Dreams and steps that united me
to the voice of the river,
moving beings,
bursts of light in history,
tercets lit like lamps.
The bread and the blood sang
with the nocturnal voice of water.1
Pablo Neruda (1954, pp. 54-55)
With this imaginative poem, Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda expressed the deep interconnections between the biophysical and cultural attributes of rivers. To perceive these biocultural interconnections, the poet listens to the “voice of the river.” Neruda’s poetic sensitivity is consistent with an ecological understanding of river ecosystems, which transport nutrients and furnish humans and other living beings with essential habitats. Rivers flow through heterogeneous landscapes and provide biological corridors for algae, plants, insects, and other invertebrates, as well as for fishes, birds, and other vertebrates. They also transport essential mineral nutrients from the highlands to the coast. Rivers are the arteries that connect the mountains and other lands with the sea. These fluvial arteries have sustained the life of diverse cultures on different continents and times. However, the complex ways rivers integrate biophysical or cultural elements are not captured by the narratives of progress we have inherited from the 20th century. Based on these narratives, rivers have been understood and exploited as mere water channels. These narratives fail to understand and value biological and cultural (i.e., biocultural) interconnections, which are vital not only for freshwater organisms but also for human life.
In this article, I criticize the problematic one-dimensional vision that considers rivers only as channels of water or fuel for hydroelectric plants. I contrast this vision with other ontologies about rivers that inspire novel social-environmental policies, which value rich biological and cultural diversities and their interrelationships (i.e., biocultural diversity). With a biocultural understanding of rivers, we can value them as ecosystems that provide habitats essential for the well-being of human communities and other living beings. To this end, I propose the “3Hs” (Habits, Habitats, co-in-Habitants) conceptual framework of my biocultural ethic that values and defends the vital links between river ecosystems and human cultures.
Supported by diverse disciplines and complementary forms of knowledge that underpin new ways of river ecosystem management and governance, a biocultural understanding of rivers is present in contemporary sciences and philosophies and in the cultural traditions of indigenous and other local communities who have long inhabited river ecosystems (Santafe‐Troncoso & Loring, 2021). These communities establish dialectical relationships of co-inhabitation with rivers, which have given rise to multiple cultural, symbolic, and material expressions. Based on an apprehension of the biocultural interconnections sustaining the well-being of human communities and other living beings, I propose an ethic of co-inhabitation with rivers. Although in this article I focus on rivers, I hope that the “3 Hs” heuristic model of biocultural ethics can contribute to examining and solving complex problems of climate change (and, more broadly, global socio-environmental change, e.g., water crises, degradation of habitats, and displacement of local communities from their territories), which generate growing issues of poverty and inequity, as well as accelerated losses of biological and cultural diversity.
Fluvial ontologies
Rivers are much more than mere channels of water. They are biocultural communities where biophysical and cultural elements get assembled. Rivers represent ancestral relationships with pre-Columbian peoples. Most cultures have emerged associated with them. Today, rivers have complex relationships with contemporary practices of husbandry, agriculture, mining, energy, and urbanization (United Nations, 2014). Observed from a biocultural perspective, rivers can invite us to reappreciate their importance in life. They encourage us to critically rethink (and transform) the one-dimensional concept that considers them as plain flows of water. This mentality has promoted the conversion of rivers into paved, engineered channels since modernity.
The one-dimensional conception of rivers is a myth—and a detrimental one. Today, many governments assert that if dams or canals are not built, the water of rivers is irreversibly lost when it reaches the sea. Former president of Peru, Alan García, wrote an unpopular article entitled “The dog-in-the-manger syndrome” (2007), expressing criticism because today “rivers run on both sides of the mountain range, and they flow into the ocean without producing electricity”2 (p. 3) due to local communities that have resources they do not exploit and do not allow anyone else to exploit. His vision expresses the modernist and individualistic spirit of Thomas Hobbes, who was unable to understand the interdependence between cultures and rivers.
Large-scale water infrastructure projects became paradigms of the 20th century. Rivers were pumped, channeled, stratified, dammed, and diverted. Diverse water bodies (rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, estuaries, and aquifers) were transformed for one-dimensional purposes of agricultural irrigation and energy, supplying urban areas, or merely favoring economic interests (Kibel, 2007). The World Commission on Dams (WCD) has estimated that, between 1945 and 2000, 80 million people were evicted worldwide to build large dams, mainly affecting indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities who were forced to migrate from their flooded ancestral territories (Johnston, 2012; WCD, 2000). Consequently, more than half a billion people dependent on rivers have lost their habitats and life habits, and consequently, their well-being was degraded (Richter et al., 2010). The transformation of lakes, rivers, and natural aquifers generates significant impact and drastic losses in hydroecological, biological, and cultural diversity: water masses “have flowed” homogenized into the 21st century.
Using the “3Hs” model (Habits, Habitats, co-in-Habitants) of a biocultural ethic (Rozzi, 2012), we can distinguish how the habit of channeling water courses has led to homogeneous habitats characterized by paved channels with the consequent elimination of ancestral communities of co-inhabitants (human and other-than-human).3 Complementarily, by valuing the indissoluble links among diverse co-inhabitants, their life habits, and shared habitats, the “3Hs” model can guide us to reconnect human societies with rivers. Free flowing rivers can transform both our mindsets and biophysical habitats. Adopting a biocultural ethic inspires us to revalue and defend our multifaceted relations with them. By “flowing” with the rivers and their communities of life, the practice of a biocultural ethic becomes an ethic of co-inhabitation for river stewards. This ethic demands us to care for the habitats and well-being of diverse human and other-than-human co-inhabitants.
To facilitate a biocultural understanding of the relevance of the natural course of rivers, I refer to philosopher Irene Klaver (2018), who revalues the concept of meander or the sinuous winding of waters. Since early modernity, rivers have been homogenized through channels for commercial river transportation, property boundary determination, and urban planning. “Meandering” took on a negative connotation, synonymous with wandering and rambling aimlessly through endless discussions, thereby disturbing the modern concept of “progress” (Rozzi et al., 1998). However, at the end of the 20th century, the ecological and cultural values of meandering began to be re-understood (Klaver, 2013). Klaver has contrasted the one-dimensional mentality of progress with emerging ways of thinking that (re)value biocultural interconnections embedded in the rivers’ meandering. In Klaver’s words (2018):
[One-dimensional thinking and consequent] homogenization and utilitarian approach to water stands as a powerful and useful exemplar of Ricardo Rozzi’s (2013) 3Hs model of biocultural ethics: it shows a habit (damming, canalizing, selling, and diverting waterways) that leads to homogenous habitats (infrastructure, paved-over or concrete “riverbeds,” and aqueducts) with a consequent reduction of communities of co-inhabitants. A 3Hs focus enables a reorientation toward reconnecting to rivers and revaluing, revitalizing, and reimagining riverine relations within processes of biocultural conservation and cultural diversification. Such a new cultural habit, including a biocultural mentality, would diversify habitats and broaden the spectrum of coinhabitants’ survival and well-being. (p. 50)
To help rethink rivers, Klaver has focused on two key riverine components: meandering and riverspheres. She interrelates their conceptual and material dimensions, highlighting thus their interactive dynamics. Klaver’s reconceptualization of rivers resounds with Neruda’s poem “The River” and my biocultural systemic and contextual approach that integrates the biophysical, material, and symbolic-linguistic cultural dimensions of rivers and other habitats. In her analysis of rivers as biocultural systems, Klaver (2013) combines ontological, epistemological, political, cultural, and phenomenological components, stating that:
[T]o create ordinary practices, places, and technologies of engagement [reconnection] … broadens the notion of ethics in the direction of ethos, attitude or habit, which in its Latinate form is related to habitare, living in a place (Rozzi et al. 2008). Humans as situational beings are in situ, in a certain site or place. Such an expanded sense of ethics as ethos means that our endeavor of linking ecology and philosophy has also ontological (exploring the realm of being), epistemological, political, cultural and experiential components. This provides further tools to conceptualize and practice ways of thinking and working together as ecologists and philosophers. (p. 89)
Klaver’s philosophy transits from ontology to an ethic grounded in material and cultural spaces. Analogical thinking links biogeophysical forms of river meander with nonlinear forms of complex thinking. New understandings of chaos and complexity4 have allowed revaluing meandering to perceive rivers as something more than channels of water or blue lines drawn on maps (Klaver, 2012). Rivers have an inflow (or influence) on geology, air, soils, groups of living beings, and cultures that co-inhabit them. Reciprocally, rivers receive the influxes of these biophysical and cultural domains. These reciprocal inflows and outflows express the biocultural nature of rivers.
Rivers create their own hydrospheres, biospheres, and atmospheres, sustaining intricate networks of relationships in a “hydraulic citizenship,” as explained by environmental anthropologist Nikhil Anand (2017). The concept of hydraulic citizenship implies a notion of responsibility and helps us theoretically and practically integrate biophysical, social, political, aesthetic, emotional, and cultural dimensions in our relations of co-inhabitation with rivers.
By considering diverse living beings as co-inhabitants, Chilean freshwater ecologist Tamara Contador has developed new methods to study “river bugs” (Contador et al., 2018, p. 193). Freshwater invertebrates are not captured for scientific collections but are carefully observed and conserved in their habitats. They are not merely considered objects of study but subjects; that is, beings with their own interest and ability to feel pain and pleasure (Rozzi, 2019). Contador’s view acknowledges not only the instrumental value of invertebrates and rivers but also their intrinsic and multiple relational values (Contador et al., 2018). Oriented by a biocultural ethic, scientists understand, value, and relate to river bugs as co-inhabitants.
Ancestral indigenous worldviews also converge with contemporary scientific and biocultural ethical understanding and valuation of rivers and their communities of life. As expressed by Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf (1989):
|
Mañkean ñi dungu Umagtuken lafken pewmamu ina nepeken challwa nepenmu. Ayeken kümemew, Ngümaken mawünmew feley ta ñi mongen, feley ta ñi nütram, fewla umagtuan. |
Mañkean’s dream My laughter is the midday sun, my tears are the spring waters, my sleep is the rest of love, and my waking up is the life of the fishes. Thus is my existence, so is my word, and the waters continue singing to me.5 |
Leonel Lienlaf expresses in his bilingual (Mapudungun and Spanish) poem the awareness of a common genealogy of human and non-human cohabitants, whose flows of energy and matter are interconnected. With a biocultural perspective, we can affirm that:
Humans and other beings walk together. The pain of one is the pain of the other. The water of the springs is the water of tears. Biological diversity and cultural diversity flow together. The pains and the welfare of humans and other living and non-living beings go hand in hand (Rozzi, 2001). In the past and today, among indigenous as much as among non-mainstream Western cultures, we find that human habits are connected to the biocultural community of co-inhabitants. This connection seems to be the norm, and the current disconnection of global society seems to be an exception, but an exception that today is dominant and needs to be rectified. (Rozzi, 2013, p. 25)
When we adopt and assume a biocultural ethic, we transform the geometric and homogenizing models of rivers, which are refreshed by an understanding and appreciation of the complexity and indeterminacy of flows (Klaver, 2013; Rozzi, 2021). Not just water flows but the dynamics of societies and their relations of co-inhabitation with diverse biocultural communities of animals, plants, sediments, infrastructure, capital, energy, tourists, money, and material and cultural exchanges. This understanding invites us to establish new forms of relationships with rivers, fostering their biocultural conservation grounded on an ethic of co-inhabitation.
Biocultural rights of rivers in 21st-century constitutions
To embark on the biocultural conservation of rivers, it is necessary to understand them as common goods. We must eliminate the prevalence of individual rights and adopt common rights (Harvey, 2008). Water provides the materiality, the medium, and the framework to think and co-inhabit in commons. To this end, several countries have recently adopted a legal framework of biocultural rights in their constitutions (Berros, 2021; González-Morales, 2022).
The new Latin American constitutionalism has expanded and transformed the understanding of environmental rights (Berros, 2021; González-Morales, 2022). As environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott (2017) has documented, recognizing the values of (and rights to) nature is part of the worldviews of multiple peoples and cultural traditions. This new constitutionalism defines governance principles and actions of critical phenomena, such as climate change and the depletion of natural resources. I call attention to the fact that, to address issues related to the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous and other local communities, this new constitutionalism should consider intercultural as much as interspecies justice (Rozzi, 2018).
Recent historical events that express the change of the one-dimensional worldview regarding rivers correspond to the attribution of biocultural rights to the Atrato River in the Colombian Constitution in 2016, to the Whanganui River in a New Zealand agreement in 2017, and to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers by the High Court of Uttarakhand in India in 2017. More recently, in 2020, a social movement in Chile demanded a plebiscite to generate a new constitutional text that should include improving our relationship with nature.
Amidst the current ecological and climatic crisis we are experiencing nationally and internationally, when we assert the rights of rivers and nature, we instill a (re)connection of global society with the natural world. A first step is the affirmation of extant biocultural diversity. A second step is the implementation of biocultural rights of rivers and other ecosystems via the relations of care undertaken by communities, especially by native peoples, fishers, and other local communities, scientists, authorities, educators, and the general public (Macpherson et al., 2020).
In the late 1970s, Czech jurist Karel Vasak (1977) identified three generations of human rights, paralleling the central ideas of the French Revolution. The first generation is linked to the concept of freedom and includes fundamental political and civil rights. The second is related to the notion of equality and consists of economic, social, and cultural rights. The third is connected to the concept of solidarity and contains the rights of Indigenous people and nature. Borrowing from the three generations of rights, the right to live in a healthy environment acknowledges the relationship between the health of humans and other living beings that co-inhabit with rivers, mountains, forests, seas, and other ecosystems.
This biocultural perspective has contributed to opening Western law to different ways of conceiving water and rivers. In the case of the Atrato River in Colombia, the Constitutional Sentence T-622 ascribing biocultural rights to the river resulted from the activism of scientists, judges, and other professionals, and overall, from the substantial role played by ethnic and local communities who had traditionally been excluded. Their worldviews and territorialized knowledge were part of the decision-making process and a creative source for new water protection mechanisms. The Colombian Court based its judgment on acknowledging the relational and systemic nature between the river and the Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and mestizo communities that co-inhabit it. The declaration of biocultural rights enabled the recognition of the historical and everyday interdependence among these communities, the river, and biodiversity. In addition, the existence of highly important knowledge and life practices was valued, and disruptive procedures, such as gold mining, were critically reconsidered (González-Morales, 2022).
Oriented by a biocultural ethic, stewards or “guardians” apply biocultural rights to protect the vital links between the life habits of communities of co-inhabitants and their shared habitats. In this way, these rights defend indissoluble relationships between biological and cultural diversity. The Constitution of Colombia expresses this biocultural vision in the following terms:
The so-called biocultural rights […] result from acknowledging the deep and intrinsic connection between nature, its resources, and the culture of ethnic and Indigenous communities that inhabit them, which are interdependent and cannot be understood in isolation. In this way, the notion and exercise of environmental rights are reconfigured since ecosystem entities are recognized as subjects of law. It is defined that their protection resides in the action of guardianship by custodians of nature to implement biocultural rights. (Sentencia T-622, 2016)6
The recognition of rivers and related ecosystems as legal persons or subjects is rapidly emerging as a mechanism in transnational practices available to governments seeking more effective and collaborative natural resource management. Rivers are resurfacing thanks to three novel concepts and practices. First, biophysical conservation and ecological restoration. For example, today, meanders and waterways are often restored by the same engineering firms that canalized waterways in the 20th century (Seal, 2012; Zeedyk and Clothier, 2014). Second, symbolic-linguistic expressions of a new biocultural imagination invite us to listen to the rivers, just as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1954) wrote, “dreams […] united me to the voice of the river” (p. 54).7 Biocultural ethics offers global society an orientation to co-inhabit with rivers, to generate bread and avoid bloodshed, paraphrasing Neruda (1954). Third, institutional and political innovations are introducing a normative shift in thinking about how we legally define and protect the natural world. Since 2006, governments worldwide have adopted legal provisions (laws and court rulings) recognizing “nature” as a “subject with inalienable rights” (Kauffman & Martin, 2018). Norms and governance structures uniting humans and nature have been long advocated by Indigenous peoples. As Ponca Nation of Oklahoma leader Casey Camp Horinek explained in her opening address at the International Rights of Nature Tribunal in Quito, Ecuador, in 2014, “If you drank water this morning […] then you must recognize and understand that there is no separation between humans and Earth” (Camp Horinek 2017, p. 12). In Colombia, India, and other countries, to justify the recognition of the Rights of Mother Earth and rivers as rights-bearing legal persons, judges have incorporated indigenous worldviews and values as well as globally circulating philosophical concepts and normative arguments provided by transnational networks of environmental lawyers, activists, social movements, and global organizations (Berros, 2021).
The recognition of rights to a non-human subject has been supported by understanding the connectivity of rivers with communities that develop their lives around them. It is not the self-absorbed protection of a river, which aims to separate human communities from the very concept of nature, but something that contributes to its symbiotic understanding. Today, rivers and their meanders summon us to behave under a biocultural ethic that flows into political processes and social deliberations to integrate biological, cultural, technological, and political dimensions in a continuous dynamic. With their meandering, rivers flow through the habitats more slowly, infiltrating biophysical and cultural depths. River stewards or guardians can listen to the murmurs of the slow flow and biotic communities, as well as to multiple human communities, including their vernacular, scientific, poetic, and legislative voices. The meanders open us towards horizons of reunion with the rivers and biocultural conservation. As anthropologist and kayaker Jens Benöhr affirms, it is “through the articulation between communities and the generation of an active link with the rivers, where we will be able to co-inhabit through sciences, sports and tourism” (Lynch, 2018, p. 19).
At the dawn of Western civilization, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus warned us that nobody ever steps in the same river twice (Kahn, 1979). At different times, we will find different waters and sedimentary materials. These are sometimes indiscernible and other times conspicuous changes. Although it is impossible to return any river to a previous configuration, the words of Heraclitus encourage us to take measures so that the waters of rivers flow freely, clearly, respectfully, and surprisingly, bringing well-being to the community of co-inhabitants—of diverse cultures and species—generously nourished by these arteries that cross our shared habitats. To respect these meandering flows, I propose a biocultural ethic of co-inhabitation with rivers that demands both intercultural and interspecies justice.