Status Updates From Is a River Alive?

A doctrine of liberation theology holds that the moral test of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.
Consider that there may be no useful distinction between human rights and the rights of nature- each is indissolubly merged with the other.

the rivers alive

“One way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills as only ‘natural resource’ is to clear them as fellow beings- kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying 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.”
Ursula K. LeGuin, 2017

The Rights of Nature movement encourages a sort of “grammar of animacy” regarding law- an attempt to make structures of power align with perceptions of a world far more alive than power usually allows. Recognizing nature’s rights is a creative means to train humans to pay attention differently, and to tell a diff. story of the living world- a far older story in which the world is not “machine after all”.

Over the past 20 years, the young Rights of Nature movement has inspired new forms of future dreaming, and unsettled long-held orthodoxies by appealing to imagination as much as to law. Case after case has been brought worldwide to test the anthropocentric foundations of existing legislation- and the drive to recognize the lives, rights and voices of rivers, mountains and forests have inspired many who do this work.