Peter Godfrey-Smith

And me, Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I would have said no.

And I've always thought of rivers as among the least good candidates for unexpected cases of living systems.

They look alive because they move.

They certainly give us that impression.

But whereas in the case of a forest, I think, you know, there's a case to be made perhaps that the forest itself as an object over and above the individual organisms that make it up might have some kind of living status in its own right.

I've always thought it's very hard to argue that for a river, because although they give us this impression of animacy, they have much less of the kind of self-maintaining, self-regulating, thermodynamically unusual features that living systems in general have, and that a forest might be a sort of special, partial, interesting, difficult case of.

So I would have said no.

Absolutely.

But first, I want to pick up something in that Le Guin quote, which I think is important and which I'll probably want to come back to this a bunch of times.

A lot of people, when they write about this, they do use this dichotomy between seeing things like rivers as commodities, as things to be exploited on one side and

and seeing them as animate, as living on the other side.

And when you were introducing the way that this book and other work sets up the rights of nature movement, that dichotomy is absolutely there.

We want to treat the river as alive because we don't think it's a good thing to keep treating it as a resource we see as a commodity.

We see the harm that's done.

Now, one of the things I like about the Le Guin quote is that what she said is...

One option, one way of moving away from the commodification of nature is towards this animist conception.

It's not the only one, and this is something I think is really important.

We don't just have a choice here between seeing forests and rivers and things like that.

as commodities or sources of commodities on one side and seeing them as living organisms in their own right on the other.