Status Updates From ¿Están vivos los ríos?: Cóm...

“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.

“Shifting baseline syndrome” is the process whereby ongoing damage to the natural world becomes normalized over time, as each new generation measures loss against (an already degraded) benchmark.
Also known as “generational amnesia”, it is a powerful force in disguising & enabling further ecological harm.

Through language the living world has been further distanced & deadened into “brute matter”- in English we “it” rivers, trees, mountains etc, reducing them to the status of stuff.
‘Grammar’ orders the relations between things. The word holds great power: in Middle English the word meant magic- a ‘gramarye’ was a book of spells/sorcery. To imagine a river is alive causes water to glitter differently.

“One of modernity’s many vanishing tricks is to disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions. We now take it for granted that we take rivers for granted.” It is unremarkable that flowing water can be owned- privatized & sold as liquid asset. It is normalized that a corporation is a recognized entity w/legal rights (including to sue) but a river that has flowed for thousands of years has no rights at all.