If Rivers Had Rights

I deas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish. One day in October 1971, a young academic called Christopher Stone was giving a seminar on property law at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It had been an intense class; the students were tired and distracted. Pens were being twirled, windows stared out of. Stone decided to have a last shot at regaining their interest. What he said then jolted the students upright—and it also surprised him. He hadn’t been expecting to say it. “So,” he asked hesitantly, “what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like? A consciousness in which . . . nature had rights. Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals. How would such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?” There was uproar from the students. How could a river have rights? How could a forest be a legal person? It would flood the courts with vexatious claims. It would be an affront to those humans who are still denied rights. Who would speak for the river in court—and how would they know what the river wanted? If a river could sue, could it be sued in return if it flooded a property? These were all good questions. One thing was for sure: Stone had got their attention. Afterward, Stone couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. Where had the idea come from? He couldn’t say. But he realized he really meant what he’d said. Rivers should have rights. Forests could be legal persons. He just didn’t know how yet. So he pulled out a yellow jotting pad and began to work it out. Stone grew his idea fast: first into a 1972 paper called “Should Trees Have Standing?”—an essay now seen as a landmark in jurisprudence—and then into a book of the same name, which remains in print more than fifty years on. His idea initially met not only resistance but derision. Judges and lawyers heaped scorn upon it. Stone didn’t mind. He knew there was a price to pay—a phase of testing to be passed through—for any strong new notion. “Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’” he wrote in his 1972 paper, each time the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for use by “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

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A lmost forty years after Stone first coined the notion of nature’s rights, a Maori legal scholar called Jacinta Ruru read his work. It struck her that an affinity existed between Stone’s young concept of legal personhood for natural entities and the long-standing Maori relationship with rivers as living, sacred ancestors. In 2010, together with her student James Morris, Ruru published an article entitled “Giving Voice to Rivers.” “Indigenous peoples throughout the world have strong connections to the flowing freshwater of rivers,” it begins, before turning to Stone’s work and considering the relevance of nature’s rights to the rivers of Aotearoa New Zealand. “We argue that it is timely to consider the application of this concept in the specific context of [our] rivers,” they wrote, on the grounds that it could “create an exciting link between the Maori legal system and the state legal system”: The “legal personality” concept aligns with the Māori legal concept of a personified natural world. By regarding the river as having its own standing, the mana (authority) and mauri (life force) of the river would be more likely to be regarded as a holistic being, rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, river-bed and river-bank. Only seven years later, Morris and Ruru’s synthesis found real-world form in an extraordinary piece of legislation called the Te Awa Tupua Act, the passing of which—in Parliament House, Wellington, on March 20, 2017—was accompanied by songs, dances, and tears of joy. That act concerns the Whanganui River, who rises as meltwater on the snowy slopes of three volcanoes on the North Island and then flows for around 180 miles through steep rainforest, deep gorges, and bush country to reach the Tasman Sea at the town of Whanganui. At the act’s heart is a radical claim: that the Whanganui River is alive, and an ancestor to the Whanganui iwi (tribe). The act speaks unambiguously of the river as an indivisible and living whole, a spiritual and physical entity with a life force. The Maori word that recurs in the act when describing the river is “mouri,” synonymous with Morris and Ruru’s term “mauri,” both of which translate as: “life principle, vital essence . . . the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.” The closest English cognate is “anima,” which means “a current of breath or wind, the vital principle, life, soul,” and which gives us “animal,” “animate,” “animism,” and “animus” in the sense of “mind.” The act also recognizes its principal subject as “comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.” What a beautifully inclusive definition of a river this is! As a tree is not only its trunk but also its branches, leaves, roots, and the lives who thrive upon and with it, so here a river is recognized not only as its main channel but also as its sources, tributaries, watershed, estuary—and what the act calls the life and health of the “communities of the River,” human and non-human, who exist within its catchment and whose well-being is continuous with that of the river’s. “Ko au te Awa; ko te Awa ko au,” runs the Whanganui proverb quoted in the act: I am the river; the river is me. To its recognition of the river as alive, the act adds a second dramatic innovation: the river is also recognized as a “legal person,” with the capacity to represent itself in court and to bear rights—the right to flow unpolluted and undammed to the sea, for example, and the right to flourish. The act establishes a body of River Guardians known as Te Pou Tupua, who constitute the river’s “human face.” The guardians’ task is to speak with and for the river; their obligation is to promote and protect its life force. The Te Awa Tupua Act was the outcome of around 180 years of conflict between the Crown and the Whanganui iwi over land and water rights. At the heart of this conflict was a struggle between two incommensurable ways of seeing the river. The first is that of the Crown: a utilitarian perception which has always viewed the Whanganui River as resource and service provider, there to be manipulated and exploited as the state has seen fit, and to be anatomized into its notionally separable, commodifiable elements: the bed, the banks, the flow, the fish, the minerals that lie beneath it. Since first claiming the river in the nineteenth century, the Crown had deforested, blasted, mined, abstracted, polluted, and rerouted the Whanganui, reducing it by the early 2000s to a weakened, sickened river. The second way of seeing is that of the Whanganui iwi. “We want . . . to begin with the view that [the river] is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief,” said Gerrard Albert, lead negotiator for the Whanganui iwi. “We have fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that, from our perspective, treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model . . . of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management.” The passing of the Te Awa Tupua Act echoed like a gong strike around the world. The recognition—at the highest legislative level of a modern democracy—of a great river as a rights-bearing living being seized the global imagination. It also supercharged the dynamic, disruptive current of ideas usually now known as the Rights of Nature movement. T here are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Over the past twenty years, energized by ecological emergency, the young Rights of Nature movement has repeatedly inspired new forms of future dreaming and unsettled long-held orthodoxies by appealing to imagination as much as to law. Case after case has been brought worldwide to test the anthropocentric foundations of existing legislation—and the drive to recognize the lives, rights, and voices of rivers, mountains, and forests has lit up activists, lawmakers, politicians, artists, and campaigners. Much of the trailblazing has been done by what Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva called “those from below”: “grassroots groups . . . which transform the world in the here and now,” chiefly local people and Indigenous communities, mobilized by shared experiences of threat to their landscapes. Much of it has also been driven by women, who have time and again stepped forward as leaders in the field. Rivers, above all, have become the focus for this movement. River rights have become the commonest form of novel legal subjectivity in dozens of countries around the world, from Australia to Colombia, Canada to Bolivia. In Bangladesh, the judiciary has enforced the closure of 231 unauthorized factories which were judged to be violating the rights of the Buriganga River. In England, a local council in Sussex has acknowledged the rights and legal personhood of the River Ouse. A Universal Declaration of River Rights has been drawn up; it recognizes rivers as living entities with fundamental rights, including the “Right to Flow” and the “Right to be Free from Pollution.” The centrality of rivers to this profound reimagining process is unsurprising. Muscular, wilful, worshipped, and mistreated, rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology. They give us metaphors to live by, and they decline our attempts to parse them. Unruly, fluid, and utterly other, rivers are—I have found—potent presences with which to imagine water differently. We will never think like a river, but perhaps we can think with them. I take the Rights of Nature movement at its best to be a kind of legal “grammar of animacy”: that is to say, an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world which is far more alive than power usually allows. “The law,” as the Nyikina Warrwa scholar-activist Anne Poelina puts it, “is being used creatively to train human beings to listen, pay attention to, and learn from, rivers.” Recognizing nature’s rights is one means of trying to tell a different story about the living world: a very old story given new expression. A story in which the world is “not a machine after all,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, but “alive and kicking.” On midsummer eve in that drought-struck summer of 2022, I joined about a hundred people on the banks of the Cam—the river who flows through my home city and who is fed by the springs that rise near my home. The light that hot afternoon was syrupy and golden, the grass tawny from weeks of hard heat. The air was kiln-dry, and it was obvious to us all that the river was sick. Sweat crawled down us and the river crawled by us, its water low and greasy. Weed trailed lankly along its surface like hanks of hair. Together, we read aloud a Declaration of the Rights of the River Cam—as if just saying might make it so: We declare that the River Cam and its tributaries have the right to flow and be free from over-abstraction, the right to be free from pollution . . . Partway through, I had to stop speaking. I was overwhelmed by hope and futility. It was a mixture of a potency I’d never experienced before—and it silenced me. Our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has. Excerpted from Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. Copyright © 2025 Robert Macfarlane. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.The post If Rivers Had Rights first appeared on The Walrus.