See that river up there?

That’s the Whanganui River and it flows through New Zealand’s North Island. It begins its journey on the north-western side of the Mount Tongariro active volcano and makes its way through the hills and mountains until it meets the Tasman Sea.

It sounds really nice, right?

Yeah, don’t be fooled. If you mess with it, it can and will sue you, because, in 2017, it became a person.

BBC explains:

The Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, had been fighting for more than 160 years to get legal protection for the river. The Whanganui tribes have nurtured a deep connection with the waterway for at least 880 years – more than 700 years before European settlers arrived. They have relied on it for much of their food, travelled it by canoe and built villages on its banks.

In Maori culture, tupuna, or “ancestors”, live on in nature so they believe that they have a sacred duty to protect the landscape and the people who lived there before them. Activists used these beliefs to move to have the river recognised as a human being, and won their case.

Environmental personhood has been studied as a way of protecting nature since at least the 1970s. In his book Should Trees Have Standing?, American law professor Christopher D Stone argued that environmental interests should be recognised apart from human ones. His work influenced Maori academics James Morris and Jacinta Ruru, who wrote Giving Voice to Rivers, making a case for why waterways in New Zealand should be seen as legal people.

When a river is granted personhood, it takes on all the rights of a human being – including the right to take other human beings to court.

I assume that would happen with the help of the environmentalists trying to protect it.

Other rivers, around the world, have since received legal rights including all of the rivers in Bangladesh.

I reckon this could be a pretty effective way to protect the planet.

[source:bbc]