The Rights of Rivers

Healthy rivers and riparian ecosystems are teaming with life, but should rivers themselves be considered alive? The question is central to the growing rights-of-nature movement that claims that ecosystems and entities, like rivers, have legal rights. After Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution, lawyers employed the new personhood status to stop mining companies from clearing a section of the Los Cedros River and its surrounding biodiverse cloud forest. Granting rivers moral standing comes as over-damming, pollution, and climate change have put them in crisis globally. Writer Robert Macfarlane explores how seeing rivers as living beings rather than just resources – a change he calls “a great act of moral imagination” – could help save our watersheds and rivers, upon which all life depends.  

Guest: 

Robert Macfarlane – Writer and Professor of Literature and Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and author of “Is a River Alive?” 

Originally posted June 23, 2025

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake 

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