Mian Crist

Welcome to the sixth episode in this series of close readings for the LRB, Nature in Crisis, hosted by me, Mian Crist.

In the last episode, we looked at James Lovelock's Gaia, which was first published in 1979 and put forth the theory that the whole Earth is something like a living organism.

Today, we'll keep hold of the idea of more-than-human life functioning as an interconnected entity, but we'll move back down the scale from Earth to ecosystems and specifically to rivers.

Robert McFarlane is one of the most celebrated living writers of the natural world, and his most recent book, Is a River Alive?, is a mind-bending invitation to consider rivers as living entities deserving of legal rights.

And Peter, before we dive in, let me ask you, before you read this book, if I had asked you, is a river alive?, what do you think you might have said?

Okay, good to know this.

You're walking in as a bit of a skeptic here.

So let's think for a second, I just want to set up the Rights of Nature movement because this is a legal movement and it's sort of, I think the germ of this book comes out of this legal movement.

So as McFarlane tells it, this begins sort of early 1970s when this academic whose name is Christopher Stone is giving a seminar on property law at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

And he is trying to keep his students' interest.

Basically, he says they're looking out the window and they're not really paying attention.

It's this long lecture.

And so he says, 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?

And this is a quote from Stone.

He was talking to McFarlane.

And apparently there was a bit of an uproar in the classroom and the students got really involved and this idea really sparked a bunch of thinking.

And it gets picked up almost 40 years later after he first sort of coined this notion of nature's rights.