Mian Crist

speaker

152 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

This is March 2017.

And this act is about this one specific river, the Whanganui River.

so here's a bit from mcfarlane at the act's heart is a radical claim that the wanganui river is alive and an ancestor to the wanganui or iwi tribe the act speaks unambiguously of the river as and quote indivisible and living whole and quote a spiritual and physical entity with a life force

The Maori word that recurs in the act when describing the river is muri, synonymous with Morris and Ruri's term mauri, both of which translate as, quote, life principle, vital essence, the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.

And McFarlane says the closest English cognate is anima, which means a current of breath or wind, the vital principle, life, soul, and which gives us the words animal, animate, animism, and animus in the sense of mind.

So this is a very different way, obviously, of thinking of a river and a very different way of being recognized as a legal person.

And we should also say that there are other entities that are recognized as legal persons in law, such as corporations, certain sacred sites, unions, and all of these have legal standing.

So they can bring lawsuits and be part of lawsuits.

So the river now has this kind of legal standing.

So as McFarlane writes, this act is really the outcome of over 180 years of conflict between the state and the Whanganui River in terms of land and water rights.

And as McFarlane writes, 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 a 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.

And then there's the second way of seeing the river, and he gives a quote here from Gerald Albert, who's the lead negotiator for the river,

And Albert says, we want to begin with the view that the river is a living being and then consider its future from that central belief.

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.

So this act, this act in New Zealand that was passed, really kind of sparked what became known as the Rights of Nature Movement.

This kind of idea has been picked up in various places around the world, particularly in Ecuador, which I think we'll get to.

But this idea of incommensurable ways of seeing rivers in terms of the way the state sees them and in terms of the way various indigenous peoples see them or people who have lived on land for a very, very long time and have relationships with rivers and their ecosystems.

And I think this disconnect is actually what McFarlane is getting at in this book in a very, very deep way, because I think, Peter, you and I were both a little surprised that there wasn't more law in this book.

There's really a lot of

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