Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.com is excited about the latest move of the environment into the legal sphere – a suit filed asking that the Colorado River be recognized as a person.
Corporations have rights … why not rivers?
While the unenlightened might see it as a daft idea, others see it as making perfect sense. If corporations can have personhood and enjoy some of the rights that people do, why not a river? An important, life-giving, ancient waterway that is being abused to no end, at that.
While a new lawsuit based on the concept is probably not a sure bet to win, it raises an important question once again: Should natural entities be given legal rights?
I think the analogy with a corporation is rather flawed because a corporation, through its aggregated human controllers, has a self-directed existence. A river, on the other hand, is a non-sentient flow of water under the influence (call it control if you wish) of gravity as modified by its riverbed, topologically and materially. It makes no cognitive choices.
Suppose a river was given legal personhood. Several questions are raised in my mind:
- Since it’s not a cognitive entity, it must be represented. Who gets that right? What happens when an industrial group gains the rights to represent a river it wants to use for dumping pollution?
- When the river damages a human installation, how will the river make the person whole?
- Can one river sue another?
I think this is a dead-end approach to trying to save the environment from over-exploitation, because the river cannot function fully – even partially – as a person. But it does have a rhetorical significance in that it should bring into sharper focus the need to consider the viability of various natural phenomenon in the future. According them some independent status as if they are reasoning creatures is a mistake, but understanding that such phenomenon gave rise to us, support us, and their absence will destroy us, is certainly a worthwhile goal. Attempting to use a personhood as a proxy for this important requirement will, in the literal sense, fail.
It’s also important to note how this usurps the proper role of government. Protection of the environment has become one of the most important roles of government, brought on by our burgeoning over-population and our preoccupation with material goods; as the environment is under-represented in private sector transactions, it only makes sense that government speaks for that which speaks in actions rather than words. Just because the EPA is currently under the direction of one of the most mis-guided assholes ever appointed to the position doesn’t mean that the EPA will continue to be misled in the future.
Contrari-wise, placing a river in the private domain potentially shields it from the public scrutiny which it so richly deserves. Like many such natural phenomenon, a river can affect literally millions of people, so making it a person in its own right doesn’t guarantee it any safety at all. As an actor in the private sphere, I see all manner of unintended consequences raining down on it – and its neighbors.
But hopefully as a rhetorical device it will succeed in focusing our attention on the environment and how important it is to us.
As if three hurricanes hadn’t done that already.
