This Editorial precedes Volume 25, Issue 2 of Kosmos. Scroll down to access featured content.
Featured image by Zhang Kaiyv
Dear Kosmos Reader,
Water is not a resource. It is not a commodity to be extracted, diverted, or privatized. It is a living system—a relative, a teacher, and one of the Earth’s oldest intelligences. In this time of accelerating climate crisis, social unraveling, and spiritual amnesia, water offers us more than survival. It offers us wisdom.
This issue of Kosmos emerges from a simple but radical question: What can water teach us—if we listen? What if water is not just part of the story, but the story itself?
From ancient rivers to disappearing glaciers, from Indigenous water protectors to decentralized water restoration movements, the voices gathered here explore water as both metaphor and material, as sacred being and system in peril. We hear from filmmakers who have witnessed landscapes reborn through bioregional cooperation. We encounter essays that speak of water as memory, as ceremony, as the pulse of climate itself. And we are reminded, again and again, that water does not act alone. It moves in networks. It shapes through persistence. It restores through relationship.
Like the underground mycelial webs that connect forests, water connects all life across species, borders, and time. It does not move in straight lines but in cycles—teaching us about return, replenishment, and the long arc of transformation. It softens stone not with force but with fidelity. In its quiet insistence, water models a form of resistance that does not dominate but persists.
Water’s wisdom invites us to reimagine power—not as something imposed from above, but as something rising from beneath: the collective strength of people in right relationship with the Earth and each other.
At a time when collapse threatens to harden hearts and landscapes alike—water teaches us to stay soft without surrendering. To remain fluid without losing direction. To be deeply still even as we act. It teaches us that endurance is not a receding, but a commitment—to life, to justice, to future generations. And like the tide, water is the way we return—again and again, with quiet power.
Love and trust,
r.fabian, for Kosmos