The Rights of Rivers

Rivers and watersheds

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0:34They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. We know there are many things alive in a river, such as fish, turtles, algae, and microorganisms.

1:20The riparian tree and grass environment alongside host life too. Even in this little San Leandro Creek in California, life depends on the flow of water. But some argue that this creek is itself alive, as is the bay it flows into. The argument is central to the growing Rights of Nature movement, which asserts that ecosystems and entities like creeks and rivers should have legal rights. We explore how a change in our thinking that regards creeks, streams, and rivers as living

1:50things rather than just resources could help save them and the watersheds they're a part of. After all, every place in the world is part of a watershed. Where I'm standing now is in the San Leandro Creek watershed, which is within the San Francisco Bay watershed. Can you name the one you live in? Welcome to Big Picture Science. I'm Mollie Bentley. In this episode, we hear how a growing movement seeks to change how we think about the rights of rivers.

The water inside us

2:30In his book Underland, writer Robert McFarlane digs into the intersection of humans and the rest of the living world that thrives below our feet. Now, the Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge has emerged from that exploration to examine our relationship with water that flows around and under us. He begins here by reading a passage from his book that reminds us of our intimate bodily relationship with rivers. The language of hydrological governance refers to rivers, streams, and lakes as water bodies.

3:05To the 40,000 recognised water bodies in England, Wales, and Scotland should be added another 65 million or so. For every human is, of course, a water body. Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water. Our skin is two-thirds water. Even our bones are watery. We were swimmers before we were walkers, slow-turning like breath divers in the dark flotation tank

3:37of the womb. Robert McFarlane's book title poses a question. Is a river alive? Well, it's one that's essential to an ethical shift that's underway in how we regard and care for ecosystems. And many regard gaining clarity on this question as key to restoring our relationship to rivers around the world and addressing threats to them such as pollution, over-damming, and climate change. Well, we'll hear what this movement asks of us, where it has achieved surprising results,

4:09and how one answers the question of whether a river is alive. But first, we begin with a rare, and for those campaigning to repair the natural flow of rivers, hopeful event. Over the course of a year, beginning in the fall of 2023, four hydroelectric dams on the 250-mile-long Klamath River that winds through southern Oregon and northern California were removed, allowing the river to flow freely for the first time in a hundred years.

Removing the Klamath dams

4:41Well, Rob, this year there was a celebration in northern California among those who were cheering the undamming of the Klamath River. Now, this was the biggest project to tear down dams in the country. What does it take to take a dam down?

4:58Explosives, heavy machinery, but above all, the infrastructure of will and imagination. And the drive, the campaign to imagine the Klamath River otherwise, a de-dammed, undammed Klamath, had to reach back almost a century to the river before the first dam went up, which I think was 1922. And then this extraordinary alliance came together with the Yurok tribe at its center and began to dream of a de-dammed Klamath.

5:32But it took two decades to imagine and then to realize. But what we have seen since the last of the dams came down last year, as you will know, is the astonishing speed with which rivers heal themselves. I recommend anyone who has not seen the before and after shots of the river, it's extraordinary to compare the two. You have this enormous lump of concrete, of engineering holding back this river.

6:03And then in the next shot, two years later, just in this last year, it's gone. It's gone. And four of them have gone. And Shane Anderson, who's making this extraordinary film about it, all the kind of longitudinal view of the de-damming, he visited the river this May. And where the reservoirs had been, so that was drowned land. And they leave behind kind of sodden silt, of course, when the reservoirs are first drawn down. But then the Yurok tribe revegetation crews had hand-seeded millions of seeds, a wildflower mix,

6:39very carefully chosen drought-resistant, lupines and California poppies and others, and planted young cottonwood trees. And so quickly, that vegetable life, as it were, that floral life, had poured back. And Shane describes seeing the banks of the former reservoirs, the drowned land, just ablaze with this orange floral fire. And he said, the air smelled sweet, and the river seemed alive. And so through it all, you have this, suddenly this moving, willful, silver agent of the river,

7:12undrowned. You know, I'm preparing to talk to you about this. I had to practice the word undammed or de-dammed because we don't use it. When would we ever say undam or de-dam a river because we don't do it? That's so interesting. It's a bit like learning and unlearning. Unlearning is the unfamiliar verb. We don't unlearn. Unlearning is hard. And de-damming is hard, harder than damming. Unlearning is harder than learning. What happens to a river when you dam it? I'll make this a two-part question. What happens to a river when you dam it?

7:43And if it does kill the river, was the Klamath River dying? Well, dams are a complex structure. They're a complex politics. There are no easy answers around them. And I've spent a little time studying them and their effects and their cultural politics, their imaginative politics in northeastern Quebec or Nittasinan, the Inuit word for the homeland there. And then I'm a kind of fascinated onlooker to the Klamath question. A reservoir drowns a river. You can drown a river.

8:14That's a counterintuitive idea, but that's what a reservoir does. It impounds water. And it also stops the free movement of silt on the one hand. And silt is a kind of superhero of riverine systems. It moves around. It spreads fertility. It reshapes and is reshaped by the flow of water. And certainly I should just say that the Mississippi Delta is a great example of what happens when you dam a river and you deprive the delta of that land-building silt and sand. And life-building because it is so fertile.

8:47And that's why the Nile Delta, right, became one of the cradles of an early form of civilization is because you could, as the old joke goes, you could kind of place your hand in the soil and grow five new fingers, right? So, but the other thing that dams stop, of course, is the free passage of migratory fish unless they're configured differently. But even then, it's so anadromous fish, that is to say fish which migrate out to the sea but have a fresh water phase of their life, come back into the headwaters of rivers to spawn.

9:19So, salmon famously and steelhead trout, which are rainbow trout, but steelheads are the anadromous version that move out to sea. You know, the Klamath was the third biggest salmon run on the Pacific coast before the dams went up. Absolutely immense. And the Europe people were a salmon people. So, food sovereignty, food security, cultural identity was absolutely bound up with those legendary salmon runs. But the dams just stopped that, just stopped it dead. And so, the salmon couldn't get up to the spawning grounds.

9:51But when the dams came down, one of this thing that came to just gong strike moment around the world is within two days of, I think it was the Iron Gate dam coming down, river scientists captured on sonar the blurry outline of the first Chinook salmon making that passage upstream of where the dam had stood. And that, you know, we need hope right now. And it had been about a century before they had done that. Yeah. The salmon, I mean, had traveled up the river. Exactly. So, I think the first dam went up in 22.

10:23The Iron Gate dam actually went up in, I think it was 64. So, there was quite a long, it was like a four-decade phase of a four-dam project, but then a really much shorter phase of the de-damming process, the undamming process. I'm rolling those words right in my mouth as well. But watching that life pour back in the form of fish, wetland regeneration, floral regeneration, prairie regeneration. I mean, we start to think of a living river as having an aura, an aura that radiates outwards. The river doesn't stop at its banks, just as it's not defined by its main channel.

10:57And life begins to emanate and radiate from a living river. Well, you said that we all need hope. And I shouldn't have interrupted you while you were saying that, because that is one phrase that should not be interrupted. Before we get to the hope, we're going to go down a little bit down the path of some despair. Because you write that rivers are in crisis worldwide, not just because of the dams. The dams certainly contribute to them. And that some young people might not even know what healthy rivers are. Rob, why are they in crisis? And how has it come to this?

Global river crises

11:29How has it come to this? Well, let me give a global answer to that and then a national answer from my country. The global answer is that rivers are threatened by pollution of many kinds and by drought. And an extraordinary recent study which used remote sensing technology data and AI analysis to, in effect, reconstruct a kind of day-by-day life of all of the world's rivers for 35 years,

12:00came to some unsurprising conclusions, which is that climate change is changing the very nature of our rivers. So very broadly, the lower, flatter reaches of rivers, there the rivers are lower and they're slower. And in the upper, steeper parts of rivers, they are flashier. That's to say they flood more suddenly and more catastrophically and they're quicker. So that's a kind of big picture about the sort of mother of all questions, how climate is reshaping our rivers.

12:37And I always like to point out that at least in the northern hemisphere, river life and human life, the Holocene broadly, are more or less co-evil. Because as the ice retreated, fresh water was released and rivers began to flow. So the little chalk stream near my house was born when the permafrost melted sufficiently that groundwater could charge the aquifer and then emerge as a spring and form a river that seeks the sea. To give the national answer briefly, in my country, England, there is not a single river in good overall health.

13:11We have two measures, good ecological health and good chemical health. Zero percent of rivers in good chemical health, 14 percent in good ecological health. So I am surrounded by wounded and dying rivers. And we've woken up to that in my country. We're now seeing it. We've seen it come into view, visibility, audibility in the last five years. And the hopeful bit is the guardianship movement of outrage and change and activism and legal work that is now responding to this crisis. Well, you were referring to the changing definition of rivers when you described that a river is not just that narrow ribbon that goes from A to B.

13:48You suggested as much. And so let's talk about the definition of rivers because it is being challenged by ecologists in a profound way that it is no longer just that band that you see. But the definition of a river includes a lot more. It includes the streams and the tributaries and what we cannot see, which is all the water moving underneath it and even wetlands, some ecologists will say. That is a much more vast description or definition of river.

14:21Did I miss anything with that? Did I summarize that? Well, no, beautifully. I mean, I think it's a philosophical as well as a material question. Where does a river end, right? And one extension of that is to say a river never ends. It's merely part of the water cycle of which we are also part as water bodies ourselves. But we could turn to the – so I sometimes compare the definition of a river as its single channel to defining and regarding a tree only as its trunk.

14:54So the tree has this immense root world, which for me is where the river meets the sea and fresh mingles with salt and that great kind of mutual irrigation of the ecotone that happens at a river's mouth. And then, of course, a river has – a tree has branches and has leaves and that's the sort of watershed of the river because the river has no single birth point that we might – we dream of a spring is where a river is born. But, of course, a river is born of rain, snow and precipitation.

15:27And everyone lives in a watershed. I love this fact. I live in Cambridge. It's so flat in Cambridge. But I still live in a watershed. We all live where water gathers towards other water to form river and stream and they seek the sea. So I love this big inclusive definition of river as community, as gathering of beings and of tributaries. But it makes it hard to manage, right? It makes it hard to deal with. So it's easier to singularize and reduce river.

15:57And then, in that way, also, watersheds become invisible, which they should not because we rely on them so much. And I could imagine that what if, in addition to giving the street where we live and the town and the country, you know where I'm going, we live on the something-something watershed. You'd also have to name your watershed. Can you – I don't want to put you on the – sorry, but I can tell you my run of – the run of my rivers. Because it's Ninewell's Wood, the spring, becomes Hobson's Brook, becomes Vickers Brook, becomes the River Cam, becomes the River Great Ouse.

16:34And the River Great Ouse meets the sea at the – what we call the wash. The north – it meets the north sea at this vast estuary mouth many miles across. So that's my – the run of my rivers, as it were. That's my watershed identity. And what is the watershed called, the whole watershed? It would be the Cam watershed, yeah, exactly. We would sort of name it for the central river that it drains. But, I mean, watershed thinking has long been a – so it had a big, big political manifestation in the 60s and 70s.

17:05It was sometimes called bioregional thinking. But there are – like Ashish Qatari, there was really interesting thinkers, Indian thinkers and others, who are arguing for the need to imagine ourselves as – into watersheds rather than nation states or provinces or regions. And, I mean, it makes perfect sense to me because water is life. We'll never do it, but it's a beautiful dream. I thought we were being hopeful. Well, can you imagine planetary governance saying, right, we abolish the nation state and we hereby inaugurate a watershed identity.

17:40But what a good identity it would be. And what it gets at is that if we were more familiar, if we had this cultural memory, as you say, of what a river is when it's allowed to just be a river, we wouldn't be thinking of it as that ribbon, why is that an important reimagining, that definition, that is much – that considers a river to be much more vast than how we imagine it because we want it to do what we want it to do for us. Yes, yes. Why is that important? Well, that we want it to do what we want it to do for us is the instrumental account of a river.

18:13It is river as resource, river as ecosystem service provider. That's the language that we would use in terms of natural governance in England. And there we have fully objectified river. It has simply become a tool. And I think the contrast between river as resource is river as life force. And that is what has got suppressed and forgotten. And part of the instrumentalization of river is the singularization of river.

18:43It's the channel. It's the thing that fills our glasses and it's the thing that takes our waste away. And I think when we fall into that as well, we – into that, as it were, delusion or that perception, which privatization of water in my country has absolutely centered a de-territorialized, privatized account of river as liquid asset. That is what – that has been the dominant paradigm in my country for 36 years. The result is a dying river system. So the work is one of imagination as well as legislation.

19:15How do we reimagine rivers as friends, as neighbors, as co-citizens, as life-givers, as complex ecologies, as trees of water that draw down from the watershed and unfurl their roots of life into the ocean? That's the work of story. It's the work of writing. And it is the work of imagination.

19:45Next, what we mean when we say a river is alive. We're considering the rights of rivers in this episode of Big Picture Science. Big Picture Science

20:23The removal of the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River came about after an historic milestone in the rights of nature movement.

20:53Prompted in part by declining salmon runs, in 2019, the Yurik tribe, whose members have long lived along its banks, recognized the rights of the Klamath River by granting it personhood. This made it the first known river in North America to have the same legal rights as a human under tribal law. Four years later, the first of the dams was removed. It was a moment those gathered here have hoped for for decades.

21:25Last week, a demolition crew broke through the Iron Gate Dam, the last of four hydroelectric dams being removed on the Klamath River, which stretches for 400 kilometers from the state of Oregon to the California coast. The dam breach is part of the largest river restoration project ever undertaken in the United States. Robert McFarlane has been describing how the definition of a river is changing. But in his book, Is a River Alive?, he describes how the moral standing of a river is also in flux.

Do rivers have rights

21:58Rob, why is a river alive? What's the case for that? And why not a lake or an ocean? What is it about a river? Well, I'm very happy to speak of a lake as alive and indeed of the ocean as alive, as well as an extraordinary blue machine. So it's not – I'm not a kind of riverist in that sense, because water seeks a body and sometimes that body is human and sometimes it's lake and sometimes it's river. Is a river alive? So this is a question and not a statement.

22:30It's something I explore. I spent four and a half years exploring, partly because it is such an alien notion, right, to the rationalist mind. Of course, a river isn't alive. It contains life. There are lives that it enables. But the river itself is not alive. And yet there are cultures, communities, individuals, regions where the idea that – including children, and I asked my son really early on in this project, and I was like, is a river alive? And Will's like, well, duh, yes, obviously.

23:01He could have saved you four years of research. He was like, that's going to be a short book. Exactly. The one-word book. I'm not sure my editors would have liked that very much. But it is a very complex question. And even the asking of it opens questions about what we mean by life. And for me, being is a verb and not a noun. River is a verb and not a noun. We live in relation. We tumble processually through the world, always tangling and untangling with other beings,

23:35other presences, other forms, other forces. But there is a definition of selfhood which we might say sort of supports the asset value account of self, which is that we are our own fortresses, that we move through the world as singletons, and we fortify ourselves against others, and we bounce off and crash into others. A river makes a nonsense of that. And the idea that our life flows with that of rivers, we think with them, we remember with them, they pass through our bodies.

24:06I mean, I'm always in relation with rivers, and actually I think all of us are. So to say that a river is alive, to conclude, requires a redefinition of what life and living and enlivenment are. The argument that rivers are alive, does it then follow that they also die? And does it also follow that they have rights? Okay. Well, if we take the second of those, sorry, the first of those first, can a river die? When I speak to people about living rivers, rivers being alive, and they'll balk at that,

24:39but then I say, can you imagine a dying river or a dead river? And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, I know, yeah, okay, I see. And a dying river literally deadpulls. That's the hydrologist's term. A river that deadpulls is a river that doesn't have enough flow to move itself out of its own belly. We know what that looks like. Like massive fish kills, the Murray-Darling River Basin in Australia. The older, during the summer of 2022, so many fish died they had to use JCBs to clear the river of the corpses.

25:10That's a dying river. A river choked with garbage so it can't flow. That's a dying river. The rivers in Chennai, which I visited, which have 0% dissolved oxygen. That's the free-floating oxygen, not the oxygen that's bound into H2O, and zero species count. That's a dying or a dead river. And we know what that feels like. And when you move close to one, you feel your spirit, Paul. You feel it kind of droop and drop because if a living river animates, a dying river mortifies. So can a river die? Yes.

25:41Therefore, can a river be alive? I think so, certainly. And not just metaphorically. I feel this metaphysically. Should a river have rights? Okay, well, now we have a big other question. Does a river have to be alive to have rights? No, we assign rights to corporations. Corporations in the UK and in the US have a whole suite of rights. So we have no problem with- Because we consider them important. We consider them important. Philosophically, arguably, we consider them to be an assemblage of humans. And so we need to find a way of representing the assemblage's rights.

26:15But it continually baffles me that a river who has flowed through my landscape for 10,000 years has no rights. But I could find a company tomorrow. You and I could go and file a company's house registration tomorrow. Could it be a company that was pro-river company? Well, yeah. And it would immediately have a bunch of rights, but the river would have none. So, yes, let's make it, if we do, let's make it a pro-river company. Now, it went by kind of fast, but some listeners may have caught the pronoun that you used. Oh, yeah, okay.

26:45You used the river who. The river who, yeah. Not the river that. Or the river which, exactly. And I get the feeling that language is important to you. Well, I've been a writer for 22 years and I teach English, so. Okay, a trite observation. But in this case, precision of language is important around rivers in particular. Yes, precision, I'm always interested in precision. I think it's a function of lyricism rather than of limit. So, at some point, did you change? Referring to rivers as that, you changed the pronouns.

27:16Yes, I did. And that happened consciously but spontaneously, as it were, early on in this process. And I suddenly realized I just wanted to naturalize to myself that phrase. So, all the way through the book, I refer to rivers who flow, rivers who rise, rivers who are born. And just that tiny adjustment in grammar feels both inconsequential and very important. It alters the posture of address that we have to the living world, including, in this case, rivers.

27:53I wonder to what degree, how far it goes in changing our relationship to rivers because there are lots of living entities whose status offers very little protection. Yeah. We still do testing on animals. We raise animals in factory farms. And these are beings that we know to feel pain. Yeah, absolutely. So, it's not a guarantee that once you say it has rights. Very far from it. And, I mean, we're seeing human rights violated at spectacular and atrocious scales every day on our live streams.

28:28So, rights are no magic bullet. However, it is almost always in the interests of existing power to represent rights as a zero-sum game. And by that, I mean to say, to argue that, oh, if we accord rights over here to rivers, we are going to be proportionally subtracting rights over here from humans, let's say. That's not how rights work.

28:59Rights organize and at some level kind of litigate relations between entities in communities. They are not automatically in conflict with one another. So, when you hear people speak of conflict-based rights as a kind of norm, as a paradigm for understanding rights, you should look at what status quo they want to keep in place. So, we can think about rivers having rights and we can think about it in a blue sky way. I keep speaking of my country, England, but it's just starting to creep in there.

29:31But we could go back to the Klamath story. And in 2019, the Yurok tribe issued, and it's a beautiful declaration. You can find it out there on a wonderful website called EcoJurisprudence Monitor that tracks all of these initiatives, these earth law-minded initiatives. They issued a declaration of rights for the Klamath River. And among those rights was the right to flow, and that right has now been restored. So, the rights thinking, the thinking of a river as having inalienable, pre-existing rights, not rights that humans are giving the river, but rights the river always had but humans had taken away or failed to recognize, that became part of the imaginative work of de-damming the Klamath.

30:11And this idea that a river is alive, that a river has rights, is part of the Rights of Nature movement. This is one that recognizes the rights of ecosystems. It sounds like this movement is getting traction. Yes. Is that fair to say? Yes. It's every year we see more momentum, more cases. The last two years, the Goldman Prize for Environmental Activism, which is sometimes called the Nobel for Nature, it's an amazing award, has gone to water defenders, both of them women, both of them working for the rights of, in the case of Teresa Vicente in 2023, Mar Menor, this great saltwater lagoon in Spain.

30:57She led an incredible campaign, which resulted in the Spanish Constitutional Court recognizing the rights of Mar Menor. And then this year, Mariluz Mariari, a Peruvian activist, brought an incredible case in the Peruvian court system to recognize the rights of the Marignan River, on which she and her people live. There, the challenge is implementation, like actually getting change on the ground. So, amazing things are happening. Are most of these, I should say, campaigns on behalf of the rights of nature brought about by indigenous groups?

31:32Yes and no. I use the phrase guardians, and I think that that includes – a lot of these movements come from below, let's put it like that. So, you very rarely find a state or a state governmental level bringing a rights campaign. It's almost always communities who recognize the harm that is being done, the harm that is being threatened to their river, to their forest, to their ecosystem, and to their identity, because their identity is bound up in that forest, river, or mountain.

32:06And sometimes a lot of them are indigenous, but a lot of them also are concerned communities. So, the citizens of Toledo at the end of Lake Erie declared a bill of rights for Lake Erie. It was struck down subsequently on appeal, but that was a group of concerned citizens who saw existing environmental regulation and law falling short in its capacity to prevent the slow death of the lake. So, let's look at a concrete example of how this idea can change the world and change an ecosystem.

Cloud forests and rivers

32:39You tell the story of how it was used, this concept that rivers have rights, that nature has rights, to protect the River of the Cedars and the cloud forest in Ecuador. And we're going to hear how, but first, could you give us a definition of what a cloud forest is for anyone who has not had the privilege of walking through one and getting their face and their hair wet? It's a pretty wet place. It sounds just magical. It is. They are magical. I've never been in a place of more life. I mean, statistically, but also atmospherically, as it were.

33:12You have the sense of being in a green furnace, just teeming with existence and the possibility of future existence. So, a cloud forest is different to a rainforest. They form higher, and instead of rain, you get cloud. And the cloud, in this case in northern Ecuador, is formed by moisture-bearing water, sweeps in off the Pacific, is then kind of pushed up the Andean range. And as it reaches a certain altitude, the air temperature drops, and the water vapor condenses in the form of mist.

33:45And there, that mist then wraps these vast regions of forest and moves through every gap between every tree. And the mist, of course, then has this immense surface area, or particularly of, as it were, vegetable life, on which to condense. So, because it's epiphytic, there's so much epiphytic plant life, plant growing on plant, you have this just inconceivably maximized surface area on which the mist condenses, forms droplets.

34:18Those droplets run to the end of leaves, and then they plop from the end of leaves in their billions in a process that I think is beautifully known as continuous fog drop. I wish they made continuous fog drop sweets, but I'd buy them. All of those drops form rivers.

34:38So, the River of the Cedars, and again, we're speaking, we're describing a place in Ecuador right now. The River of the Cedars feeds the cloud forest. But what was interesting, the many things that are interesting in your book, is that one of your companions, Juliana, said it also goes the other way. And she said, and I'm quoting from the book, the mining would kill this river stone dead. Because, of course, there are miners that want to get in there, into the forest. If you take away the forest, you take away the rain and the mist, and the river dies.

35:10So, the river is feeding this lush ecosystem. But as you just described, it is also being fed by this forest. Absolutely. I mean, the first rule of ecology is everything is connected to everything else. And the cloud forest is a river maker. The river is a cloud forest maker. So, of course, their life, their being is mutual, reciprocal. The one can't exist without the other. And mining, the form of mining that threatened Los Cedros, the name given to this cloud forest from which the Rio Los Cedros flows, was predominantly gold mining.

35:44So, a concession was issued in 2017, which just stamped a big, big access grid over the southern portion of Los Cedros. And this gold mining would just delete the forest. It would eliminate the forest because you have to raise it in order to open pit mine the gold out of there. And then the gold is leached out of these big tailings heaps in a process that's known as cyanidation, where you're literally just running poison through the tailings heaps to leach out the gold.

36:19And, of course, theoretically, that highly toxic water is then somehow contained in a bermed pond or something. But, of course, most of it just runs out into the existing river courses and flows into the groundwater. So, death, death to the forest, death to the river.

36:51Coming up, what happened next when powerful mining companies entered the Ecuadorian cloud forest, preparing to clear part of it? This episode of Big Picture Science looks at the rights of rivers.

37:30Let's do it. You're irreplaceable, Jane, but another you would be great. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free on LinkedIn today at linkedin.com slash quality. Before we hear about the fate of the Ecuadorian cloud forest as the mining companies prepared to roll in with their equipment, we should visit the night in 2008 when a vote was taken that would shape that fate.

38:00In his book, Robert McFarland describes how many of Ecuador's 14 indigenous nations traveled from around the country to meet in the town of Monte Cristi. Indigenous leaders and shamans gathered in an assembly building in town. No one else was allowed access to the room. After a ceremony that involved the taking of ayahuasca and summoning the spirits of the mountain, the members voted on whether the rights of nature should be enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution.

38:31The answer, Robert McFarland says, was a resounding yes. And, he writes, one of the regions whose future was to be determined by that vote was the area of rivers and cloud forest in the northwest of the country called Los Cedros.

38:48We're coming to a dramatic moment. And, before we describe what actually happened, we want to describe the tool that Ecuador had created for just this purpose. And, they had incorporated a pretty profound idea, as we've laid out here, in their constitution in 2008. Correct.

Constitutional rights of nature

39:11And, what was that idea? The idea is the idea of the rights of nature. And, again, it trips off the tongue. But, actually, to meet it, as is now the case in the Ecuadorian constitution, which was revised in 2008, to meet these ideas installed as a series of four articles in the highest, as it were, blueprint of governance for a nation state, is still, to me, amazing. And, I call it an act of great moral imagination, and it was. So, there were four articles, 71, 74, usually called the rights of nature articles.

39:43They're in there in the constitution. They were brought in there by fascinating, kind of seething, boiling process of imagination and negotiation driven by indigenous alliances, by eco-feminists, by progressives. The first of them says that nature has the right to exist, flourish, and persist. And, the fourth of them makes the state the guarantor of those rights and allows that any citizen in Ecuador can bring a case on behalf of nature if they feel that nature's rights have been violated under the constitution.

40:18Wow. Revolutionary. And, are the rights equal to that of humans? Do humans have a different set of rights, and maybe animals? Or, where do they fall on the rights hierarchy? Yeah, they all entangle. It's not a hierarchy. It's an entanglement. So, for example, the UN in 2022 recognized as a key human right the right to a clean and healthy environment. And, this was one of the key recognitions in helping connect the rights of nature and human rights because they might be thought of as antagonistic or separable.

40:52And, in some cases, they have been, I think. But, really, we need to understand them philosophically as absolutely mutual. So, the constitution made fascinating provision, which was not really then followed through on, for indigenous rights, rights to clean water, for example. So, it was a very rights-minded constitution. But, the rights of nature were there. And, for a long time, they did nothing. And, we should say that there's a difference between moral imagination, constitutional realization, and then actually implementation or change on the ground.

41:27It's much easier to stop bad things happening to rivers and forests than it is to make good the bad things that have happened to rivers and forests. That's why the Klamath is such a remarkable story of revival, of Lazarus, of restoration, of resurrection. But, in Ecuador, fortunately, what happened in 2021… Can I set up just a little bit here for the drama? Because, I think it has earned its drama. It has. So, as you said, the miners had created a grid of this part of the cloud forest that they wanted to fell.

42:04They wanted it to get rid of. They were going to blow it up and create mines. And, that would be – the river would be destroyed or parts of it and also parts of the cloud forest in this area that is of immense biodiversity. Not only just many raindrops, but a very lush part of Ecuador. And they were getting ready to do it. The miners just thought sort of – I don't want to say that they were rubbing their hands together. That's not fair. But, they were all set to do it. I don't know if it got so far that the, you know, the trucks had been engaged, the ignitions had been engaged.

43:07So, corporate interest. Like, this is power. This is not a bunch of guys with some gold panning and some pickaxes. So, this was the abolition of the forest coming up. Yes. This is closer to David and Goliath. And, again, as you would say, those corporations would have rights. They would have rights. At least in our country. Okay. So, then this incredible thing happened.

Protecting Los Cedros

43:27What happened next? The forest looked like it would die. And then a remarkable man called José Ducu, who had moved into this forest 35 years earlier in a tent and then had cussedly, limpet-like, attached himself to the forest and fought off the many sources of destruction that threatened it. Literally attached himself. Well, I mean, he lived, I mean, he pitched his tent down by the river and he, you know, that's where he lived and, in fact, where he, more or less where he died in May last year.

44:02So, the forest wouldn't exist without José, but he, all other avenues being exhausted, he realized that there were these constitutional articles and he, as a citizen, could bring the case. And so, he escalated a case up through the Ecuadorian court system saying, if the miners come, the rights of the river and the forest will be violated. And during COVID, during the high phase of COVID in that country and, indeed, around the world, three judges sat and a huge court procedure was undertaken with the mining companies representing themselves.

44:36There was many so-called amicus curiae, friends of the court, coming to speak for the forest and of the forest, scientists submitting papers about the biodiversity. It was an extraordinary theater as well as almost a tribunal of the imagination. The judges couldn't get to the forest because nobody could travel in Ecuador because of the pandemic. So, they had to kind of pass a life or death sentence on this remarkable cloud forest without ever meeting it. And in late 2021, late November, early December, this judgment comes down from the constitutional court.

45:07It is a beautiful piece of jurisprudence. It's Laura's poetry, headed up by Agustin Grialva Jimenez, and it decrees that the rights of the forest will be violated if the mining goes ahead. And it compels the mining companies to evacuate the area, quit all operations, make good any, in this case, fortunately, minor damage. And it had the power of the constitution behind it. And so, they were repelled. The forest lives, the rivers flow, still clear watered. And I was there a year after that judgment was passed.

45:40And I traveled up to the forest with the judges who had never met the forest that existed because of them. And I still remember walking up into that mist to the bird call, the sound of that forest just teeming and seething with Agustin and his colleague, Jamiro. And every step, we were taking in a living forest, but also a dead forest, the counterfactual forest, the forest that shouldn't be there. And I just remember this flickering of experience between the real and the might have been, as it were.

46:12It was very haunting, very powerful encounter. We were there for about two weeks. Is the future of the cloud forest secure? No, because gold prices have gone – I mean, they were insane when I was there in 2022. But a kind of spot price of a troy ounce of gold has since then, because of tariffs, because of Ukraine, is vast now. And so, of course, the mountains are more valuable. The forest is more valuable. The pressure is growing.

46:44So I actually have stayed very involved with this forest and river and, indeed, many of the other rivers I write about in the book. And we've formed a network of guardians of the forest, Ecuadorian colleagues, legal specialists, activists on the ground, and then an international board of which and group of which I'm one. Because this is not a fairy tale ending to what would have been a villainous story. It is merely one stay or reprieve for this place of most life. It is a powerful example, though, of what's possible.

47:18Yes, what's possible. We have to hold on to that. Yes, yes. And there are many examples where rights for nature rulings have failed or implementation has been impossible, including the Atrato River in Colombia. And another amazing ruling in 2016, but one in which actually change on the ground has proved incredibly difficult because of illegal mining, because of narco violence, because of state absence in the upper reaches of the Atrato. So for every hopeful example, there's a counter example.

47:50But this dialectic between hope and futility or hope and loss or possibility and degradation is where we live, right? So finally, Rob, this idea of flickering back and forth between the forest that is and the forest that could have been, and when we think about the importance of rivers and our efforts to save them, we really do save ourselves when we do this. But I wonder if we could take to heart the example that where we are recording now in Manhattan was once a wetland.

48:30It was a living system. So we made a tradeoff. And where we are sitting now, in a studio, on a road where there are lots of cars, there's lots of traffic outside, it was not always like this. It was once alive. And I wonder if you could describe for us what the island of Manhattan once looked like.

Daylighting urban rivers

48:53Well, I'll have a go. And I will say that, you know, cities are alive. We're alive, too. And cities are complex ecosystems. And cities contain remarkable nature. I always have eyes for the birds in cities. And my friend, Yuva Naves, who features in the book, he says barrenness is a state of mind, rarely a state of land. And I think that's worth remembering. But, yeah, Manhattan has buried many of its rivers and streams. There's the famous, I think, Vela map, it's called, from the 1860s. And there, if you look at that, it's easily findable online.

49:26You can see the wetlands. You can see, like, Washington Square. And you can see the streams moving through the city and reaching the Hudson or reaching the ocean. But this takes me perhaps to a phrase and a concept we can end on, which is the idea of daylighting.

49:44It's lovely. It's a lovely idea. I see your face light up with it. I was hoping you would describe this. Yeah. Because it is hopeful. It's a very hopeful act. What is daylighting? Well, it comes from the language of urban planning, let's say. But, of course, it's a metaphor as well. But in urban planning, city design, it is where we restore buried rivers, culverted rivers, covered rivers, to the surface of cities. So we bring them back up to the light again. We daylight them. And this has happened in cities because so many cities built themselves over their rivers.

50:16They imprisoned them. They entombed them. They ghosted them. And I have this idea that we should, wherever buried rivers run in our cities, if they haven't been daylighted, we should paint great blue rivers of paint across pavement and road. And so every time we cross a river, we understand that our cities are not just built by rivers but on rivers. So there's a thought for the urban planners out there. But otherwise, where we can, bringing rivers back up to the surface, they become presences we relate to.

50:48We understand their absolutely inseparable entanglement with our lives and what they do for us. And they become personalities. They become individualized again. So let us daylight. And where we cannot daylight, let us remember.

51:04Robert McFarlane, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Me too, Molly. Robert McFarlane is the author of Is a River Alive? This show would not be possible without the constantly flowing creativity of astronomer and producer Seth Shostak,

51:45senior producer Gary Niederhoff and assistant producers Brian Edwards and Shannon Rose Geary. I am the executive producer of Big Picture Science, Molly Bentley. Also, a big thanks to our listeners and our Patreon supporters. The original music in this show is by Dewey DeLay and June Miyake. This episode of Big Picture Science that examines the vital role that rivers play in our ecosystems and the movements to protect them is called the rights of rivers. Looking to get the most out of your money, your time, and generally give your life an upgrade?

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