On rights for rivers

We’re exploring a river charter: should a river benefit from “personhood” and acquire rights, a voice of its own and ultimately, legal personality? In other words, is a river alive?

Is a river alive?

There are many cultures, representing millions of people, who would never wonder if the river wasn’t alive. And probably, many reading this will feel intrigued by, sympathetic with, the notion of a river as a coherent, living thing. The demands and crises of the world we live in means this has quickly become more than an abstract question, or colourful animist viewpoint.

“The demands and crises of the world we live in make this more than an abstract question.”

It feels like every news cycle brings yet more evidence of an escalating climate crisis and in the foreground, legislation and other interventions to encourage investment in land use and technologies that put ever more pressure on natural resources  — not least water. It seems like every interest is fully and legally personified in that debate except the resources themselves.

That’s what adds credibility and urgency to this question. 

We’re wading in (excuse the pun) because we are storymakers and this one needs its telling. And though we could tell the stories of, say, the temperate rainforests of western Britain and Ireland, or the shallow seas off those coasts, we’re choosing to focus on rivers because we have a personal connection with one in particular: the River Wye, or Afon Gwy, to give it its more original name.

One river, two names

As those two names suggest, the Wye threads itself through mid and eastern Wales, and west and southern England, stitching together two nations in shared landscape, experience, outlook, history, cultures and a riverine lingua franca. The Wye is how Wales and England define their interfaces, their edges, their commonalities and their differences. 

The Wye starts high on the slopes of Plynlimon, a trickle of water emerging from the peat. It’s an unobtrusive beginning, a stream of water that you can step over. Nothing to suggest that it will become one of Britain’s great rivers.

It strengthens itself as it descends, fed by rain, springs and countless unseen tributaries. The water moves faster. Valleys widen. Villages appear. The river starts to curve rather than rush, to slow down and linger.

Soon this band of water becomes a border. For mile after mile the Wye separates England from Wales, although the fish ignore the distinction, the herons pay no attention, and the ferns and mosses grow green and damp on both banks just the same.

As it winds across the country and through counties, the river is crossed by bridges, shared by walkers, paddlers and anglers, and relied upon by towns and villages that have grown up together along its banks.

It grows older as it travels. Winding through ancient woodland, beneath castles and ruined abbeys, around limestone cliffs shaped by centuries of water. 

All along the way, people have crossed it, fished it, painted it, written about it and argued over it. The Wye simply keeps flowing.

By the time it reaches the broad tidal waters below Chepstow, it has travelled more than two hundred miles. Then fresh water meets salt and the current slows. 

The river that began as little more than a hillside stream dissolves into the vastness of the Severn Estuary, carrying with it everything it has gathered along the way.

Not a hundred fragments

The Wye holds Monmouthshire — Cohesive’s spiritual home — like a shepherd holds a lamb; safe in the crook of its arm. Like many rivers in these islands, it has for centuries carried the burden of careless human activity, from agriculture to industry, of water companies and house builders. It has given life to fields, water to homes, power to mills and inspiration to anyone that cares to take a second glance. In return, we have given it our effluent, ignorance and indifference.

Now, the organisations and individuals with the greatest expertise, agency and sensitivity to the current and future health of the river and its landscape have come together to agree a River Wye Charter. The Charter gives rights to the river, and an official voice. The rights frame and call forth all existing environmental protections available to the river. The Voice of the River Wye is senior ecologist Dr Louise Bodnar, a voting member of the Wye Catchment Nutrient Management Board, who can both speak and vote on the river’s behalf.

More profoundly, the Charter is a framework and declaration of intent: it reflects a broad consensus that the river could and should enjoy full legal personhood. That’s for a future Act of Parliament to decide, but the trajectory is now well established.

Whatever else personhood may imply, it brings undeniable coherence. We should no longer be able to think about the Wye in limited and disjointed frames such as: “Our stretch of the river,”  or “Homes protected from flooding,” or “total impact= total nitrates + total phosphates.” Instead we must consider the living body, from infancy to old age, from rise to fall, ebb to flow. All parts as one part. 

We’re in. 

No river, no us

At first glance, perhaps giving rights to a river can feel like a legal curiosity. But look more closely and the rights themselves are very practical: the right to flow naturally, to remain free from pollution, to regenerate after damage, and to be represented when decisions affect its future. 

They’re not about elevating the river above people, they’re recognising that thriving communities depend on thriving rivers. If the Wye flourishes, so do the towns, farms, businesses and wildlife that have grown up alongside it for centuries.

“It's recognising that thriving communities depend on thriving rivers.”

And once you’ve accepted that the river’s rights exist alongside people’s rights, just as the river exists alongside its Welsh and English neighbours, it feels even less strange to take the next step and formally recognise those rights, and the care and responsibilities that flow from that recognition.

Such rights have never been limited to humans. We speak about Apple or Nike as if those brands were tangible, embodied and deserving of rights and protections. We think of markets in the same way. The market, through its regulator, can stand up against anyone who tries to distort it; to make it anything less than “free” or “fair”. So why not a natural system. Why not a river?

If not this, what else?

Or maybe: if not this, then what else? It’s hard to argue when great departments of state, and boards of organisations capitalised at trillions of dollars, turn their minds to renewable resources, that the river shouldn’t sit at the table, vivid and tangible. Its obvious power, its dynamism, its great flow and its thousands of arterial riverlets, the wealth and weight of the life within it, and its reach into the lives of every thing that lives beside it. 

“It's hard to argue that the river shouldn't sit at the table, vivid and tangible.”

Brands and markets are deemed real and alive primarily because we all choose to believe that they are, and then act accordingly. The Apple brand is a shared story, an intersubjective reality that we’ve all bought into, whether we admire Apple or not.

So for a river to be alive, it needs a story of what that life is, what it means, where it starts and where it ends. A story that can be shared, and believed, by anyone with the least imagination. You may choose to cherish that life, or exploit it. To knowingly protect it or willfully neglect it. But in all cases, what you can’t now do is ignore it or deny it. The river has a story and life of its own.

A charter might be the shortest possible version of that story. And this exploration of ours, a modest fleshing out of the narrative. 

Beyond personhood

When you put your imagination to work at that story, and begin to see the vastness, the timelessness, the provenance of the river, you start to glimpse that “personhood” doesn’t even come close to encompassing its real nature, accomplishments or contribution. That the exceptionalism we attribute to our own species is mostly hubris. That there are living systems in this world that exist beyond our frames of reference. 

Maybe we should all instead aspire to “riverhood.” Now there’s a thought.