There has been a lot of discussion – and increasing action – over giving England’s rivers legal rights – as the move by Lewes District Council in East Sussex to recognise the fundamental rights of the River Ouse is the first of its kind in the UK.
This week’s BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week looked at ‘Advocating for nature’ and among the guests in the studio, there was the nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta, both with books out.
In his latest, Is this river alive? Robert Macfarlane looks at the lives, deaths and rights of our rivers The Guardian’s review covered all these facets, including:
“River rights” have become the commonest form of novel legal subjectivity in dozens of countries from Australia to Canada. A Universal Declaration of River Rights has been drawn up that recognises rivers as living entities with fundamental rights, including the right to flow and the right to be free from pollution. These ideas have now washed up on British shores. In early March, Lewes district council in East Sussex agreed to champion a charter of rights for the River Ouse, and river rights campaigns are emerging for the Clyde, the Don, the Derwent and the Rye.
In another Guardian piece, “A Barrister for the Earth” by lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta is reviewed through a series of questions: ‘All other avenues have been exhausted’: Is legal action the only way to save the planet?
The more cases she has worked on, the more Feria-Tinta has come to see commonalities in how seemingly very different communities relate to their natural environments. At the start of 2025, she finalised her legal advice about Chester, the tree in Southend that the council intended to chop down. She set out the council’s obligations on the climate under the European convention on human rights. As she drafted the document, she found herself thinking about the Salween river in Myanmar, where she had advised an Indigenous community fighting a dam project some years earlier. Both the tree in Essex and the river in Myanmar were seen by the authorities as expendable, rather than as living entities valued by the people around them. “Whether it’s a single tree, or a whole community depending on a river, what is at stake is the future of humanity,” she told me.
A couple of months later, on a blustery day in early spring, I met Feria-Tinta in the village on the border of Surrey and Sussex where she now lives. Mud squelched underfoot as we walked through woodland, stepping over twisted tree roots, past banks of heather and marshy pools of water. “Back in 2016, I was one of the pioneers doing this [work], but now it’s become mainstream, and it’s a knowledge you can’t be without,” she said excitedly, reaching out a hand to help me climb over a tree felled by a recent storm. “We need everyone.”
On the border of Surrey and Sussex:
[Photograph: Georgina Richards] Laws of nature: could UK rivers be given the same rights as people? | Rivers | The Guardian