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Chapter 1: What does Robert Macfarlane mean by a river being alive?
Welcome to the sixth episode in this series of close readings for the LRB, Nature in Crisis, hosted by me, Mian Crist.
And me, Peter Godfrey-Smith.
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?
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the Rights of Nature movement begin?
So I would have said no.
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. A Maori legal scholar called Jacinta Ruru sort of picked up this idea, and I'm going to give a quote here from McFarlane.
It struck her that an affinity existed between Stone's young concept of legal personhood for natural entities and the longstanding Maori relationship with rivers as living sacred ancestors.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Whanganui River in legal terms?
So she kind of picks up this idea and it gets applied to certain rivers in New Zealand. And it really is kind of linking the Maori legal system and the state legal system in an interesting kind of way. And in 2010...
ruru and her student james morris published this article called giving voice to rivers i'll read a quote here they say the legal personality concept aligns with the maori legal concept of a personified natural world by regarding the river as having its own standing the mana or authority and maori life force of the river
would be more likely to be regarded as a holistic being rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, riverbed, and riverbank. And this concept of the river as a whole entity is useful in the legal sense because extractive processes taking things from different parts of the river tend to damage the river ecosystem as a whole.
And so they're using this idea to say, you know, you can't just look at a river as these individual bits that can be pulled apart and used for human consumption or human need or human wants, but that this whole river deserves some kind of understanding in a holistic sense legally and should have rights.
So seven years after publishing this article, Morris and Ruru helped to form this really extraordinary piece of legislation, which is called the Te Awa Te Pua Act. 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.
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Chapter 4: How do Indigenous perspectives influence legal views on rivers?
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 imagination of just how can we see a river? How can we imagine a river?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of treating rivers as living entities?
And I was really struck that the beginning of part one of this book, which is this section on Ecuador, begins with a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin. She writes, one way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as natural resource is to class them as fellow beings, kinfolk. I guess I'm trying to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gotten us.
To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination. And this quote, a great reach outward of the mind and imagination, reappears at the very, very end of the book, almost in the last paragraph. And that signals to me that that's really what this book is about. So I feel like I've been talking for a moment.
Let's maybe stop and talk about McFarlane, sort of how he enters into this rights of nature movement.
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.
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Chapter 6: How does the dichotomy of resource versus being affect environmental ethics?
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. It's quite possible to think that these things should be protected and treated in quite special ways, not because they're alive, but because they have special kinds of value that are properly seen as quite separate from any commodity type role they have.
The quote from Le Guin really said it like that. This is one way of departing from the commercial exploitative mindset, not necessarily the only way. That's a big thing for me.
All through here, the idea that there are other options beside the two that people like McFarlane and also his interlocutors and the people he works with, there are other options beside the two that are forever being contrasted here, you know, commodity versus living system in its own right.
There are less theoretically problematic ways of recognizing the value in natural systems and their entitlement, or at least the goodness of protecting them. There are ways of doing that without going down this animist road.
So one question, do you see the goodness of protecting them as good for the sake of humans and human flourishing or good for their own sake, for the sake of rivers?
Good for the earth, good for the whole system, which includes us, includes them.
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Chapter 7: What alternative perspectives exist on the value of nature?
I mean, that's a very good question. And for someone like me, it's a big thing and I don't want to sound glib about it. And once you say that the river is an organism in its own right, it solves the problem of where the alternative locus of value might be. It's then straightforward to say, we humans are not the only value bearers in this situation.
The river is an organism too, and it should get a say. It should have its rights respected. If you do go down what we might think of as this kind of animist road, It does solve that problem.
And the sort of third and fourth on the different sorts of options that I'm trying to sort of just keep on the table, pushing back against the dichotomous treatment here, they have hard philosophical problems tangled up in them.
But I do think that the alternative paths I'm trying to keep on the table here are paths in which the Yosemite Valley or these rivers, the cloud forest, the systems that are paradigm cases of things worthy of protection here are not worthy of protection just because it's good for us.
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