There is a river in Wales which snakes between low hills and on certain nights glows like liquid silver in the light of the moon. In daylight, it can be so still that it’s only by the gurgles it makes as it slides across fossil-filled stones from another age that you know it’s alive.
A man from London bought it and fell in love with its independence and connectivity with places far away. But this was ownership of a kind he had never encountered before. First the river was alive and mobile, changing its pace and dimensions without any reference to him. The winter rise could be ten feet or more, the narrow ribbon becoming a moving mass of water as wide as a motorway. Overnight it could freeze into a solid slab of ice, roofing over fields and hedgerows.
But it was also a prisoner. It had no control over the effluent which ran off fields further upstream nor the toxic waste from the newly built battery hen farm over the hill. It had no say in the destruction of its protective hedgerows and habitat as the buckets of giant bulldozers left the wounded limbs of oaks and sallow hanging in the wind. Kingfisher, heron, salmon and otter disappeared with the trees in a rerun of Gilgamesh taking his axe 4000 years ago to the cedar forests on the banks of the Euphrates. Now, very late in the day, river ‘ghosts’ are being resurrected and river ‘rights’ accorded in dozens of countries since the first epic decision in New Zealand to declare the Wanganui River alive with the full rights of a legal person.
These ideas have now washed up on the shores of other countries. In Britain charters of rights are being drawn up for the Ouse, the Don, the Derwent and the Clyde. A group of Guardians protects the River Roding in Essex. In 2021 Canada recognised the rights of the Mutuhekau Shipu not to be drowned by a hydro dam project. In the same year the cloud forest Los Cedros was accorded the legal right to life under the Ecuadorian Constitution. It might be a step too far to similarly honour the beauty of that liquid silver tributary of the Wye in Wales, but ecocide of our rivers, by design or default from mining, pollution and damming is increasingly seen as contrary to the ‘natural contract’ between man and water. Gilgamesh is at last sheathing his axe.