The quality of water as it slips through life: Afro-Colombian aquatic worlds and alternatives to resource-driven development

Avoiding the reduction of social and ecological reality to centred factors, institutional hierarchies and unidimensional causalities, this paper interrogates the networked relations between living beings, territory and water across the Colombian Pacific Lowlands. Situated within the environmental humanities and philosophical essay writing, the paper does not advance a programmatic macro-economic policy blueprint or an institutional development model. Instead, it develops an ontological and micro-social proposition grounded in the ethnographic documentation of Afro-descendant communities in Chocó (notably through Ulrich Oslender's geography of social movements) in dialogue with Hartmut Rosa's sociology of resonance and Gilles Deleuze's relational ontology of becoming. We demonstrate how the notion of aquatic space – characterised by tidal rhythms, fluidity and uncontrollable currents – articulates an amphibious mode of existence. Ultimately, the essay proposes an existential alternative to resource-driven development, replacing extractive terrestrial logic, acceleration and instrumental control with adaptive, affective and resonant forms of dwelling in a changing world. The notion of aquatic space, which expresses fluidity, movement and transformation as communitarian capabilities, helps us understand alternative ways of being located on Colombia's Pacific Coast. The essay ultimately calls for a reassessment of our collective existence, urging a transition from a resource-driven mindset to one that embraces more resonant and interconnected forms of living.