Paper short abstract:

Focusing on efforts to ‘speak for the river’, this paper considers indigenous and environmental activists’ campaigns for non-human rights and more sustainable human-environmental engagements. It asks how such values can be realised to support a Utopian vision that is vital for all living kinds.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on efforts to ‘speak for the river’, this paper considers the efforts of international indigenous networks and environmental activists to promote non-human rights. Place-based communities around the world have long expressed concerns about rampant environmental exploitation and the damaging effects on their sacred landscapes. The 1990s brought Kogi warnings to ‘Younger Brother’. Australian Aboriginal communities continue to critique European environmental practices. Recent years have brought protests against oil pipelines by the Dakota Sioux at Standing Rock; successful campaigns to give constitutional protection to ‘Pachamama’ in South America; and legal actions by Māori communities and others to establish the personhood and legal rights of rivers.

Such efforts mesh with campaigns by environmental activists to persuade the United Nations to issue a declaration on the Rights of Nature, and to push the International Criminal Court to define ‘ecocide’ as an actionable crime. Though highly diverse, these groups are united in envisioning an alternate future: a vital Utopia in which non-human rights are not sacrificed to short-term exigencies and desires, and which diverts humankind from its current trajectory towards anthropogenically-induced ecological collapse. Their passionate concern is echoed in scholarly discourses arguing for societies to rethink assumptions of patriarchal dominion over Nature, and to adopt more reciprocal modes of environmental engagement. Taking Māori innovations as an example, the paper considers how such a change in values might be implemented in mainstream environmental governance. It asks how anthropologists can assist dialogues promoting both human and non-human rights, and achieving a balance between these.