Glossary

Coming soon

Organised around a natural region — its rivers, land, and ecosystems — rather than administrative boundaries like counties. ReAnglia’s focus on the East of England reflects a bioregional way of thinking about place.

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A critical but depleted source of fresh water, groundwater is water that has soaked down through the soil’s surface into the rock layers below the water table (contrasted with surface water in lakes, rivers etc. and not including soil moisture sitting above the water table in the ‘unsaturated zone’). Accounting for 99% of all liquid freshwater on Earth, groundwater can take anything from days to hundreds to thousands of years to accumulate, yet it supplies drinking water for almost half the population and is being extracted faster than it can be recharged from precipitation and surface water (see recharge below for why this is). While in some parts of the UK most of the domestic water supply comes from surface water, in many parts of the Anglian region the majority comes from the aquifer.

See further:
https://un-igrac.org/why-groundwater/groundwater-basics/
https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/groundwater-making-invisible-visible-2022-and-beyond
https://www.unesco.org/reports/wwdr/2022/en
https://unu.edu/ehs/series/5-facts-groundwater-depletion
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/groundwater/water-resources/groundwater-resources-in-the-uk/

A worldview that treats nature as kin, not resource. Rather than humans standing apart from nature and managing it, a kincentric approach sees people as one part of a living web of relationships with plants, animals, rivers, and soil.

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↠ Kincentric Leadership
↠ Worldview Chart, part of the Worldview Literacy Project, from Kindred World

Aquifers naturally recharge with groundwater through rain filtering through soil that is well vegetated and permeable. Human systems (cities, farms and water infrastructure) disrupt this sequence so that the water bypasses the aquifer completely and ends up in rivers, drains, and combined sewers or evaporates. This happens through:

• impervious surfaces (roads, buildings, car parks) where water runs off into drains and rivers;
• farmland or turf (in parks and gardens) with compacted or poorly structured soil where the water is more likely to evaporate or run off than to percolate down; and
• infrastructure (roads, railways, dams, and drainage networks) that reroutes water to bypass natural recharge pathways entirely, often ending up in a ‘combined sewer system’.

This can be mitigated through ‘sustainable urban drainage systems’ (SuDs) such as permeable paving, infiltration basins, retention ponds, soakaways, “managed aquifer recharge” schemes and systems that either divert rainwater and/or separate rainwater from the main sewerage system. However, most legal and planning frameworks still routinely overlook recharge protection.

See further:
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/geology-projects/suds/
https://www.susdrain.org/delivering-suds/using-suds/background/sustainable-drainage.html
SlowFlow Rain Planters – A raingarden in a box – SuDS Planter – by Water Sensitive Cambridge
Chavula, Mulenga and Jimaima (2026) Impact of land use and infrastructure on groundwater recharge. Front. Water 8:1898078.
Dave Owen, Law, Land Use, and Groundwater Recharge, 73 Stan. L. Rev. 1163 (2021).

Going beyond “doing less harm” to actively restoring and renewing natural systems — soil, water, habitats — so they become healthier and more resilient over time, not just maintained as they are.

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Paying attention to relationships, not just outcomes: how people relate to nature, to each other, and to the places they live, rather than treating land, water, or community purely as things to be managed or extracted from.

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Restoring an area to a wilder, more self-sustaining state, often by reducing human management and allowing natural processes — like flooding, grazing, or natural regeneration of trees — to shape the landscape again.

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A legal and philosophical idea that nature — or a specific river — has its own inherent rights, such as the right to flow freely or be free from pollution, rather than being treated only as property or a resource.

Not utopian (a perfect, finished future with no path to it) and not dystopian (a warning of collapse). Thrutopian thinking asks what it might realistically take to get from here to somewhere better — grounded, not fantastical.

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