In early May, an orange floral fire burned across Northern California river banks in celebration: an explosion of poppies, goldenrod and other native plants, marking the first spring after the biggest de-damming project in U.S. history liberated the Klamath River from its confinements.
The recovery of the wider Klamath watershed began last year with the demolition of four dams, and the free-flowing river now provides roughly 400 miles of restored habitat for salmon and steelhead trout. It’s also creating wetlands, helping the regrowth of forests and brush and leading to major improvements in water quality.
The Klamath’s revival is a beacon of hope at a time of deep ecological gloom for the United States. President Trump and his administration have made clear their intention to drastically de-prioritize the natural world in favor of economic interests. Rivers and other freshwater bodies are among the ecosystems most vulnerable to this rapid reorientation.
In declaring a national energy emergency, a Trump executive order effectively waived large portions of the Clean Water Act to fast-track energy projects, weakening protections for free-flowing rivers and increasing the risk of watershed pollution from mining and drilling. River health is also now threatened by the administration’s drive to expand American timber production; logging degrades water quality by increasing soil erosion and sediment runoff. By narrowing the definition of “the waters of the United States,” the Environmental Protection Agency has made it easier for pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides and mining waste to enter bodies of water.
The doctrine of human supremacy, which waxes strong in the current administration, portrays life as a hierarchy with humans at the top, rather than a web within which humans are entangled. Consider that a scant 0.0002 percent of Earth’s total water flows in rivers at any given time, yet rivers have been vital, fragile accomplices to human flourishing for thousands of years. To view rivers only as sources and drains is to reduce them to base functions rather than to see them as the life-giving, world-shaping forces they are.
Over the past 20 years, a powerful movement has emerged that contests human exploitation of the natural world. It is usually known as the rights of nature movement, and it calls for recognizing the inherent, inalienable rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist and flourish. At its best, the rights of nature movement challenges anthropocentric presumptions, which are embedded in our laws and imaginations.
Rivers have become this movement’s particular focus and rallying point. In 2008, in an act of great moral imagination, Ecuador revised its constitution to recognize the rights of nature and make the country the guarantor of those rights. In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that proposed gold mining would violate the rights of a cloud forest and its associated river system; the ruling forced two mining companies to abandon their claims to the area. In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, the Maori word for New Zealand, was recognized in a parliamentary act as a “spiritual and physical entity.” A body of river guardians was appointed to speak for the river, with the mandate of protecting and enhancing its mauri, or life force.
The momentum and visibility of the rights of nature movement are snowballing. For the past two years the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for nature, has been awarded to water-rights activists. In 2024, the prize recognized the lawyer Teresa Vicente for her work saving the grievously polluted Mar Menor lagoon in Spain from ecological collapse; her grass roots campaign led in 2022 to the Spanish Parliament granting legal rights to the lagoon, a first for Europe. This April, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari received the prize for a three-year campaign resulting in the landmark legal recognition of the Marañón River in Peru as a living entity with the inherent rights to exist, flow, give life to animals and plants and remain free of pollution.
If the idea of a river bearing rights seems radical to the point of being absurd, remember that corporations, under U.S. and British law, are nonhuman entities with a wide suite of rights, including the right to a fair trial and rights to certain privacies.
Perhaps surprisingly, the rights of nature movement is extremely active in the United States. The Eco Jurisprudence Monitor, which tracks such legal initiatives around the world, details 156 rights of nature initiatives in America, far more than in any other country. Among them is the Yurok Tribe’s 2019 resolution, which declared the rights of the Klamath River “to exist, flourish and naturally evolve” and “to have a clean and healthy environment free from pollutants.”
Mr. Trump’s administration will surely be hostile to rights of nature thinking. For a fundamental incommensurability exists between a worldview that perceives rivers as assets and a worldview that sees them as alive. To recognize rivers as life-giving forces and as rights-bearing presences is a profound and hopeful position. It offers philosophical grounds for resistance to the present administration’s shortsighted drive to gut environmental regulation and reduce the natural world to dollar value.
Rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance, they revive with remarkable speed. Lazarus-like, their life pours back. The first salmon was detected swimming upstream of where the Klamath dams had once stood just three days after the completion of the dams’ removal last September. Within a month, 6,000 salmon had migrated up into the newly accessible habitat. As Barry McCovey, a senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, told the BBC, “the river is healing itself.” And as rivers heal, they heal us in return.
Robert Macfarlane is a poet, a professor of English at Cambridge University and the author of “Is a River Alive?”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Does a River Have Legal Rights? appeared first on New York Times.
