Strong Forms of "Rights of Nature": De-centering Settler Legalities
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I can't tell you anything new about the river–
you can't tell a river to itself.
There's lots of chatter in the Environmental Humanities network about "rights of nature" – the idea that legal institutions may extend the legal concept of personhood to a natural (nonhuman) object for more powerful laws against its exploitation, extraction, or destruction. The most famous example is the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (aka New Zealand), which gained personhood status in 2017, shortly after nearby Te Urewera National Park was recognized as a living being in 2014. With no hesitation, I cheer on the strides in legal reform that have been pushed by activists from Indigenous and non-indigenous groups across the world, from the debates on wild rice in Minnesota to the campaign for Pacific Ocean personhood.
The opening citation from Natalie Diaz ("Exhibits from The American Water Museum"), along with Sherri Mitchell's writing, compels me to think deeper about the "rights of nature" framework. In Sacred Instructions (2018), Mitchell lays out a strong argument for pairing our rhetoric of rights with one of responsibility. As in, if our society justly demands the right to clean, uncontaminated drinking water, we must also demand our responsibility to care for clean, uncontaminated drinking water. The current division of management power tends to decouple one from the other, as Flint's water district politics made quite clear. Unequally-distributed climate change catastrophe is a similar question of (dis)connecting the right to a high standard of living to the responsibility of emissions reductions.
Through the idea of responsibility (and Haraway's term "response-ability"), I wonder if we can spiral into a form of "rights of nature" that has no need for categories of "person" and "non-person" in legally judging what deserves care. In other words, a form of thought that breaks the settler-colonial breakage of kin ties.
Diaz's poem is a stunning collage of "exhibits" that bring the imagined visitor to a dry necropolis of water politics. The opening exhibit, cited above, first de-centers the (white visitor) human gaze: a river is withdrawn from knowledge-seeking, inaccessible because of how its body is different from our own. But the second line splits this impasse onto two levels. In one reading, the river resists "your" explanatory "tellings" of the law because they only understand the river in settler logics. This is the crux of the critique of the "weak rights of nature" that extends personhood to rivers: telling a river that it has properties of a person (according to the law) in itself continues violent social dominance of state power.
The second reading may constitute a way toward a "strong rights of nature." In this reading, we return to the "I" of the first line, which could also shimmer as the river-object in the second line. Re-written, it would be "you can't tell (me-person-river) to (my-its-river-self)". If Diaz were to have a motto for water politics, it would be "river<->body" – and this theme returns again in other exhibits: "I remember you / I cannot forget / my own body." What we have been doing (re-imagining the rivers as similar to our own bodies) Diaz says can be reversed (re-imagining our own bodies as dry and contaminated rivers). This is a form of river-centered, Indigenous-led water justice in its strongest form: literally, the water judging us.
In this image I imagine the mutual relation between the metonym of the US supreme court (for the legal apparatus on the nation) and the Colorado River (after Diaz). What legally-binding forms of taking responsibility could be birthed out of taking a river at its word? When a river says [DRY] or [FLOOD] or [DEAD], how can we help deliver its verdict while practicing restorative justice?
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