Water, Theology, and the New Mexico Water Code
NATURAL RESOURCES JOURNAL
Water, Theology, and the New Mexico Water Code
Martha C. Franks 0
Recommended Citation 0
0 Martha C. Franks , Water, Theology, and the New Mexico Water Code, 48 Nat. Resources J. 227, 2008 , USA
Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol48/iss2/2
Water, Theology, and the New Mexico
Water Code
INTRODUCTION: THREE WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT WATER
Water, according to Mircea Eliade, an historian of religions, is the
"reservoir of all the possibilities of existence."1 Certainly in the book of
Genesis water existed before creation. Before God spoke, when the earth
was without form and void, the Spirit of God moved over the face of the
waters. 2 Thus, Eliade observes, water is the symbol of the formlessness from
which form arises. This is true not only of the moment of creation, but in all
the changes of our lives. Water is the symbol of the formlessness in which
the dissolutions and reformations of all kinds of birth and death occur. In
the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, the great flood first destroys the
world and then gives way to God's promise. The Hebrews walk through the
Red Sea in going from slavery to freedom. In the waters of baptism people
die to sin and are born to new life. Water dissolves old forms and gives
place to the possibility of re-formed life. For this reason, says Eliade, water
is not just one mythic symbol among others, but has a special place. It is by
analyzing the religious value of water that one can understand the structure
and function of all religious symbolism, and of the working of symbolism
generally. Thus, he claims, no matter in what religious system one
encounters it, the emergence of form from the pre-formal water is not only
a vision of physical creation common to many religious traditions, it is
also - not coincidentally - an essential metaphorical backdrop for the
human experience of the emergence of a sense of order and meaning out of
formlessness.
As with any good metaphor, these high-flown ideas match the
matter-of-fact. There is no need to look to esoteric philosophies or symbolic
systems to know that life emerged from water and that how we live in the
* Martha C. Franks is an environmental attorney specializing in water law and
concentrating on issues of drought and scarcity, water rights adjudication and administration, the
Endangered Species Act, and environmental compliance. Before entering private practice, she
represented the State of New Mexico on water matters for many years and then worked for
the Office of the Solicitor of the United States during the Clinton Administration, advising the
Bureau of Reclamation on water questions. A great deal of her work consists of negotiation
among a broad array of water interests, including state, federal, tribal, city, and county
governments, as well as irrigation districts and environmental groups. She is also a graduate
of the Virginia Theological Seminary, having received her Masters in Theological Studies
degree in 1997. She has published articles on both legal and theological subjects and has
lectured on environmental theology. She teaches part time at St. John's College in Santa Fe.
1. MIRcEA ELIADE, LE SACRt ET LE PROFANE 112.
2. Genesis 1:2.
world is shaped by water. These things are true in a perfectly literal way.
Water was in fact the pre-condition for the development of our global
biological systems. Living bodies were formed in water both at the literal
beginning of all life and the particular beginning of each human life. Even
the symbolism of water as a dissolver of form to make room for new life has
a perfectly literal analog. The property of water as a near universal solvent
is an indispensable part of the various ecological cycles that support life,
growth, and the continual evolutionary re-formation of life and growth.
Whether approached through a spiritual tradition or as a practical and
biological matter, water is the preliminary from which organization arises.
The essentialness of water to life echoes all the way across human existence
from the heights of spirituality to the fundamental level of material need.
There is a third way to talk about water that puts these vast
perspectives in conversation, along with a great many more prosaic points
of view. In my experience as an environmental lawyer specializing in
southwestern water law, I have found that when people argue about water
the whole range of spiritual and physical meanings for water are, at least in
recent years, part of the fight. The physical aspect of the situation is
obvious. People will of course legislate and litigate over practical material
property issues concerning how any commodity is distributed. Equally
obvious, the scarcity of water in a desert society like the American
Southwest- a scarcity that also exists in the part of the world that gave us the
Judeo-Christian scriptures - turns up the heat on all of that legislation and
litigation in the same way that the rarity of diamonds (...truncated)