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

“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.

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.

Most of us, having been raised on rationalism, see rivers as “service providers”. The infrastructural reframing of rivers, aided by the modern inventions of pourable concrete & dynamite reflects technocracy’s view of nature as “calculable coherence”. Nothing is good in & of itself, it must be good FOR something. The identity of “river” is singularized, readable only in terms of flow-rates & megawattage.

“What is a river saying?” is a question asked by many peoples throughout the ages. The various answers acknowledge that we live in a polyphonic world, but one where a majority of Earth’s inhabitants (human & other-than-human) are denied voice. To be silenced is not the same as to be silent; to go unheard is not the same as to be speechless. No landscape speaks with a single tongue.