No man treads in the same river twice, wrote Heraclitus in the fifth century BC. No doubt that clever old bird was on to something, but nowadays it seems that we need to be careful about treading in rivers at all. It was reported last week that the River Loddon in Hampshire has been granted legal personhood by a local council, inspired by a document known as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers.
The UDRR, created in 2017, was created by an organisation called the Earth Law Centre, and makes some pretty sweeping claims on behalf of our fluvial comrades, including the ‘right to flow’, the ‘right to feed and be fed by sustainable aquifers’, and ‘the right to regeneration and restoration’. Drawing on precedents from New Zealand, India and Colombia, it suggests that rivers should be treated as distinct entities in law with their own interests and prerogatives.
Some readers will already be rolling their eyes and I confess that was my instinctive response.
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