wetlands and riparian zones, and like us, a circulatory system. We’re inseparable from the waters of the world. We rely on these living bodies for our very survival. I hope that through my global water projects everyone will feel called to action on behalf of your local river.
All my published articles and books include the idea of deep ecological interconnections Here is a list of my four books:
- Water Library. 2007. University of New Mexico Press.
- Reading the River; The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland. 2017. Museum de Domijnen, The Netherlands. (In conjunction with Irland’s Retrospective).
- Basia Irland, Repositories: Portable Sculptures for Waterway Journeys. 2023. A monograph by Patricia Watts. Ecoartspace.
- What Rivers Know, Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways. 2025. Texas A&M University Press.
You have spent your career working in the intersection of art and ecology. How do you balance the poetic and scientific aspects of your work to make conservation messages resonate with a wider audience?
I do not differentiate between the poetic and the scientific because in my work the two flow together.
In my writing or when I present lectures, I try to use lay language that is easily understood with a broad audience, which often means finding unique ways to translate complex scientific data into more readily understood terms. As Lucy Lippard once wrote; “A naturalist in the old-fashioned sense as well as an avant-garde artist—a potent combination of two vocations that depend on looking very closely—Irland is also a poet, which enables her to encapsulate a great deal of vital information into limited words.”
I founded the Art and Ecology Program at UNM to get students out into the field and away from campus, and to open up courses to students across the university instead of just offering them to artists. It is one thing to read about a raven, a rapidly flowing stream, a wildflower meadow and it is quite another to experience it first hand. It took five years of academic meetings to finally get this program up and running, but it is now thriving
Reverence is the deep respect and acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of all beings, recognizing the value and significance of every story, culture, and experience. Do you consider your work a reflection of reverence for these connections, and how does that shape the stories you tell through your work?
Yes, I wholeheartedly hope that my international water projects reflect a deep awe and reverence! I’ve dedicated my life and art to global water issues and have taken an interdisciplinary approach to the creative process by collaborating with a variety of colleagues, including biologists, stream ecologists, botanists, hydrologists, environmental groups, engineers, poets, musicians, and other artists. The focus on the importance of respecting and preserving water is fundamental to all my documentary films, performances, community actions, archival objects, installations, sculptures, and publications.
To me, there is nothing that inspires a deep feeling of awe and reverence as when I am near flowing water.
Whenever beside a small mountain creek, I use my phone to record the sound so that I can replay it upon returning home. When I visit my son, Derek, in Vancouver, Canada we hike up to a series of waterfalls and sit in contemplation of the wonder. Every stream has its own ancient story to tell if we are willing to listen carefully.
In What Rivers Know, I write, “Everything is interconnected through a cycle. Each of us is a walking river, sloshing along with damp insides held together by our paper-thin epidermis. Clogged arteries in the human body are analogous to the structures of dams, where entire ecosystems are changed when streams cannot flow naturally. If all of us could deeply understand that rivers are living beings, would we treat them with respect and cause them no harm?”
