Self-driving tourists entered nature areas along the road in northern Tibet.
Photo Credit: Hanchu Liu

By Joshua Cohen, Charles Dannreuther, Markus Fraundorfer, Colin Makie, Julia Martin-Ortega, Anna Mdee, and Nicolas Sutil.

Read the full paper here.

Damming, pollution, climate change and other pressures mean that only a third of the world’s rivers remain free-flowing. Global migratory fish populations have dropped 76% since 1970 and freshwater vertebrate populations have dropped 83% overall in the same period. Part of the reason for the dire situation of the world’s rivers lies in a long history of transformations in the ways in which humans know, relate to, and value freshwater. Over time, overriding economic, technological and philosophical processes and logics have privileged relating to waters as things rather than as kin.

Understanding that history, we argue, suggests other possibilities for how humans relate to water, including moving away from what we characterize as the derangement of relationship with our ‘riverkin.’ Kinship with waters has figured centrally in the vital, primarily Indigenous-led struggles for the recognition of the personhood of rivers in New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. This marks an important potential inflection point in how humanity relates to the nonhuman world, but much less so if limited only to the ‘local,’ and the ‘Indigenous’.

We argue that once again privileging relating to waters as kin also in the very centres of colonial-modernity might allow a fuller, more radical seizing of this moment. Offering the example of the United Kingdom, the literature discussed in this paper suggests that this proposition might not be quite as improbable as it could first appear.