This Ocean Wave Has Rights

This Ocean Wave Has Rights  

December 23, 2024 at 08:30PM

The rights-of-nature movement is growing. “Over the past two decades, more than 140 rights-of-nature provisions have been implemented around the world,” reports Kristen French. There are individual laws that recognize the rights of the Ganges River in India, Mount Taranaki in New Zealand, and the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, for example. For Nautilus, French writes about the efforts by locals in Regencia Augusta, a village in Brazil where the Rio Doce meets the sea, to protect the region’s waters. The river was severely contaminated after a mining wastewater dam failed in 2015, which decimated wildlife, destroyed vegetation, and created a toxic and heavily polluted landscape. The community is still recovering.

As of August 2024, however, the “Regencia wave” is now considered a person in the eyes of the law, and has “the intrinsic right to existence, regeneration, and restoration and to the natural flow of the river that feeds it.” French talks with some of the residents about what this means for their community.

Some 16 days after the collapse, the waste reached the sea, and a giant plume spread hundreds of miles out into the ocean and along the coast. The water outside Regencia turned a deep shade of rust. Vultures descended on the beaches to pick off the dead fish. Fishing, swimming, and surfing in the affected waters were prohibited. Barros moved to a city three hours south and wasn’t sure he would return. Fiorot shut down the surf school he ran and never reopened it. Tourism evaporated. As mining waste built up along the bottom of the river and at its mouth, the force of the river was nearly extinguished. It stopped moving torrents of water into the ocean and sediment into the seabed. The wave lost its perfect primordial shape.

The spiritual relationship to the river was “100 percent severed,” Barcelos said. “If you cannot drink the river water, if you cannot swim in the river, if you cannot fish in the river, there’s no way to relate to the river.” The river has become “a source of fear,” added Augusto da Silva.

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/23/this-ocean-wave-has-rights/
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