The Whanganui River was granted legal personhood in 2017, through the Te Awa Tupua Act, giving it all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person in New Zealand. Earlier this year, Mari Murayari, an Indigenous river campaigner from Peru won a legal battle to protect the Marañon River in the Peruvian Amazon. Judges ruled Marañon had the right to be free-flowing and clean, respecting an Indigenous worldview that regards rivers as living entitities. [i]\
Corellas feeding just above me.
[i] In his seminal article, ‘Should Trees Have Standing’, from 1972, Christopher Stone proposed that, ‘we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment – indeed to the natural environment as a whole.’ It was not taken very seriously at the time.
