Long-term historical and pre-historical analyses show that societies have diverged considerably in their ways of engaging with, using and managing water. Although some smaller cultural groups have retained relatively sustainable or ’harmonious’ modes of engagement, the majority of large, industrialised societies have tended to adopt increasingly unsustainable values, ideas and practices. While highly directive water technologies have had many material benefits for humankind, the impacts on other species, and on the Earth’s ecosystems, have been severe. The forms of production enabled by intensifying levels of water and land use have led not only to climate change, with its potentially disruptive outcomes, but also to the wider loss or degradation of habitats essential for the well-being of both human and non-human beings. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature is now describing the first anthropogenically-created ’mass extinction’ of other species. In the next 40-50 years they anticipate the loss of 41% of all amphibians; 25% of all mammals; and all coral reefs - which support not only a quarter of all oceanic species, but also the 500 million people who depend on these. All around the world, both salt and freshwater ecosystems are showing signs of strain. Achieving more harmonious relationships with water is therefore a matter of urgency. There has been much ’managerial’ debate about maintaining ’environmental flows’ and this generally translates into trying to ensure that some minimal flow of water continues to support ecosystemic processes. Efforts have been made to place economic values on ’ecosystem services’ so that these are sufficiently valorised and thus protected. But such instrumentalist and reductive approaches often detach decision-making about water from the wider social, political and material context inwhich it takes place, and which is more subtly but powerfully causative of the effects outlined above. This paper suggests that there is a need to adopt a more interdisciplinary view of the issues in order to relocate human engagements with water in a way that reconnects decision-making not only with the immediate physical needs of local ecosystems, but with the wider social and material processes that act upon these. As this implies, such an approach entails some consideration of social values, and how these promote particular patterns of resource use. By drawing on comparisons between different societal trajectories, the paper articulates some of the underlying values that enable or obstruct sustainable human-environmental relationships. This draws attention, in particular, to a key contrast between societies in which humankind is seen anthropocentrically as separate from ’nature’ (which is thus framed as the object and subject of human action), and those in which humankind is seen in more egalitarian terms, as part of a simultaneously human and non-human social and material environment. Inevitably, this raises some key questions about the viability of adhering to competitive growth-based economic modes, and suggests a need to explore more collaborative and bioethically robust alternatives.