Natural rights?

Should rivers be granted “rights”? Anyone with common sense would consider this a nonsensical question. Rivers may be beautiful and awe-inspiring, but they are insentient geological features.

Don’t tell that to noted nature writer Robert Macfarlane. His New York Times bestselling Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 384 pp.) is a beautiful memoir recounting his travels on three rivers, but its primary purpose is to convince readers that these waterways are actually “vast and mysterious presences,” i.e., living beings. He writes, “I prefer to speak of rivers who flow,” rather than “which” because that “reduces them to the status of stuff and distinguishes them from human persons.”

Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane is part of a growing neo-paganistic movement known generally as “nature rights,” which seeks to erase moral and legal distinctions between humans and nature by granting rights to the natural world. As for rivers, Macfarlane believes they should have “the right to flow and be free from over-abstraction and the right to be free from pollution.” Advocates have already managed to secure personhood rights for a number of rivers around the world.

How does a river enforce its rights? Many proposals allow anyone who believes that the river’s “rights” are being violated to sue as the river’s guardian. Other proposals call for commissions—which would be made up of true believers like Macfarlane.

Either way, the potential for harm such irrational schemes cause cannot be overstated. If rivers have a right to flow, that means no more flood control projects. A right to be free from over-­abstraction prevents irrigation that removes more water than is supplied naturally: Do that and we can kiss acres of fecund farmlands goodbye.

Macfarlane mentions these costs in passing but seems little concerned. Indeed, he discusses the Three Gorges Dam in China spanning the Yangtze River as if it were a bad thing. But before the dam, thousands of people could be killed when the Yangtze flooded. Despite bemoaning global warming, Macfarlane fails to mention that Three Gorges creates pollution-free power as the world’s largest hydroelectric project.

The book idealizes preindustrialized society without considering the needs of our modern world. Moreover, can’t we protect rivers without pretending they are living persons?

Macfarlane writes, “There are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Perhaps. But it doesn’t mean it is a good idea. And for those who truly care about human thriving, granting rights to nature generally, and to rivers specifically, is a very bad idea.