Streams of Consciousness

Robert Macfarlane believes that “there are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” He is referring, in this context, to the rights-of-nature movement, a global, grassroots campaign, driven largely by Indigenous communities, to grant legal personhood to rivers, forests, mountains, and their multitudinous kin. If a corporation can be considered a person in the eyes of the law, shouldn’t these natural systems have voices too? Rather than treating them as property that’s ripe for exploitation, shouldn’t people value their right to subsist and persist? This idea lies at the heart of the British nature writer’s Is a River Alive?, which takes readers to Ecuador, India, and Quebec, where locals have rallied to defend aquatic landscapes. It also flows through Theory of Water, by the Nishnaabeg scholar, author, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose slim, complex web of a book calls upon readers to radically rethink how they view the...