In November 2023, the Colorado River Indian Tribes passed a historic resolution granting legal personhood to the Colorado River. Chair Amelia Flores put it simply: "The river is a living being, just like we are living beings."
The Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand won legal personhood for the Whanganui River in 2017 after a 150-year legal battle, recognizing it as "an indivisible and living whole." Colombia did the same for the Atrato River in 2016.
Indigenous and First Nations peoples have been right all along. The idea that a river can be owned, allocated, diverted, and depleted to the point of ecological death is not a water management problem. It is a philosophical failure — a fundamental misconception about what nature is and what our relationship to it should be.
We should be thinking about “what is humanity’s relationship with water” and not how do I “manage” water.
More on what I believe about personhood, people, and optimism in the next several days.
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