Can my river have rights? An auto-ethnographic exploration of changing people-nature relations

Abstract (English)

This paper proposes to address the methods of working with waters and people by thinking through a personal process of activism, fighting for the rights of a river in the United Kingdom. I approach this with theoretical and ethnographic tools informed by Indigenous knowledge and explorations of the anthropocene within Medical Anthropology, and apply these to a local experience of community activism.

75% of river in the UK now pose a risk to human health, yet waterways, rivers, seas and oceans are neglected areas of environmental activism, and only recently have
environmental groups begin to realise the vitality of the 'life' of rivers and seas to planetary health.

Although legislation exists to protect for example marine conservation areas, and in the UK swimming groups can apply for ‘bathing water status’ these rights must coexist with legal frameworks protecting corporations, water companies and with western paradigms of ownership. Human hierarchies of being are imposed among themselves and with others, hence water, marine life, the lives of marginalised people who live in or near water come up against the protections for our imperial mode of being (Brand and Wissen).

When a right it claimed it is not the end of a conversation, but the beginning, in which rights are weighed against interests of other rights holders. Giving rights to nature does not prepare them from global power relations and the interests of corporations but begins to open a debate about the relationship between people and water. A move away from idea that state law is the answer will be a necessary condition for saving waterways and natural environments, and we must supplement these with ground up community processes of community activism, hence the need to combine academic understandings with hands on processes of activism.

The paper is an auto-ethnography of the process of applying for the rights of water for a river in the United Kingdom as a process of understanding the meanings of this ethnographically, at community, legislative and global levels. I will raise questions around how we make the case for the rights of water, as people, what barriers we are up against and how to navigate them, though the lens of an ethnographer with a longstanding commitment to understanding and working with Indigenous people-nature relations.