Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Is a River Alive? > Status Update

“It seems crazy that we give a corporation that’s 10 years old rights, but we won’t give rights to a 10,000-year-old river. Water is life. Water is the medicinal plants. Water is the berries, the fish, and all the other animals that drink the water. If you don’t have water, everything else dies around it. The river IS life.”
- Lydia Mestokosho (artist & activist)

“My own spiritual observation has been that a small ‘self’ suffers and causes suffering, that a love of the living world lets single identities and selfhoods expand and encompass other beings, entities, & whole landscapes, such that the self becomes a spacious being.”

-Yuvan Aves

How we imagine the matter of water MATTERS. To recognize its ceaseless migrancy is to recognize that we live in a fundamentally decentralized world, engaged always in multiple forms of relation- and that power can be crucial and determining the capacity of those relations to animate or exhaust their participants.

“To be is to be related…
We must hugely widen the space of relations.”

-Yuvan Aves (Chennai)

Fly-ash from the chimneys of power stations get dumped into slurry ponds, or baked into bricks & sold/given to villagers who build with them. But fly-ash (even produced by conventional power stations) is radioactive. The state knows this. The power-station administrators know this. Still, the villagers are building their houses from radioactive bricks. Villagers get cancer, and wish for days when they only got asthma

In 1997 the Tamil Nadu government ‘magically’ made the Ennore Creek disappear overnight. How? They simply erased it from their official map.
The ‘Coastal Zone Management Plan of Tamil Nadu’ was created in response to national directives to zone & manage plan their coastline. New national directive instructed the preservation of coastal areas, but this creek marsh is where the heaviest industries were located

“Barrenness is almost always a state of mind, only rarely a state of land.”
-Yuvan

Thomas Berry, American ecologist/scholar/historian/writer wrote about ‘The Great Work’- the gigantic effort required to reimagine the subject-object relations; to recognize Earth as Home to a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. He’s credited with coining the phrase ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ to refer to a philosophy of law & governance which was founded upon recognizing & upholding that communion

There have been increasing Rights of Nature cases in India that attempt to shift the law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence.
“The natural environment is part of basic human rights of ‘right to life itself’.” ruled Justice S. Srimathy- who also went on to skewer existing environmental legal doctrines as inadequate to the scale of the challenges at hand.

“Children are born as animists, and then they lose that power- or rather, it is taken from them.
…What on earth HAPPENED to the world?- What happened to a world where animism is a rarity, or seen as ‘weird’? What is ‘weird’ about seeing the extent & vitality of the life that surrounds us, the lives with which each of our own little lives is entangled?”
- Yuvan, Naturalist & River Activist, Chennai India