What all share is a recognition that we live in a polyphonic world, but also one in which the majority of Earth’s inhabitants– human and 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.
Introduction: Anima
What all share is a recognition that we live in a polyphonic world, but also one in which the majority of Earth’s inhabitants– human and 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.
‘Daylighting’ lets the water of buried streams meet the sun again. It is a means of bringing river ghosts back to life in towns and cities, of re- encountering rivers as friends and fellow citizens. In cities where daylighting has occurred, the results have often been socially transformative. In Seoul the Cheonggyecheon Stream was freed from the highway that had encased it: the public park created along its banks now draws ninety thousand pedestrians on an average day. Summer temperatures at the waterside can be five degrees cooler than surrounding areas, and air pollution levels along the stream’s corridor have dropped by more than a third.
This infrastructural reframing of the river, he argued, was symbolic of the broader consequences of technocracy’s administrative effort to entrap nature ‘as a calculable coherence’. Nothing is good in and of itself; everything must be good for something. The identity of ‘river’ is stabilized and singularized, rendered legible only in terms of flow- rates and megawattage.
‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ is the name given to the process whereby ongoing damage to the natural world becomes normalized over time, as each new generation measures loss against an already degraded benchmark. A person born in the 1970s will remember the car windscreens of their childhood spattered by countless insect impacts after a long journey. The windscreens of today’s cars bear a fraction of those impact marks– but someone born in the early 2000s would not recognize this as signifying a drastic decline in flying insect populations, because they never knew the earlier abundance.
When the Lower Elwha Dam in Washington State was removed in September 2011, a century after it was constructed, the Elwha revived breathtakingly fast.
Stone grew his idea fast: first into a 1972 paper called ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’– an essay now seen as a landmark in jurisprudence– and then into a book of the same name, which remains in print more than fifty years on.
each time the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable . . . This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’– those who are holding rights at the time.
The Act also recognizes its principal subject as ‘comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements’. What a beautifully inclusive definition of a river this is! As a tree is not only its trunk but also its branches, leaves, roots, and the lives who thrive upon and with it, so here a river is recognized not only as its main channel, but also as its sources, tributaries, watershed, estuary
The centrality of rivers to this profound reimagining process is unsurprising. Muscular, wilful, worshipped and mistreated, rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology. They give us metaphors to live by, and they decline our attempts to parse them.
Part I: The River of the Cedars (Ecuador)
It was a global first. The Rights of Nature– to exist, to regenerate, to be restored, to be respected– were enshrined at the highest level: among the fundamental principles by which a nation is governed. Nature’s ‘life’ was recognized as requiring protection by the state. Crucially, the constitutional wording included human beings as ‘an inseparable part’ of ‘Nature’, rather than hiving humans off into a distinct, implicitly superior category. Ecuador’s boldness of vision set the modern Rights of Nature movement in motion. So many subsequent developments in this field– including the recognition of the life and rights of the Whanganui River in 2017– have their roots in this moment.
A cloud- forest is a river- maker.
Cloud- forests form at higher altitudes than rainforests: typically between three thousand and eight thousand feet above sea level, in steep landscapes of peak, ridge and valley. The elevation means that cloud- forests are cooler than rainforests, and the drama of their topography means that their rivers are fast, shallow, clear and rock- bedded, compared to the muddier, slower rivers of rainforests.
The interior of a cloud- forest is a steaming, glowing furnace of green. To be inside a cloud- forest is what I imagine walking through damp moss might be like if you had been miniaturized. There, life thrives upon life upon life upon life in a seemingly endless mise en abyme that bewilders the imagination and opens a scale- slide of wonder into which the mind might plummet.
Los Cedros is a living Wunderkammer. It is the home of fabulous beasts, birds, plants and fungi who could have flown, crawled and grown straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s imagination: the spiny pocket mouse, the strangler fig, the white- headed capuchin, the devil’s fingers fungus, the spectacled bear, the dwarf squirrel, the river otter, the jaguarundi, the golden- headed quetzal, the black- and- chestnut eagle . . .
The little dog is called Cachorrita, which means ‘Little Puppy’, and she bites democratically, without distinction or favour between victims.
‘Howlers,’ says DeCoux. ‘Loudest animal on the planet. Louder than a jet plane taking off. They’re just talking, though. If they were roaring, well, you’d know about it. It’s loud from five kilometres away.’
An open- air library runs along two sides of the hexagon. I can see familiar spines: Ursula K. Le Guin, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, novels by John le Carré and lots of regional field guides.
I keep expecting to hear that Josef has been murdered, she’d said to me. It would be easy to arrange. If the forest has a guardian, that’s Josef, and he lives there by himself. There are people who want that forest for money, who are angry at his protection of the forest, at the Rights of Nature ruling. It would be simple to say he was drunk, he fell over . . . He is definitely at risk– and we have to protect him.
He snorts his derision at this. ‘So– I came here, and, well, I’ve been here ever since. The moral of this cautionary tale is: if you want to do something, you’d better watch out, because you might just end up doing it for the rest of your life!’
often tolerated or supported by the state; of a shadowy, powerful instrument of international law known innocuously as Investor– State Dispute Settlement, which gives private parties– typically foreign companies– the right to sue a sovereign nation in a forum other than that of the nation’s domestic courts, if they feel the state has failed to guarantee the terms of the investment;
‘I’m not strictly anti- birder,’ Giuliana says. ‘Some of my good friends are birders. I just prefer fungi to birds. A lot.’
She pauses. ‘The fuzz in the matrix. That’s still the best way I can describe it. I can say very definitely that it’s a communication– a two- way interaction. The fungi know I’m there, as well as the reverse. Fungi have a different vibration to plants and animals. The colours move differently, I find. And fungi have a . . . shine that’s different to the shine of plants. It’s more . . . opaque. And they have a very different energy than plants– much more of a watery or liquid feel.’
We could call it the ‘Solaris Problem’– the question of how on earth to open a plausible line of communication with a river– after Stanisław Lem’s 1961 SF novel Solaris, about a planet whose ocean behaves in ways that perplex the usual mechanistic reductions of water to matter. In ways, in fact, which seem to human observers to be intentional, sentient . . . alive.
‘Hola!’ I say to the mushroom. ‘Nice to meet you!’
‘The mining would kill this river stone- dead,’ says Giuliana. ‘If you take away the forest, you take away the rain and the mist– and so the river dies. Where they destroyed the forests to the north of here, the rivers don’t even run year- round now.’
‘You know, there are in fact three rivers flowing here, now, around us,’ says Giuliana. ‘There’s the one at our feet, the Río Los Cedros, the one we can all see and hear. Then there’s the one beneath our feet. That’s a fungal river. One of the things that ectomycorrhizal fungi do– and there will be thousands of miles of them in the soil beneath us– is to extend the area of water absorption for a tree or plant, connecting and creating a micro river system of water and nutrients that flows between trees, through the earth. And the volume of flow through these ecto- networks, because of the sheer extent of the mycelia, can be huge.’
Part II: Ghosts, Monsters and Angels (India)
‘Waiting is the act of witnessing life unfold beyond the constraints of one’s will,’ he wrote in one of the journals he kept.
Snakes played a conspicuous role in the life of Pathashaala, slipping in and out of drains, classrooms and playgrounds, and often ending up where humans did not want them. Yuvan generally took the side of the snakes, on the grounds that it was in fact humans who had ended up where snakes did not want them.
Moths to light, gecko to moths, snake to gecko.
Suddenly, Yuvan stops a passing pupil. ‘Wait, what fresh hell is this?!’ he exclaims. ‘Your T- shirt is mixing Marvel and DC characters? That’s heresy!’
The Uttarakhand judgment represented a first attempt to shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice. Since 2017 more Rights of Nature cases have been brought in India, and more judgments have followed. Among them, issued less than a year before I arrived in Chennai, was a high- court judgment recognizing the Rights of Nature across Chennai and the whole watery state of Tamil Nadu. ‘The natural environment is part of basic human rights of “right to life itself”,’ Justice S. Srimathy declared, but ‘the few remaining original forests– our biodiversity treasury– are being destroyed to make way for huge mines or dams or lucrative real estate projects. [This] is not sustainable development, it is sustainable destruction.’
‘You’re sleeping on former marsh while you’re here, Rob,’ says Yuvan. ‘Me too, as you saw: our apartment block is built over marsh. This whole city was once marsh, is now almost all real estate. I sometimes ask my students what the commonest marshland species is. They say the mosquito, or the pond heron, or the painted stork, of course. I say: No! It’s the IT professional! Four hundred and eighty IT companies or so on the Old Mahabalipuram Road alone– and all built on marsh and wetland!’
Many details of what is known as the ‘Coromandel Slave Trade’ are only now coming to light– for the Dutch have been more efficient than even the British at disguising the barbarisms of their empire.
Then Yuvan calls out excitedly, grips my shoulder and points. ‘Oh! There! Look! A mudskipper! Such a beauty! She has blue spots that shine when she’s angry.’
But fly- ash– even that produced by conventional power stations– is radioactive. The state knows this. The power- station administrators know this. Still, though, the villagers are building their houses from radioactive bricks.
‘But here in Ennore Creek, people have been deprived of the ability to dream. At one meeting we held, when I asked what they would want for the future here in the Ennore Creek, a villager replied, “We’re all getting cancer. It would be nice if we just got asthma.” That was her dream. Asthma rather than cancer.
Of all the threats sea turtles face, perhaps the greatest is climate change. Fascinatingly, the sex of a sea turtle hatchling is determined by the temperature at which the eggs gestate. The flip- point for sea turtle sexing in India is 31.5 ° C. Below that, the majority of eggs become male. Above that, the majority become female. Today, due to global warming, the sand on Chennai beach is reliably in the thirties, even as early in the year as February. The result is that future breeding ratios are heavily skewed.
Sperm whales sleep vertically in the water, as you’ll know, Rob, and the fisherfolk have told me that once or twice they have reached the canyons in their boats and found there the grey noses of several sleeping sperm whales sticking out of the water– “like pillars of stone in the ocean”, they said.’
‘Those will be turtle eggs on his head,’ says Arun. ‘We sometimes get people like him finding a nest and knowing what to do. They come from very far, often at the end of a night’s work, to bring the eggs to the hatchery. Such people ask for nothing.’
‘Don’t get too excited, Rob,’ says Arun. ‘She’ll probably be gull food within the hour.’
Part III: The Living River (Nitassinan/Canada)
‘Absolutely. We know for certain that whale communities teach one another. There’s the now- famous example of the orcas in the Gibraltar Straits who have shared both the knowledge of, and at some level the purpose behind, attacking the keels and rudders of sailing boats in the Straits. Or the example of sperm whales in the early decades of whaling, who taught each other to flee from whaling boats after the first few seasons of slaughter, and who then developed their counter- strategies not only laterally within social groups but also intergenerationally, with parents teaching calves.’
‘Like, do whales tell jokes?’ I say, flippantly.
‘That is a very good question,’ replies Wayne, seriously. ‘For if they don’t, if they only speak either sincerely or instrumentally, then might the humans who are newly able to “speak whale” actually introduce the concept of irony to the whale world, setting into motion a further twist in the Viconian spiral of time?’
Unlike many very good speakers, Wayne is a very good listener. There are also long periods of silence, which may last upwards of an hour. Words pour from Wayne, and then they don’t.
You might think it impossible to drown a river– but a dam can do this.
Hour after hour on the grey ribbon of road. Always the forest to our left, always the sea to our right. I have a growing sense of the immensity of this country, and the delusion of resource inexhaustibility, of infinite damage- absorption, that its scale must induce.
The rock over which the rivers crash is called the Canadian Shield by geologists. The Shield has the oldest surface rock in the world. Two of the most ancient rock samples that exist were taken from here: one dated to 4 billion years ago, the other to 4.8 billion– a mere 300 million years younger than the planet itself.
In the meantime, he finds that his nearly three- decade experience of keeping the chest has disclosed to him a life- rule which he recommends to others, including me: If you’re going to open Pandora’s Box, make sure to stand behind the lid when you do so.
Early in our acquaintance, I sense someone very moral. I also sense someone who has been born into the wrong century.
‘They call it the “Beaver Complex”,’ says Raph. ‘You know, the Québécois compulsion to just keep building dams.’
You know a lake is big, I think, when you speak of it having coasts, rather than shores.
I remember the clacking branches of tens of thousands of ash trees on the South Downs in England, all brittled by ash dieback; the sycamore seedlings starting to colonize where the ashes were dying. Tides of trees, moving back and forth in symphony with each other’s fates over decades, centuries. If you pull the temporal lens back far enough, you come to see that trees are migrants too. They walk, move, shift their boundaries. They suffer plagues and pandemics, like us.
We are watching the falls when Danny says, unprompted: ‘Of course a river is alive! I mean, to me it’s self- evident that that’s the case. I’ve basically given my whole life to rivers. I can’t not feel them in that way.’
‘Right across where we’re standing– along this line. They’ve got their eye on this site because a lot of the hard work has been done for them by geology; they can join up all this bedrock, then drive down into the narrow channel of Saxophone itself, and so create the barrage. It would flood all the way back up the Valley of Eagles, the whole valley. It would create a reservoir all the way to Lac Magpie, en fait.’
Year after year it must have survived inundation, ice, the bitter cold of winter and the brutal floods of spring, holding its ground on this scrape of a home. It could well be decades, even centuries old, though it’s less than a foot high. Research into the black spruce trees of the harsh terrain of northern Labrador has shown that some small trees– not even the height of a person, with trunks perhaps only a few inches in diameter– are as much as four hundred years old. So extreme are the conditions that trees may only grow a ring one cell thick in a year. One cell!
‘I’ve been thinking through some of the hard matters raised by the declaration you read from last night,’ Wayne says after a while, ‘indeed by the whole Rights of Nature movement, and those phrases like “living entity” and “fundamental rights”. Behind all of this lurks the surely unanswerable question: how do we know what the river wants?’
‘Over the course of this journey, I’ve sometimes wondered,’ says Wayne, ‘are we a client species for the river? Is Hydro- Québec, in fact, a client entity for the river, performing functions the river wants to have performed on its behalf? The thought- experiment is worth undertaking, if only to jolt the mind out of its usual grooves of proprietary thinking about “more- than- human” presences. But I remain sceptical of the notion of giving voice to or for a river. It strikes me as both insufficient and fraught with the risk of ventriloquizing. Better by far to help the river do as it will, in my opinion, either directly on its behalf (if a credible line of communication can be opened with it at some future point), or else by protecting a context in which it is able to do its own thing, however inexplicably. Which for this river might mean flooding as well as flowing; backing up as well as running on.’
‘Hopeful!’ He gestures at the Gorge. ‘Look– a river like that can cut a fucking mountain in half, a mountain made of the oldest, hardest rocks on the planet. Are you telling me that it can’t also damage ideological structures; that this god can’t in some avatar of itself erode at least some of the superstructures of terminal- stage capitalism?!’
why should a god make choices we recognize as choices?