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The Hindu
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Save rivers, pleads Robert Macfarlane
In his latest book, Wild Fictions, Amitav Ghosh writes about the role of a novelist as opposed to that of a historian. 'The historian's past has a sweep that the novelist's doesn't. The difference is between observing the flow of a river from the shore and from within the waters: the direction of the current is the same in both cases, but a swimmer, or a fish, has at every moment a million different choices and options.' The point that Ghosh, reflecting on his own work as a novelist is making, is that of immersion. Novelists have to respond to what characters feel, touch and fall into, unlike historians who may discuss wider trends. Natural spirits Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? is not a novel, yet he dips into the waters, novelist-style, of the characters that pepper the pages, mycologists, musicians, activists, grieving friends, hermits, and rivers. The book takes us in close proximity to three rivers, and the perils they face – the mist-shrouded Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the deadened Adyar in Chennai, and the turbulent Mutehekau Shipu in Canada. What Macfarlane attempts is more than a simple personification of rivers. By visiting each river, navigating them, and staying by them, he attempts a character sketch which is at once bewildering and animated. To save a river, one might expect a tabling of their ecosystem services, their PH values, their gallons of water, irrevocable proof. Yet the book offers something different: it suggests that rivers are too much of the 'other' to be neatly tabulated. Macfarlane makes the political choice of rebelling against human-made boxes, painting a complex picture that is beyond simple objectivity. It suggests older ways of knowing rivers. Ecologists might call this 'ecological character,' a word that exists in India's Wetland rules (2017). The author suggests an animacy of the river beyond human-centring: this isn't anthropocentric, it is enlarging the meaning of life, he argues. In 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand delivered a landmark judgment, emphasising the 'physical and spiritual sustenance' of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, making them legal persons. This was later stayed by the Supreme Court. Life at Ennore creek The book takes us close to the people who think in this manner and defend rivers. The mist-laden Los Cedros is threatened by gold mining, yet this is a reserve that was protected by law in a landmark judgment that upheld the Rights of Nature and protected the reserve from mining. We meet Giulina Furci, who finds fungi new to science in the shadow of the river. The Adyar river and Ennore creek are polluted beyond belief, yet the author finds life struggling through while walking with environmentalist Yuvan Aves. The eddying Mutehekau Shipu is threatened by a dam, yet we see why the river means so much (a legal person with a right to live as per Innu declarations) even as the human party gets bitten by blackflies. This book is entirely show, not tell. There are no sermons on why you must protect nature, only monographs on what, or who, the rivers mean. In the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, the book offers a view of the world where the person and the river, or the person and nature, are seen in relation to each other. 'To be is to be related,' as Aves says in the book. New ways of seeing The author offers a vocabulary for this new way of seeing the world, a world-building, so to speak, in which rivers write time and features: he cites the Maori phrase—'Who are your waters' (mine, for example, would be the Yamuna), he writes on the Los Cedros: 'River and cloud can't be separated—each authors the other.' When a river spiral throws him upstream, he suggests he is going back in time. In a dream, he sees 'grief-cutter ants,' a play on leaf-cutter ants. Macfarlane thus moors his identity around rivers, the riverbed and the catchment—'everyone lives in a watershed.' Each character we meet is carrying grief: the death of a parent, the death of a sister, the death of a friend, the death of landscapes. It is the river that heals them, gives them purpose, buoys sinking spirits. Returning to Wild Fictions, one more parallel rings true. Ghosh writes: 'High modernity taught us that the earth was inert and existed to be exploited by human beings for their own purposes… We are slowly beginning to understand that in order to hear the earth, we must first learn to love it.' Love, grief, and hope flow through this book. Let the author lead you downstream, let the river toss you and nourish you, and then you can answer the title's question for yourself. The reviewer is a conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful - Tales of 15 Iconic Indian species.
Scotsman
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Robert Macfarlane at Edinburgh Book Festival: 'when you put yourself in remarkable places, surprising things happen'
One of the greatest nature writer and poets of his generation ponders the life and uncertain future of the world's waterways in his new book Is A River Alive? Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Robert Macfarlane holds up his hand on the Zoom screen to show me a strip of red fabric knotted round his right wrist. It was put there by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and activist, before he set off on a 100km kayak journey down the Mutehekau Shipu (or Magpie) river in Northern Quebec. She told him: 'Only time or the river will remove it'. 'It has this rather awkward knot,' he says, tugging on it to show me. 'So when you're sleeping or resting something digs into you. At the beginning I thought that was annoying, but later on I thought it was brilliant. It's a reminder, like the pebble in the shoe, it reminds me what I learned on that river.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Writing his latest book, Is A River Alive?, involved a lot of learning, about the parlous state of rivers in the UK and around the world and about the growing Rights of Nature movement which seeks to grant them legal status, a kind of personhood, so they can be better protected. But the learning he's really talking about here is experiential, the hard-to-explain ways in which his perspective shifted during the writing of this book about the natural world, about life itself. Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth It's his most personal, most passionate book, fuelled with an urgent, driving energy. He is not a neutral observer, he is writing to convince the reader. 'I remain very much involved, legally and in terms of activism, with all of the rivers, all of the people in the book. This book has continued to flow through me and through my life and shape it and I think it will do so probably for the rest of my life.' He points to his only tattoo, on his wrist next to the red fabric, the Cuneiform characters for 'river' from the epic of Gilgamesh, which forms a kind of bubbling undercurrent to Is A River Alive? The book charts three extraordinary journeys: a hike into the Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador, after a mining consortium which would have destroyed it was successfully challenged under Ecuadorian law; the kayak voyage down the mighty Mutehekau Shipu, where river guardians are currently fighting a vast hydro dam development; and a journey through Chennai, India, where the river Adyar is 'as close to death as any river I have seen in my life' from industrial pollution. If a river is alive, of course, it can also be killed. It's a book which 'wears the question at its heart on its sleeve'. I ask him to what extent he knew the answer before he set out. 'I think I began in a false sense of certainty,' he says, thoughtfully. 'It was only later I realised that I had begin in doubt. The question mark mattered, this wasn't a declaration. It was a multi-year, multi-continent grappling with a very complex set of questions. I was aware I was dealing with a vast and ancient philosophical conversation about what constitutes life.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It took him out his comfort zone, because the personhood of rivers challenges 'conventional western' ways of thinking. The book isn't a marshalling of arguments, it's an account of experiences, a shift which happened in the imagination, perhaps, one might say, the spirit. It finishes with an epiphany on the Mutehekau Shipu which is (even for Macfarlane) hard to put into words. One review in a science magazine described parts of it as 'fundamentally unscientific'. 'It doesn't come easily to the rationalist mind. One is wary of woo-woo. There is a tussle between philosophical traditions which twists through the book. I learned to feel my own intellectual inheritance of rationalism. I think by the time the third journey [in Quebec] began I rapidly lost any sense of embarrassment at the idea that one might relate to a river as a friend or a force or a being. The more I met people and ideas which challenged that hard shell of certainty and began to dissolve it, the more fascinating it all became.' Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. Macfarlane has been described as 'the great nature writer and nature poet of this generation'. His bestselling first book, Mountains of the Mind, in 2003, established him at the vanguard of what has been called The New Nature Writing. He followed that success with books like The Old Ways and Underland, made television programmes and created projects like Lost Words, which has produced books, music, exhibitions and education resources. He writes lyrically, poetically, and speaks much as he writes. Riverine metaphors flow through our conversation: he talks about the book's 'tributaries', the concepts which are now beginning to 'irrigate' the law. He apologises for 'meandering'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He asks me – as he likes to ask everyone – about the 'rivers which flow through your life and your memories'. I tell him I grew up between the Dee and the Don in Aberdeenshire, which immediately leads him to make a comparison to the Tigris and Euphrates ('The Mesopotamia of Scotland!'). We talk about Nan Shepherd, the North-east writer whose book The Living Mountain has been hailed posthumously as a classic of nature writing. Macfarlane was instrumental in bringing it back to the public eye. 'She and I wouldn't reach for the same forms of language, but I think we're moving towards the same conclusions. She writes about life as a quality brought into being by relation, the mountain lives in its complex totality of air and water and plant and human and weather and rock and time. I think my book argues for life always lived in relation, rather than Newtonian single units of self.' It is certainly a book written in relation to other people. I admit to Macfarlane that I imagined him to be a lone adventurer, but this book full of people, larger than life characters like mycologist Giuliana Furci, who has a sixth sense for finding rare mushrooms, ebullient land rights lawyer César Rodríguez-Garavito, and Yuvan Aves, the inspirational self-taught naturalist Macfarlane meets in Chennai. 'I think in the 2000s I would have been that lone traveller, but there has been a trajectory towards conviviality, company and community. In this book I'm alone for approximately three minutes. I love writing about people. I've always found that, when you put yourself in the way of remarkable places and remarkable people, surprising things will happen.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad How hopeful is he for rivers? In England and Wales there is no river which has a 'good' rating from the environmental agency. Scotland has some rated higher, but that brings with it a danger of complacency. On Sunday, at the Book Festival, Macfarlane will share a stage with writer Louise Welsh who is currently exploring a new legal status for the Clyde. While more people are prepared to speak out for rivers, the opponents of river rights are often powerful, wealthy and without scruples. 'I've seen river guardians and activists working in incredibly demanding and often dangerous circumstances where standing up for water rights or land rights is not a hobby, it's your life. These people are not despairing, so for me to do would be a luxury. 'I feel so hopeful because this extraordinary movement has sprung up in the UK and organised itself across communities in a way I could never have predicted in the five years I've been working on the book. It is already changing everything. It will take 20 or 25 years for that change to materialise in a revived river system in this country, but I have absolutely no doubt that it will happen.' A few days before our conversation, the local council in Southampton adopted a river rights motion along the lines the book described. A copy Is A River Alive? was waved during a speech to support the motion. Macfarlane is clearly pleased. 'It's exciting to see these ideas moving into policy-making. It's not that the book caused that, but it has been a small part of the catalytic process around that thinking. That's another reason to feel hopeful.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Nature's right to exist, flourish and persist
You have said you are 'north-minded,' drawn to high altitudes and high latitudes, to snow, ice, and rock, to mountains. You debuted with Mountains of the Mind but then your trajectory descends and your latest book is on rivers. Why? Mountains and rivers live in an ancient dialectic; mountains lend their gravity to rivers, as it were, and rivers in return sharpen and cleave mountains. So, in a strange way, turning to rivers felt like a coming home! I have always and will always be drawn, as a writer, to the limitless terrain where nature meets culture; where the complex and eventually unmappable reciprocities of imagination and landscape shape one another, dynamically. Is A River Alive? asks its readers to imagine rivers as possessing lives, deaths and even rights, and to see what consequences flow from that, in terms of law, story, song and, of course, the aliveness of rivers themselves. I've never known a subject like this one –– so urgent, so ancient, so torrenting –– nor known a book which continues to flow through my life long after I have notionally 'finished' writing it. I feel deeply passionate about the ideas, rivers and people who run through its pages; among them Yuvan Aves, the young Indian writer, campaigner and naturalist with whom I am fortunate to have been friends for six years or so now, and whose home city of Chennai is at the core of the central section of the book. The publishers have called Is A River Alive your most personal and political book. Does this description resonate with you? It is certainly the most personal and political I've ever written. The former, perhaps, a function of being nearly 50; the latter of the emergency in which the Earth finds itself, in terms of the living world, and the need to re-imagine so many of our laws, customs, perceptions and practices from the understanding of humans as part of a web or flow, not as the summits of a pinnacle or pyramid. Thinking 'with' rivers, as I found myself non-trivially doing in the course of writing the book, proved a powerful, even radical experience. Which leads us to the question of whether rivers have rights. What does this mean for you and are you optimistic about it? There is nothing so powerful as an idea that changes the world, and the ideas at the heart of the young Rights of Nature movement have the potential to do so. Since Ecuador recognised, in its Constitution in 2008, the inalienable and fundamental rights of Nature (Pachamama) to exist, to flourish and to persist, and charged the state with the guarantee of those rights, and with enforcing the repair of damage should those rights be violated, the world has seen the spread in number and consequence of Rights of Nature cases and thinking, across and up and down jurisdictions. The Parliamentary recognition in 2017 of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as a 'living entity' with attendant rights, for instance, or the 2021 ruling in Ecuador that recognised the rights of an astonishing cloud-forest would be violated if gold mining were to occur there. These have been gong-strike moments, the noise of which has resonated around the planet, and I believe are part of the path to a truer, more just future. If you find the idea of a river having rights initially confronting, remember that in European and American law, corporations have both rights and legal personhood (the right to bring suit in court). Why should a company founded two days ago have rights, but not a river that has flowed for tens of thousands of years? It's a form of socially normalised madness. You have filed a petition seeking that the Los Cedros cloud forest, Ecuador, be recognised as the co-author of a song. Please explain the reasoning behind this? To me it is self-evident that a forest might co-author a song with human collaborators, and bizarre that not a single jurisdiction in the world allows for a natural being or entity (forest, river, animal) to be recognised as a 'moral author' of a creative work. We brought this case within the Ecuadorian legal system where, as mentioned, the Rights of Nature are recognised within the constitution, after writing a song in the Los Cedros cloud-forest and with the Los Cedros cloud-forest: indeed, the many voices of the forest (barbet, howler monkey, river, wind, fruitbat) are literally present as singers on the song. You can hear it on any of the main streaming platforms: search for Song of the Cedars, and you will find the forest named as one of the song's authors! You are passionate about the river Cam in your backyard, about the dumping of sewage in rivers across the UK, whose waters — as you put it, 'have become undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable', but for this book you have explored other geographies, including India, Ecuador and Canada, to write about our polluted, but fiercely defended, rivers. Because these are all places in which rivers are being imagined otherwise. Rivers desperately need new stories telling about them –– and some of those stories are very old, and have been forgotten. The dominant story now is one of river as resource, not river as life-force. In India, in Canada/Nitassinan, in Ecuador, different forms of moral imagination are at work, or trying to be heard, and so I travelled there to meet people and places where radical revisions are being attempted to the natural contract. It was an honour to write about the rivers, marshes, lagoons and creeks of Chennai, and to do so in the company of –– and seeing through the eyes of –– Yuvan Aves and his fellow campaigners, who are trying to imagine and implement a just future for Chennai's many water-bodies, inspired by the Tamil word palluyir, meaning 'all of life'. In India, the paradox is especially sharp. We hold our rivers sacred yet are killing them in a multitude of ways. This is true also of the region you visited. You write that water was central to Dravidian culture which has eroded. How do you make sense of this? I struggled to make sense of it, in all honesty. This deep discrepancy between the religious recognition of rivers –– the Ganga, the Yamuna –– as sacred, and the ecological devastation of those same rivers is incomprehensible to me. If a river is divine, surely the imperative to keep its life flowing and its waters clear would be a beautiful and primary form of worship? You write that you found optimism difficult in Chennai, that you had never seen a river as close to death as Enmore Creek, or the Kosathalaiyar. Did you eventually find hope in the waterways of Chennai? Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline. I watched Yuvan and his friends and colleagues struggling to drive change for the better, despite the threats and power levelled against them; in the face of such courage and moral clarity, what right would I have to sit back and say that I despair? As my indefatigable friend Rebecca Solnit puts it, 'You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.' And hope is a discipline because it requires vigilance, concentration and lucidity to imagine other, better possible futures –– and then to push onwards in search of their realisation. And though there were times and stretches of the Cooum or the Kosasthalaiyar in which the river seemed as close to death as any I have ever known, there were moments of illumination and possibility – not least accompanying the 'Turtle Patrol' overnight, as it walks the beach to secure the safety of thousands of Olive Ridley Sea Turtle eggs each night during the nesting season. As sun broke on the night I had walked with the patrol, the first turtle hatchling of the season broke through the surface of the sand in the hatchery, and we carried her towards the surf, and watched as ancient instinct drove that tiny, perfect creature to seek the water. Hope, right there! You co-wrote a ghazal with Yuvan for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. Tell us more, and about the turtles you saw along the Chennai coast, both dead and alive Yes! A praise-song to these extraordinary deep-sea voyagers, these mothers who have been hauling themselves ashore on the coasts of what we now call India for hundreds of thousands of years, to dig their nests and lay their eggs. We wanted to celebrate them in verse and song, so we co-wrote a ghazal for the sea turtle. It was later set exquisitely to music for a nine-voice choir called HOWL: again, if interested people can listen to the song by searching for Night Swimmer (Sea Turtle) and HOWL on the main streaming services. But you are right that, of course, the story of sea turtles and Chennai is now one of death as well as life. Trawler-strikes and net-entanglements threaten the lives of sea turtles during nesting season in particular, and Yuvan and I saw many dead turtles washed up on the tideline, their eyes picked out by ghost-crabs. This year (2025) has been especially catastrophic for turtle deaths, with well over a thousand washed up on the greater Chennai coast alone. It's absolutely crucial that the government strictly enforces the exclusion zone which requires trawlers to stay a certain distance offshore and legally requires trawler nets to be fitted with TEDs (Turtle Excluder Devices) to minimise bycatch deaths. You find ways to champion people, including those from neglected, relegated geographies. I recall your support for the campaign against tree-felling in Telangana in 2021. What prompts you to care for places and landscapes unseen, of uplifting people that few in positions of influence do? You are too kind to say so. If even a fraction of this is true, though, well, I am glad. I guess it is in my nature to want to help as many persons (human and more-than-human) that I can. I have a voice of some volume, and I can't imagine not trying to use it on behalf of those who have had their voices muted by power or circumstance. To be silenced is not the same as to be silent. I also fundamentally thrive on collaboration with others; the world is a 'mycelium', a webwork of relations in which we are all entangled –– collaboration is an extension of these countless mutualisms. Prerna Singh Bindra is a conservationist, author and PhD scholar at CambridgeUniversity. She is @prernabindra on X
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It's irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He's exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a 'dying' river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: 'Is this thing I'm in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants – well, where would you even start?' He's in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, 'this small country with a vast moral imagination', became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, 'since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings'. This enshrinement of the Rights of Nature set off similar developments in other countries. In 2017, a law was passed in New Zealand that afforded the Whanganui River protection as a 'spiritual and physical entity'. In India, five days later, judges ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna should be recognised as 'living entities'. And in 2021, the Mutehekau Shipu (AKA Magpie River) became the first river in Canada to be declared a 'legal person [and] living entity'. The Rights of Nature movement has now reached the UK, with Lewes council in East Sussex recognising the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse. Macfarlane's book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, 'a gradual, desperate calamity' has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps (recorded by a tracker called Top of the Poops) at despicable levels. 'Generational amnesia' means that young people don't know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: 'I am the river; the river is me.' Many Indigenous communities believe that rivers are conscious, with souls, intelligence, even memory. Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He's also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. To the question 'Is a river alive?' he wants to answer as simply and resoundingly as his nine-year-old son did: yes! And he wills himself to believe it by granting rivers human pronouns: instead of which or that, 'I prefer to speak of rivers who flow'. But it's a long journey, with many challenges along the way. He begins with a modest outing, to the springs near his home in Cambridge which, in the summer of 2022, the hottest on record, have all but dried up. He'll see what a dead river looks like in southern India but in Ecuador's cloud forest, Los Cedros, it's a happier story: here's water saved from 'pollutocrats' by Ecuador's progressive constitution. But not all is as secure as it ought to be. Andean forests and rivers have been wrecked by logging, farming and mining. And a young anti-mining activist, five months pregnant, has just been shot dead in the north of Ecuador. Macfarlane, at least, is among allies. He meets eco-centric lawyers as well as a shambling, bearded castaway, Josef DeCoux, who has fought to protect the river and cloud forest for decades. He's awed by their tireless resistance to corporate profiteering and feels companioned by the forest: 'Lushness beyond imagination. Greenness beyond measure.' His prose aspires to poetry throughout. Fireflies 'score the dark like slow tracer bullets'. Flamingos 'stand in their own reflections, doubled like playing-card queens, blushing the water pink'. Glow-worms 'put tapers on their yellow lantern'. Shooting stars are 'scratches on the world's tin'. A half moon is a 'clipped coin'. He so rarely falters in his 'love-language' for the natural world that when he describes the sun, near Chennai, 'rising red as a Coke can over the ocean' it feels bathetic. But bathos is the point: along with plastic bottles, turds and effluents, the Coke can is emblematic of a polluted coastline. Chennai is the most dispiriting of Macfarlane's visits. The River Adyar, reeking and sewage-stricken, is 'as close to death as any river I have seen in my life'. And the Ennore Creek, a site of heavy industry, hasn't just been infilled, built over and surrendered to heavy industry, but has been erased from the official government map, as if it didn't exist: annihilation cartography. Amid the toxins, hope for rivers is hard to find. He is cheered by a trip to a lakeside waterbird sanctuary ('an avian Venice') and by rescuing turtle eggs on a beach. Still, here and elsewhere doubts creep in. He's a researcher, not an animist (the book has 50 pages of notes). Are Rights of Nature 'an over-enchanted dream'? How compatible is the 'stiff discourse'' of rights with a dashing, quicksilver river? 'For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work,' he says. 'It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The unlearning comes in a remote region of Quebec when, before his epic 100-mile journey trekking and kayaking downstream, he's instructed by Rita, an Innu poet, activist and sage: 'Don't think too much with your head … You will be transported by the river – who will speak through you.' So it does. When he and his companions go over scary rapids it's as if he's been 'flooded from within', the river flowing through him, a process mirrored in the prose, which rushes in long, ecstatic paragraphs that allow themselves commas but resist full stops. The river is under threat from damming but Macfarlane himself is released, surrendering agency to the water, pantheistically enraptured by 'some vast and unknowable other life-way'. 'The river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men,' Mark Twain said. It's not just Macfarlane who bears this out but the three people he spends most time with on his travels: the eerily intuitive mycologist Giuliana in Ecuador, the geomancer Wayne in Canada and the ecologist Yuvan in India with his 'ductile, fast-flowing mind'. All are grieving when they begin their journeys after the death of someone they loved. But the river consoles and even heals them: 'I felt my power return,' Giuliana says. Here's another reason to fight for the Rights of Nature – not just to save rivers and forests, but to save ourselves. 'The tale of a dying river / Does not end where you stand with the visitors / at a sickbed,' Ted Hughes wrote in his poetry collection River, four decades ago. The battle is to save rivers as living beings. Macfarlane's impassioned book shows the way, ending on a riskily lyrical high with his arrival as a waterbody complete: 'I am rivered.' Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane is published by Hamish Hamilton (£25). 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Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Environment Is Under Attack. The Rights of Nature Movement Can Save It
Will the Great Lakes, one of the natural wonders of the United States, be allowed to go to court to defend their rights to exist on equal terms with the human race? Last month, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly granting them and all other bodies of water in New York those legal rights. The waters, the bill declares, 'shall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist […] free from human violations.' The bill comes at a time when the Trump administration has decimated the National Park Service, directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back environmental regulations, and tried to revoke billions in climate change-combatting programs. Just days ago, President Trump issued an executive order allowing commercial fishing in one of the world's largest ocean reserves. Now, more than ever, nature is in need of protection. More from Rolling Stone Activating the 'Silent Majority' to Fight Climate Change The Court Battle to Stop Trump's $20 Billion Climate Clawback Why Los Angeles Burned Granting rights to certain natural bodies or ecosystems is an idea that's been a long time coming. Five decades ago, Christopher Stone, a professor at the University of Southern California law school, penned the idea. 'I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment,' he wrote in the Southern California law review. 'Indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.' The idea of granting seemingly insentient organisms legal rights may sound preposterous, but the Rights of Nature movement is anything but fanciful; in fact, through local ordinances, court decisions, national legislation, and even constitutional amendments, the movement has made its way to 38 countries spanning six of the seven continents. In the U.S., the movement has touched 14 states, with varying degrees of success. Most notably, the Pennsylvania government, just five years ago, upheld a 2014 local Rights of Nature law that had simultaneously outlawed the injection of fracking waste in small-town Grant Township. Indigenous peoples across the world, particularly in the U.S., have become powerful leaders in the movement. In 2019, the Yurok tribe in northern California granted legal personhood to the Klamath River — the first river in North America to be granted such rights — and, in 2020, the Nez Perce Tribe General Council conferred rights upon the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest. In 1972, Professor Stone, son of the legendary muckraker I.F. Stone, published his thesis, in an article entitled 'Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.' Stone, who collected turtles in Rock Creek Park while growing up in Washington, D.C., was a 34-year-old law professor who had never before published anything about the environment. But he had passion. 'Based on the beauty of his writing, which reads like a lawyer's love letter to the planet, he had a deep connection with and respect for the natural world,' says Grant Wilson, an environmental lawyer and the executive director of Earth Law Center, a group based in Colorado comprising nearly 30 lawyers and environmental experts. 'It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,' Stone argued. 'Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems.' Stone proposed using the same system of guardianship for natural objects. His idea was cited in the 1972 Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton. The Sierra Club had sued the Secretary of the Interior to prevent the Walt Disney Company from building a ski resort on public land in Mineral King Valley, California. While the court ruled that the Sierra Club did not have standing to sue, as it had not alleged any concrete injury, Justice William O. Douglas issued a visionary dissent. 'Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation,' wrote Douglas. He asserted that 'the critical question of 'standing' would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated…in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers.' Douglas contended that those who 'have a meaningful relation' to a specific part of nature, who 'frequent it or visit it merely to sit in solitude and wonderment,' should be able to have standing and act as its legal representative. 'The problem is to make certain that the inanimate objects, which are the very core of America's beauty, have spokesmen before they are destroyed,' concluded Douglas. THREE DECADES LATER, in 2006, it happened: Tamaqua Borough, a tiny town about 35 miles northwest of Allentown in Pennsylvania's coal country, became the first place in the world to codify the rights of nature in law. The law, entitled the 'Sewage Sludge Ordinance,' sought to ban waste corporations from dumping in Tamaqua any longer, stating that 'ecosystems shall be considered 'persons' for the purposes of the enforcement of [their] civil rights.' Although the law has never been tested in court, it has been credited with preventing further waste dumping. In 2008, Ecuador became the first sovereign country to recognize the rights of nature in its national constitution, declaring that 'Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycle, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.' It also granted nature 'the right to be restored' and resolved the issue of standing in the most painless way possible: by granting it to everyone. In Ecuador, any person can represent any piece of land in court — full stop. In 2011, the owners of 'the Garden of Paradise,' a property on the banks of the Vilcabamba River, invoked Ecuador's constitutional provision to challenge a government highway project that was filling the river with excavated rocks and causing it to flood surrounding properties. With the river acting as plaintiff, a provincial court halted the project, effectively upholding the Rights of Nature provision. And in 2021, a series of decisions by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court further affirmed the rights of nature, blocking, among other actions, mining activities in the famously biodiverse Los Cedros forest. 'We've seen the rights of rivers upheld in Bangladesh, along with a landmark decision from its Supreme Court calling upon governmental agencies to push back against illegal encroachment on the rivers,' says Grant Wilson. 'We've seen the rights of Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in Spain, be recognized through national law and held up in their constitutional court, with legal guardians appointed to speak for and as the lagoon in a legal sense, just like a child might have a legal guardian. In other words, the lagoon has a voice in government.' The Rights of Nature doctrine has surfaced in international codes and agreements. In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Resolution on Harmony With Nature, and has renewed it each year since. The resolutions seek to develop a 'new, non-anthropocentric paradigm in which the fundamental basis for right and wrong action concerning the environment is grounded not solely in human concerns.' The UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a legally binding agreement signed in 1992, has declared a goal of global harmony with nature by 2050, endorsing the Rights of Nature as one possible pathway. Every nation in the world is party but four — Andorra, Iraq, Somalia, and the U.S., which has signed but not ratified the treaty. In 2015, Pope Francis demanded the UN prioritize the rights of nature — 'It must be stated that a true 'right of the environment' does exist,' he said — over society's 'selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity.' He asserted that 'any harm done to the environment, therefore is harm done to humanity.' In 2010, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the first major U.S. city to adopt and make legally enforceable the rights of nature, recognizing them as part of a ban on shale gas drilling and fracking. In 2017, the City Council of Lafayette, Colorado, population 30,000, passed the Climate Bill of Rights, an ordinance that — along with prohibiting the extraction of oil and gas — recognized ecosystems' rights to clean water and clean air, as well as to be free from chemical trespass, to exist, and to flourish. Just last December, a ballot initiative in the city of Everett, Washington, granted legally enforceable rights — to exist, regenerate, and flourish — to the Snohomish River watershed. FOR ALL OF AMERICA'S 248 years, its legal system has existed in service of human beings. In the eyes of the law, the environment matters only in human terms — how it serves as our property, how it generates revenue for our economy, how it produces the raw materials we rely on, how it provides recreation sites for our use, and how it affects our health. Even environmental legislation like the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act were only passed in order to make the environment safer for humans. 'If there is a forest cut down, to challenge that [in court] under the doctrine of standing, you have to show that a human was harmed by the forest being cut down,' explains Wilson. But according to the principles of Rights of Nature, environmental damage alone, regardless of whether any humans are affected, is enough to hold up in court. 'The key thing to know is that under a Rights of Nature framework, you're determining whether and how humans can respectfully take from nature, and you're really considering what's in the best interest of the larger community of life,' says Wilson. 'Current laws are really rooted in human superiority to nature.' To change this system means to fundamentally change how we relate to and conceive of nature. 'Humans don't simply live on a stage upon which only their own drama unfolds, as if trees and plants and animals and birds are just props in that human production,' Dr. Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist who has studied Indigenous cultures extensively, tells Rolling Stone. 'On the contrary, every living being, from the grandest blue whale down to a microscopic amoeba, is part of the living organism that is the Earth.' Christopher Stone thought as much: 'I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth…as one organism,' he wrote, 'of which Mankind is a functional part — the mind, perhaps: different from the rest of nature, but different as a man's brain is from his lungs.' This line of thinking is deeply rooted in Indigenous customs. For the Maori, for example, in New Zealand, humans are lowest on the totem pole of the natural world, says Meghan Robinson, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia who is completing her doctoral research on the Rights of Nature. And to the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples in Colombia, says Davis, the water that runs down a river is no different from the blood that runs through one's veins. But can the American legal system — and the society that governs it — change so radically that it sees nature as something more than simply a way to boost the GDP? As something sacred? Davis thinks yes. 'All cultures are constantly changing. We preserve jam, not culture.' 'The very idea that a river could be considered to have rights would have been so inconceivably preposterous to my father's generation,' he says. 'I mean, my father's generation was raised to believe that oil left in the ground was wealth wasted. That a tree left standing in the forest was money down the drain. The entire idea of an environmental or ecological ethos, things that we now take to be common, was completely off the charts and radical at that time.' 'We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless 'things' to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo,' wrote Stone in 1972. 'The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new 'entity,' the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable.' No matter how much we talk circles around it, American economic progress invariably comes with the exploitation of nature. Thus, the endowing of nature with rights will require some concessions on the part of humans, chiefly 'a willingness to suspend the rate of increase in the standard of living,' as Stone put it. 'We may have to … subordinate some human claims to those of the environment.' Justice Douglas, in his 1972 dissenting opinion, warned against letting the 'bulldozers of 'progress' … plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land.' Of course, it is necessary, for basic human survival, to take advantage of natural resources. But there are truly hard lines to draw when it comes to defining what taking is permissible and what constitutes an unacceptable violation of the rights of nature — especially when harming and healing the environment may go hand in hand. Michael Gerrard, a prominent environmental lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School, describes one such scenario to Rolling Stone: 'We know that one of the most important things we need to do in order to fight climate change is to build a massive number of solar farms. Some of them will go in the desert. What if the desert had rights and could sue to prevent the solar farms from being built — which would be bad for the environment in general but might be good for the desert? The desert's lawyer would have the obligation to do everything they could to protect the desert.' But perhaps this dilemma is not as insurmountable as it seems. 'You're inserting this new rights holder — nature — into the mix, and it's going to cause some tensions with other rights, as well as economic [and development] interests,' says Wilson. 'Yet in the legal system, there's tension between different rights all of the time — and the courts figure out how to balance those.' 'We live on a finite planet, but we're trying to say that we can have infinite growth — and that thought process is so unbelievably flawed,' says Meghan Robinson. 'We need to come up with a different economic system that doesn't think that we can grow infinitely in an unsustainable way. [If we don't,] the environment is just going to wipe us out.' IN THE PAST DECADE or so, the Rights of Nature movement in the U.S. has become a battleground for fights over local sovereignty and corporatocracy. Numerous state legislatures, heavily lobbied by commercial industries, have preempted or challenged Rights of Nature laws, rendering them null, void, and wholly unenforceable. Four states — Florida, Ohio, Idaho, and Utah — have even gone as far as to summarily ban Rights of Nature legislation. Tish O'Dell is a lifelong Ohioan who grew up 10 miles from the shores of Lake Erie. 'I was always mesmerized by Lake Erie, even as a small child,' she says. So when she learned of fracking taking place in her community, she went to her local elected officials. '[Former Ohio senator] Sherrod Brown was in office, and me and another mom sat across from him with a folder of photos of toxic waste pits in our neighborhood and told him we didn't want our community poisoned,' she says. 'He just muttered back about all the jobs [fracking] was creating. It was then that [it hit me] that no one was coming to save my community or the environment.' O'Dell proceeded to work with mothers from across Ohio (forming Mothers Against Drilling In Our Neighborhoods) to pass a 2012 Rights of Nature amendment in Broadview Heights, Ohio. When the local amendment was overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2015, she went on, with the help of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), to propose more than 40 Rights of Nature laws throughout the state. Her crusade culminated in the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), approved by Toledo, Ohio, voters in 2019, which recognized the lake's rights to 'exist, flourish and naturally evolve.' Yet U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, in a harshly written opinion, struck down LEBOR, overturning the first U.S. law ever to affirm the rights of a particular ecosystem on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague and oustripped the municipality's authority. 'LEBOR's authors failed to make hard choices regarding the appropriate balance between environmental protection and economic activity. Instead, they employed language that sounds powerful but has no practical meaning,' wrote Zouhary. 'What conduct infringes the right of Lake Erie and its watershed to 'exist, flourish, and naturally evolve?' How would a prosecutor, judge, or jury decide? LEBOR offers no guidance.' In 2020, things seemed to look up for the movement when Grant Township's 2014 Rights of Nature law became the first such piece of legislation to be enforced by a state, with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) citing it in rescinding a fracking waste injection permit. Although the law has since been swept into a years-long saga of lawsuits — the ordinance was overturned and then enshrined into a Home Rule Charter, all while the DEP switched its stance back and forth — there is still no injection well. So what's next? 'I think it's likely that one state is going to pass a Rights of Nature framework and it's going to propel the movement to a whole different level,' predicts Wilson. Once implemented, Rights of Nature legislation potentially affords a whole host of litigation advantages. For starters, it could completely wipe away the challenges of fulfilling standing requirements, which have traditionally been extremely vulnerable to the whims of judges — particularly conservative ones — seeking to constrict them. Moreover, litigating on behalf of a natural entity greatly diminishes the burden of proof, for one need not prove a human was harmed, only that the specific part of nature at hand was harmed. The reality is that the widespread implementation of the Rights of Nature doctrine in the United States is not going to come quickly or easily. 'Someone told me once that it takes about 200 miles to turn a big Boeing 747 around, and I think that's a fitting metaphor,' says Wilson. But progress is progress. 'All these things are aggregate. Aggregate and cumulative,' says Davis. 'The movement itself is a statement that the mindset has already changed.' 'Over the past nearly 15 years, all over the world, governments, courts, indigenous nations, and people in their communities have secured the rights of nature in law,' said Mari Margil, who was previously the Associate Director of CELDF, at a 2020 environmental justice conference. 'After all of these developments, the question is no longer 'Can nature have rights?' It can. And it does. The questions before us now are: How do we secure the rights of nature in every legal system around the world? And how do we do it while there's still nature left to save?' The environment is waiting for us to act, and the futures of both humanity and Mother Earth are on the line. So we must ask ourselves the question: Will anyone speak for nature? And if not us, then who? Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
