
Should Rivers Have Same Legal Rights as Humans? Growing Number of Voices Say Yes - pseudolus
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/740604142/should-rivers-have-same-legal-rights-as-humans-a-growing-number-of-voices-say-ye
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wpietri
Honestly, this sounds like a reasonable hack.

The dominant notion of property rights, wherein a given individual can do
absolutely anything to something as long as they can get a government to say
it's theirs, ends up being pretty flawed. E.g., the massive negative
externalities that caused us to eventually adopt things like the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act.

I'd rather see a more thoughtful and nuanced system that carefully weighs
competing interests. But people being what they are, giving legal personhood
to rivers seems less ridiculous than giving it to corporations.

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chr1
Corporations are groups of people that behave at least somewhat similar to
people, nothing about rivers allows analogy to a person.

E.g. do i harm a river when throw a bottle into it, or do i give her a toy to
happily play with? It surely looks happy carrying trash, after all she often
takes trees and boulders by herself.

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devnulloverflow
The word "corporation", even in the legal sense includes things like towns. In
a slightly broader sense, it includes things like provinces and countries. So
why could it not include something like the community of people who live by
and or use water from the river?

Now I can see all sorts of _detailed_ problems with this (for example people
upstream might have opposite interests from downstream, so the collective is
not a coherent person-like entity). But I don't see a _fundamental_ difference
between this kind of corporation and that of the existing kinds.

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yyyk
Your suggestion is not problematic per se, but it's not the one advanced in
the article. There are some very significant differences.

First, if it's the _people_ who have the rights and not the river, than they
can waive their rights as well. It's quite possible to imagine people who
prefer development to a pristine river - this was the choice of every
developing country after all.

Second, would the people have standing if the developments in question do not
affect them or affect them positively? (e.g. diverting the river downstream,
or drying up some swamps to halt some malaria-like disease).

The result is the giving communities those legal rights won't do for the
purposes of those advancing this doctrine - many communities' political
representatives will just waive the rights immediately, perhaps in exchange
for some investment or another.

The purpose of this legal doctrine seems to be to stop developments even if
the elected authorities agree to them, so they have to give the rights to
something which can't waive them or trade them for something else.

Even if you could get one lawyer/rights group to agree a certain development
is worth it, there would always be some other group ready to advance a claim
in the "river's" name.

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PhilWright
Clearly a river cannot have legal rights. If the river bursts its banks and
floods my house, can I sue the river? Clearly I cannot because how do I sue
the river, who represents the river and how does the river have money to pay
me? The river cannot appointment executives to represent its interests.

In reality the local government acts for the protection of the environment, so
why pretend the river has rights? If you want cleaner rivers then pass
legislation with appropriate level of punishment such as fines/prison.

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devoply
River could do all of these. River can become a corporation which provides
water as its main source of revenue in return for money which is held in a
trust and used to pay people employed by the river to carry out its business.
There are many implications to this idea, but it seems pretty sound
alternative to having a river owned by shareholder for instance who pursue a
profit motive.

The point of such an environmental corporation would be to ensure its survival
over the long run, rather than shareholder profit. Could you sue a river,
maybe, though the lawyers for the river would argue that the blame is not the
river's but an act of god out of the control of the river and those who manage
it.

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PhilWright
The river does not have a mind, so any decisions on what actions to take in
the name of the river are actually conducted by a person/organisation. In that
case it is the person/organisation that becomes responsible. So the river is
just a pointer deference to another entity. Just like a corporation is a
pointer deference to the shareholders.

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devoply
As I said the point of the river, is longevity and therefore just as a
corporation optimizes for corporate profit a corporation representing the
river optimizes for the river's longevity. I don't see how much difference
there is between any corporation representing the profit motive of
shareholders vs. a corporation representing the environmental motive of a
natural resource. They are both simply ideas personified.

Currently people simply plunder natural resources where their longevity is an
after thought and not really incorporated into the profiteering of their
consumption. This has to change.

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tathougies
Why is the point of a river longevity? Left to their own devices, rivers
change course and dry up. The key characteristic of a river is a flow of water
not longevity

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XaoDaoCaoCao
On the surface, it seems like a good idea especially in the face of upcoming
"water wars" if some transformational technology involving cheap clean water
isn't trotted out by mid-century.

If Capital wants billions of new consumer and their resultant markets, Capital
better steward the natural resources that enable those billions to thrive.

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lightlyused
Ohio just banned this.
[http://www.norwalkreflector.com/Government/2019/07/18/Ohio-l...](http://www.norwalkreflector.com/Government/2019/07/18/Ohio-
legislature-bans-rights-of-nature-enforcement) (self paying video)

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amelius
Reminds me of the discussion of the tragedy of the commons from yesterday.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602217)

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pvaldes
A river receiving the same treatment as a corporation looks a smart idea that
will solve a lot of problems. Can Columbia be purchased and merged in Amazon
yet?

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closeparen
Could Chicago exist if this were the law of the land from the beginning?

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smt88
Who cares? Whether the answer were yes or no, it wouldn't have any bearing on
the current discussion.

"This policy would've been bad in the past" not an argument against that
policy now, especially ~180 yrs later.

Also, why is an alternate reality without Chicago a nightmare scenario?

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closeparen
If a policy would have prevented something we now enjoy from emerging in the
past, we should at least be concerned about what it might suppress tomorrow.

Total environmental damage would be a lot worse if the populations of
skyscraper cities were instead scattered across a broader, less intense
sprawl. Environmental regulation can sometime be counterproductive that way.

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tathougies
The framers of the constitutuon recognized that land has rights too and made
sure that geography, not just population, was part of the democracy via
institutions such as the electoral college. Very forward thinking

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smt88
I think this is stretching the stated intent of the Electoral College to the
point of being disingenuous. The framers did want "land" to affect
presidential election, but not because they wanted the land itself to be a
separate legal entity.

Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

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tathougies
I never said they wanted land to be a separate entity but rather they sought
to take into account geographic interests and not just individual ones when
writing the constitution

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smt88
Agreed, but "geographic interests" was an economic distinction. I don't see
how it has any relationship to the original article, which is about giving
rights to literal pieces of the Earth.

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tathougies
Because the first step in the law recognizing something has rights is first
realizing they have interests to be protected.

