“Who are your waters?” The answer to this Māori greeting reveals something about both the person responding and the lands in which they dwell. The question also provides a strong yet elusive subtext that flows through Robert MacFarlane’s latest book, Is a River Alive?
To the Māori, running waters are kin and ancestors, possessed of agency and rights of their own. A river is not an “it” but a “who,” and this crucial distinction lies at the heart of the quest to endow rivers (and other natural entities) with legal personhood.
Ask Robert MacFarlane who his waters are, and he’ll take you to the Nine Wells that trickle out of Cotswold chalk to give birth to the storied and abused River Thames. He revisits Nine Wells throughout the book – during drought-plagued summer, drab winter, and hopeful, bubbling spring. These visits anchor MacFarlane’s narrative in the local and personal, even as he transports us to the cloud forests of Ecuador, the violated creeks and deltas of Chennai, India, and a potentially death-dealing wild river in boreal Québec.
What does the river want? Will human caretakers, no matter how well-meaning, end up “ventriloquizing” their own desires onto the river?
MacFarlane cannot make these journeys or answer the book’s title question alone. He’s accompanied by a cast of companions and helpers worthy of Tolkien or The Odyssey, all of whom are deeply connected to their own waters.
On the Los Cedros River in Ecuador, his companions include fierce local water defenders, a woman with a sixth (and possibly seventh) sense for finding rare fungi, and a pair of lawyers who enshrined rights for nature in the nation’s constitution. His walking companion and teacher in Chennai is Yuvan Aves, a young naturalist who transcended a history of parental violence to find inspiration in the small wonders of nature around the waterways he hopes to revive. Finally, to paddle the wild Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie) river in Québec, he needs the mentorship of three consummate river men, the perspective of a demon-haunted friend, and the blessing of a wise woman: poet and activist Rita Mestokosho.
Throughout his travels, MacFarlane wrestles with practical and philosophical questions about what being alive means for a river. For him, a major challenge lies in “unlearning” our enlightenment-focused, instrumental view of nature. On the Mutehekau Shipu, Rita Mestokosho sees a man who “lives too much inside his head.” She counsels him to “be a tree, be a bird, be a river,” to which he replies, honestly, “I don’t know how to do that.”
Fittingly, it is the Mutehekau Shipu who elects to answer some questions, even while testing MacFarlane and his friends’ endurance to the limit. Other questions, however, remain unanswered. What does the river want? Will human caretakers, no matter how well-meaning, end up “ventriloquizing” their own desires onto the river?
MacFarlane’s inner struggles are visible throughout the pages of Is a River Alive?, which simultaneously feels like the most urgent and least polished of his books. But while he occasionally struggles with the concept, his companions extol the sacred animacy of nature with admirable clarity. Perhaps the most profound expression of this credo comes from Arun, an Indian forester who spends his vacations rescuing marine turtle eggs from feral dogs. When MacFarlane asks him why he does what he does, the good forester answers, simply, “For life.”
Legal persons and their advocates
In 1972, Christopher Stone wrote a seminal rights-for-nature article, “Should Trees have Standing?” It lit a slow fuse that burned for decades until a flurry of legal decisions accorded legal personhood to a number of natural entities in the 2010s.
Courts, legislatures, and tribal councils have, at various times and with varying levels of legal force, declared the Amazon, Ganges, Atrato, Marañon, and Klamath rivers to be legal persons. In Aoetorea (New Zealand), the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood by an Act of Parliament, the Te Awa Tupua Act of 2017. In 2019, the Ohio state legislature granted Lake Erie the right to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”
Legal personhood for the environment has not yet been tested in Canadian courts.
The Te Awa Tupua Act provides a model for pursuing both legal rights for nature and Indigenous reconciliation. Among other things, the Act established a corps of River Guardians tasked with speaking with and for the river. This template – a resolution, legal recognition, and the appointment of river guardians – was repeated for Québec’s Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River). A coalition of local Innu people, whitewater paddlers, the Mingan municipal regional council, and SNAP (the Québec arm of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society) drafted Innu and non-Innu resolutions recognizing Mutehekau Shipu as a “legal person with the right to live, to flow, and to evolve naturally.”
In Canada, there are ongoing movements to grant rights and personhood to the Tenàgàdino (Gatineau) and Fraser rivers. Each movement and alliance will carve a unique legal course dictated by the river’s geography, the human communities lining its banks, and the pre-existing legal frameworks within which river-rights advocates have to work.
But what, in practical terms, does legal personhood mean? The Canadian Bar Association notes the “idea of legal personhood for the environment has not yet been tested in Canadian courts.” The Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which stopped short of recognizing legal personhood, was struck down after local farmers challenged it in a US federal court. And in India, Uttarakhand State successfully argued that personhood for the Ganges and Yamuna was “unsustainable at law” because the identities of custodians and liability for drownings on the rivers were unclear.
Nevertheless, rights-for-nature movements continue to gather momentum, fuelled by Indigenous philosophies of Nature and the parallel quest for reconciliation. According to Tenàgàdino spokesperson Lissa Cowan, “Granting the Tenàgàdino Zibi legal personhood would finally recognize what Indigenous people have always known – that rivers are living entities deserving of protection.”
Andrew Park is a writer, science communicator, and former professor of forest ecology based in Gatineau, Quebec.
