The true course of human enlightenment has never run smoothly, and has often been characterised by factional rivalries that break out into open hostility. For example, there was the bitter rivalry that existed between the followers of the pre-eminent UCL statisticians Jerzy Neyman and Ronald Fisher, in which mutual enmity was such that neither camp could bring itself to share the faculty tearoom with the other. Neyman’s group would take their tea between 3.30 and 4.15pm and drink only India tea, whilst the Fisherites would turn up at 4.15pm and steadfastly stick to Chinese blend. It would appear that academic groupthink really is a thing.

However, such infighting pales into insignificance when viewed alongside the fisticuffs to be found whenever a hydro-sociologist comes into contact with a socio-hydrologist. And heaven forfend if you were to confuse one with the other — as if that were even remotely possible.

Just to underline how difficult it would be to confuse the two, Wikipedia offers a useful guide:

The first approach to socio-hydrology was the term “hydro-sociology”, which arises from a concern about the scale of impact of human activities on the hydrological cycle. Socio-hydrology is defined as the humans-water interaction and later as “the science of people and water”, which introduces bidirectional feedbacks between human–water systems, differentiating it from other related disciplines that deal with water.

So it seems that hydro-sociology came first but it was too limited in scope for some of its followers as it failed to deal with “bidirectional feedbacks between human–water systems”. And if you were wondering what such a feedback might look like, Wikipedia offers a highly educational graphic:

Delve further into this fascinating system diagram and you find that it covers so much more than the concepts of drinking and urination. For example, it is through the efforts of the socio-hydrologists that we have learnt that building levees can give a false sense of security from floods, and flood defences will often just transfer the problem downstream. Also, improving a water supply will only result in an increased demand, and that is surely a bad thing. None of this wisdom was available to the hydro-sociologists because they failed to appreciate the need for a right-pointing arrow. Or so Wikipedia would have you believe.

I think it’s only fair that I now present an account of hydro-sociology that wasn’t obviously written by a socio-hydrologist. According to Dr Asok Kumar Ghoshi of Jadavpur University:

HYDROSOCIOLOGY is that branch of science which deals with interaction of community activities, governance, religious actions, health & hazard risks initiated through pollution, flood & drought, international & national politics and basin economics with climate change, hydro-meteorological factors, hydro-geomorphic parameters and hydrogeological factors keeping in view overall growth plan of the country.

Gulp! So now I really am confused. You can’t deal with all of that without a plentiful supply of arrows. And with climate change added into the mix, you’ll probably need most of them to point to fossil fuels — unless, of course, you don’t care too much about where your next research grant is coming from. So maybe there isn’t such a difference between hydro-sociology and socio-hydrology after all.

Well, that’s not the view of Professors Alexander Ross and Heejun Chang of the Portland State University, although to be fair they do see there being a time when the two camps might be able to see eye-to-eye. In their interrogatorily titled paper, Socio-hydrology with hydrosocial theory: two sides of the same coin?, they suggest that there is a “sophisticated relationship with emergent syntheses”. They continue:

Our review concludes that socio-hydrology and hydrosocial research exist in a complex epistemological relationship, offering fertile grounds for lively discussions from which both will continue to benefit.

Lively discussions, indeed. In fact, as part of their conclusions they call for “the development of more holistic studies that might be seen as an overlapping set in a Venn Diagram”. Whether the overlap could lead to the sharing of the faculty tearoom remains to be seen. However, there is one potential area of epistemic cooperation that I might venture to suggest could be useful. How about if the hydro-sociologists and socio-hydrologists got their heads together to explain to the rest of the world that the recent Pakistani flooding, in which 9 per cent of the country was inundated (the equivalent of one third in climate science arithmetic), was so much greater than it need have been due to massive deforestation of the Himalayan foothills? That’s one huge arrow that doesn’t point to fossil fuels and it would be helpful to see the two camps settle their differences long enough to commission a suitable system diagram that even a school-shirking, erstwhile child activist with anti-Semitic proclivities could understand.