This passage beautifully illustrates how Macfarlane is applying Herbert Marcuse's concept of "one-dimensional" thinking to our relationship with water and rivers.
Marcuse, in his influential work "One-Dimensional Man" (1964), argued that advanced industrial society creates "one-dimensional thought" - a form of consciousness that reduces complex realities to purely functional, instrumental terms. People lose the ability to think critically or imagine alternatives because everything gets flattened into questions of efficiency and utility.
When Macfarlane says we have "one-dimensional water," he's extending this critique to show how modern rationalism has reduced water to merely a "service provider." Rivers become nothing more than resources to be managed - sources of power, irrigation, drinking water, waste disposal. Their complexity as living systems with their own "personalities, cultures, watersheds, regions, biotas" gets erased in favor of viewing them purely through the lens of human utility.
This connects to the Benjamin/Adorno concept of constellation we just discussed. Macfarlane is arguing that we've lost the ability to see rivers in their full constellation of meanings - ecological, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic. Instead of experiencing them as complex beings with their own agency and character, we've "deterritorialized" and "homogenized" them into interchangeable units of H2O.
The phrase "crisis of imagination as well as legislation" is particularly striking. Macfarlane suggests that our environmental problems aren't just about policy failures, but about impoverished ways of thinking and perceiving. We need new stories and narratives that can help us see rivers as "interflowing collaborators" rather than mere resources. This is where his work as a nature writer becomes political - storytelling becomes a form of resistance against one-dimensional thinking, opening up space for more complex, relational ways of understanding our place in the world.
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