Emerging Islands Presents
Follow the Water
An Explorers Journal
SAY “MOSS” AND REMEMBER THE RIVER
Was it a summer filled with the churning foam of ocean waves, the gritty squelch of sandy slippers? Or the smell of chlorine and sunblock, the prickle of fear as you swam toward the deep end of the pool? Maybe water meant a soapy bath filled with bright, waterlogged toys, or the murky swirl of a river, cow dung and mud softly swallowing your toes.
Take a moment to remember, and you might feel yourself afloat once more, like the first time you learned you could trust the water to carry your weight.
Follow the Water began as an outdoor photography exhibit in La Union. We wanted to widen the conversation around the experiences and issues of coastal communities in the region.
Since then, Follow the Water has evolved into a framework—a way to reorient storytelling around the presence and poetics of water.
Our hope is to recenter the world’s lakes, rivers, wetlands, and seas in people’s imaginations, by amplifying the voices and knowledge of the communities that depend on them and fight to protect them.
For this publication, we gathered storytellers whose work is shaped by and around water—from the marshlands of Mindanao to the Mekong, from the Banda Sea to the Amazon.
Each story is a tributary, flowing into the next: together they form a river of memory, resistance, and care.
Following the water is how we can begin to upend and invert the world we’ve built—not by escaping into fantasy, but by returning to a daily, lived truth. That the world is more water than land; an archipelago more than a continent.
Where the water flows, life follows.
Suggested Reflections
1
Read through these stories as you would comb through a beach, or browse at a thrift store: with a light touch, following your senses, your intuition open. What questions, ideas arose in your mind in the process? Or perhaps you’re more of a visual or intuitive person, and it’s more images, patterns, or shapes? Write, draw or talk about it with a friend.
3
Go outside and look for a body of water near you. Spend five minutes with it: looking, listening, wondering. Describe everything that comes to your senses, now that you’re paying attention. Write, draw, take pictures, call a friend and tell them about it, or post it on a story online. Go about your day.
2
Or perhaps you like to read stories more thoroughly, from beginning to end. As you parse through these texts and images, pay attention to the themes that emerge not just within each story, but between stories. What threads connect the different bodies of water portrayed here? Where do their stories overlap? It might be a word, an ecological concept, a pressing issue, an animal, or even an image.
4
Call a few friends and start a nature journaling club, visit a body of water together. Write, draw, and reflect.
Featuring Work by
Gab Mejia
Mandy Barker
Malin Fezehai
Musuk Nolte
Huiying Ore
Sirachai Arunrugstichai
Muhammad Fadli & Fatris MF
Pablo Albarenga
Dercio Muha Gomate
The editorial team, under the leadership of the National Geographic Storytellers Collective, extends its gratitude to C Asean, for supporting us in creating a publication that is committed to the stories of water and its communities.
Follow the Water was conceived by Emerging Islands as an exhibition of Southeast Asian photography in 2021, bridging our community in San Juan, La Union to the wider world of coastal narratives.
It grew as a regional paradigm in 2023, with the support of the Sustainability Expo, where we initiated Follow the Water as a digital map of water stories, drawing photography submissions from Asia and beyond.
This publication is one more step, as we hope to continue this collaboration to create space for a new generation of storytellers connecting with water, to explore the diversity of ecological stories around the globe through community-based storytelling, and to root us all back to our interconnectedness amidst the ecological crisis we are facing today.
Writer & Editor: Nicola Sebastian
Creative Director & Project Manager: David Loughran
Photo Editor: Hannah Reyes Morales
Editorial Assistant: Samantha Zarandin
Graphic Designer: Alec Figuracion
Researcher & Proofreader: Geela Garcia
Color Proofing Editor: Ekkarat Punyatara
Illustrator: Alaga
Contributing Writer: Marcela Vallejo
Editorial Advisor: Lisa Lytton, Vice President, National Geographic Storytellers Collective