To the waters and the wild: reflections on eco-social healing in the WILD project Katherine Phillips and Antony Lyons Introduction We’re standing in the shallows of the River Churn, a small tributary of the River Thames in the Cotswold Hills (UK). Late summer sunlight filters through the leaves of willow and sycamore trees that line this section of the river as it intersects fields of grazing cattle and arable crops. So far, the morning has involved cutting back and thinning the dense bankside vegetation, allowing more light to reach the water channel. Volunteers have been pulling up the invasive plant, Himalayan balsam, to provide more space for biodiversity, and to improve riverbank stability. With us, in the flowing waters, are two members of the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG). One of us spots a crayfish, and we follow it as it slides downstream with the current. It is a North American signal crayfish, a non- native species, deemed by ecologists to be a problem in part due to the destabilizing effects of its burrowing activity on riverbanks and its destructive impact on the smaller native White Claw crayfish. It is an amazing creature to behold, and interacts with us as we observe it, waving its claws defensively, clearly watching our approach. The volunteer group’s next activity is riverfly monitoring. We kick up the sediment in the stream, and gather samples of the turbulent water, which are then poured from buckets into shallow trays. This enables us to isolate the various types of tiny creature using a pipette, and identify the species using a chart. An electronic microscope plugged into a laptop computer allows us to see, in intricate detail, the bodies and movements of mayfly and caddisfly larvae, the latter encased in an exquisite case of minute, multi-coloured sand grains. Enlarged on the screen, the movements of these creatures are mesmerizing, as though performing an intricate dance. The day is rich with such multi-species encounters. Led by FWAG, the WILD project (Water and Integrated Local Delivery) operates on the whole catchment, or watershed, of the River Churn. Working with volunteer groups, farmers, residents, and local organisations, WILD takes an integrative approach to enhancing water quality and ecology, attending to social and policy rifts and disconnects, as well as individual healing and well-being. Our initial contact with WILD was made via the production process of a short documentary film with an environmental communication purpose 1 . In this exploration, we revisit the semi-structured interviews conducted for the film-making – with coordinators, volunteers and others - in order to further explore the dynamics of the project that seemed to us to interweave environmental and social healing, through what we term ‘eco-social healing’. In doing so, we contemplate the significance of water (the ‘W’ in WILD), as a medium of transformation at multiple levels. Drawing also on our own experiences with WILD we highlight some significant elements of eco-social healing, including the multi-sensory, and multi-species encounters. In the second part of the chapter, we reflect on the model of ‘integrated local delivery’ and its relationship to land- use management and people’s diverse engagement as ‘hydrocitizens’. We consider how the approach taken by WILD can provide a holistic ecological model, enabling an integration of healing and recovery on individual, social, community and bioregional levels. 59