The rights of nature

In 2000, as is now pretty widely known, a new name was proposed for the geological epoch that we inhabit and that at some level we have substantively created. That term proposed by Sturm and Crutzen was the Anthropocene. We were up until that point, and technically, according to the stratigraphers, still are, in the Holocene. The Holocene took over from the Pleistocene at the end of the last glaciation, and the Holocene, 10 to 12,000 years long, has been the time of extraordinary flourishing for our species — so much so that in terms of our sheer number and the amplification of our processes and consequences that technology has given us (or inflicted upon the Earth, depending on your perspective), we are now so titanic in our terraforming and planet-shaping activities that the legacy we leave, it is now thought, will be legible both as absences and as presences in the strata in the rock record for millions of years to come. The stratigraphers themselves have rejected the idea of the Anthropocene. The name and the proposal have come in for all manner of generally very good and constructive criticism — for example, that it generalizes the cause of damage to anthropos to the species, whereas in fact it is, depending on your perspective, a system (capitalism) or a small proportion of the world's inhabitants who are the main inflictors of that damage. What Christophe Bonneuil calls the shock of the Anthropocene did shock me when I first met it. The idea that we are leaving a legacy that will be legible for millions of years to come carried an ethical charge to me.

I have been interested in rivers, in the idea of life (what is alive and what is dead) and how the boundary between life and death is policed and patrolled — what Jacques Ranciere calls the partition du sensible. I have been particularly fascinated by one manifestation of these debates, these struggles, which is the idea of the rights of nature. This has, like any big idea, many roots, many of them going back thousands of years in indigenous communities in particular. Within Western rights law, it has a particular beginning, and that is in 1972. A Californian law professor named Christopher Stone, trying to get the attention of his bored property law class at the end of a long seminar — he is talking about rights — suddenly says, “What if mountains and rivers and forests had rights?”

The idea that a river might be a rights-bearing entity is in law, but ontologically, in terms of being, very confronting to Western structures of being, of law-making, of judgment. That is one of the reasons I find it very fascinating — because of the immense confrontation it issues to ideas that are so naturalized as to be invisible. I sometimes make the point to people who are surprised to think of a river as potentially having rights, which we are acknowledging rather than bestowing, by pointing out that in the UK, in European and in American law, corporations have rights. Corporations have a whole suite of rights guaranteed in part in Europe by the European Convention on Human Rights. The notion that a more than human entity, a complex assemblage of humans and technology, in the case of a corporation, might be rights-bearing, we have naturalized to the point of invisibility. The idea that a river, who has flowed through the landscape for 10,000 years since the ice retreated, might bear rights is seen as a preposterous, even dangerous, one. I was once described in The Guardian as a heretic for proposing and arguing for the rights of nature. This is the kind of criticism that we need right now in a world that is on a crumbling ecological brink.

In March 2017, a police station in India got a surprising phone call. The phone call was from a man, an activist named Bridge Khandelwal. He called and said, "I want to report a murder." The police said, "Tell us more. Who, where, what?" He said, "The murder of a river." Of course, they began laughing at him, put the phone down and laughed the case out of the station. The point of his call was that earlier that month, the provincial regional High Court in India had recognized the Yamuna River and the Ganges River both as gods, as living beings and as rights-bearing sacred entities. This followed hard on the heels of the so-called Te Awa Tupua River Claims Settlement Act, which was passed at the beginning of that month in Aotearoa, New Zealand, recognizing the rights of the Whanganui River. The Indian judiciary followed suit very rapidly afterwards and Khandelwal decided to take that opportunity to instantiate the idea that if a river is a being, if a river is alive, if a river is a god, then it can be killed. It can be murdered.

In 2008, Ecuador recognized, in this radical act of moral political imagination, the rights of nature in its constitution, articles 71 to 74: the right of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist. Those articles also made it possible for any citizen to bring a case within the Ecuadorian court system on behalf of nature, Pachamama, if they felt that nature's rights were being violated in some way — an amazing moment in modern environmental imagination and legislation. In 2021, those rights were invoked and they gave the power and philosophical force to a judgment that was handed down to protect a cloud forest called Los Cedros, the cedar forest in the northwest of Ecuador, from what would have been obliteration by gold mining and secondary copper mining interests.

In Chennai, I traveled with a remarkable young Tamil activist, water campaigner and river guardian named Yuvan Aves. Yuvan said something to me that has remained with me, and it happened when I was looking at his rivers, which were as close to biologically dead as any I have ever seen: 0% dissolved oxygen, zero species count for much of the year. I said, "These are dead rivers." He said, "Barrenness is almost always a state of mind and very rarely a state of place." He then proved that to me by taking me to these rivers and helping me see the ways in which, despite everything, life was finding a way around them, and even at times within them. It reminded me of earlier versions of that conversation; the perception of a place as a terra nullius, as a kind of void, is often in the interests of power — because if you evacuate meaning, life, story, history, culture from a place, then it becomes more easily disposable, more easily usable.

In "Is River alive?" I try to ask and imagine what it means, what follows, if we conceive of rivers as having lives, as having rights and as having deaths. It is relatively easy to imagine a dying river or a dead river. We know what that looks like, and we know what it feels like. I know particularly because I live on chalk, 99-million-year-old chalk, here in Cambridgeshire, and very near my home are springs. There are very few chalk stream rivers in the world.

We are not the first to have lived through a crisis in our river system. In fact, if you go back to the mid-19th century, you would find England's rivers in a far worse state of pollution than they are currently, though things are very dire now. On the Czech-German border, on the River Elbe, there are these extraordinary objects called drought stones, which are bedrock boulders that only get exposed when the river's level drops desperately low — basically, in times of extreme and sustained drought. They are drought stones because they were carved at times of drought, in times when they were exposed, with warnings, and there is one which says, in German, "If you see me, weep." They carry warnings. They remind us that we are not living uniquely through an end times, although there are other ways in which we are. They have a huge power. They remind me that in the very oldest written story, a really long poem in world literature, the "Epic of Gilgamesh", there, too, the bull of heaven is sent down as a punishment for crimes that Gilgamesh and Enkidu have committed. One of the things the bull of heaven does is drink the river’s level low. It drinks so deeply that it causes the river to drop. The bull is drought. These cycles have been ongoing for as long as we have been writing them down and long before that, too.

The Australian eco-philosopher and linguist Glenn Albrecht coined an unforgettable (to me) term, solastalgia. Solastalgia is like nostalgia, but where nostalgia is the pain of remembering a place or a time from which you have been estranged by distance or the passing of years, solastalgia is, in Albrecht's definition, the psychic distress that comes from a place changing around you to the point of being unrecognizable without you having moved anywhere.

Over the past few years in particular, I have come to think that hope is a discipline and despair is a luxury. If I take the second of those phrases first, despair is a luxury because, having traveled with the activists, the land and water defenders whom I have watched, the power that they are confronting, I have seen them nevertheless indefatigable and indeed radical in what they imagine might be possible. For me to despair, having seen their lack of despair, would be a luxury on my part.

We are legacy-leaving creatures, and we can leave harms as our legacies, or we can leave gifts as legacies. I have come to think more and more about gift. The gift gives on, says Marcel Mauss in his great study of gift theory. The idea that things are non-transactional and do not require proportional recompense is very attractive to me. The idea of giving not just to people but to the land makes very good sense to me. When I was traveling down this big river, the Mutacao Hipu, the Magpie River, in northeastern Quebec, I was given a pouch of tobacco by Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet and community leader, and she said to me every morning, give a pinch of tobacco to the land and a pinch to the water. I did so for the 12 days that I was on the river.